Why Flight 93?

[DavidJames]

Both hit massive objects providing considerable resistance. No reason to assume they are not comparable.

Wow!

Funny, in a couple of other threads, you worked very hard to "show your work". Here you are assuming the planes hitting WTC's and the ground at different angles WTC's would produce comparable results.

Amazing.

 

[DGM]

Answer this for me. Why would the wings suddenly stop producing lift when the plane hit the ground? Wouldn't that lift push them "up" in relation to the fuselage?

 

[Gravy]

It is very evident from the crater images that there was very little plowing.

A pile several feet high, all in the direction of travel. If you think that's not enough, then back your argument with facts. No one is interested in your arguments from incredulity.

I don't insist the plane hit perpendiculary. I am assuming the FDR was correct. The fact that there was so little plowing as evidenced by the crater raises questions.

Since we're not psychics, please tell us what questions the crash scene raises in your mind. We've addressed the "wings on the wrong side" claim. Anything else?

 

[R.Mackey]

Answer this for me. Why would the wings suddenly stop producing lift when the plane hit the ground? Wouldn't that lift push them "up" in relation to the fuselage?

It's even worse than that, in fact. The wings could have been pushed "up" or "down," depending on the local angle of attack at the moment of separation. Plus or minus only a couple of degrees would give you opposite results.

Since the aircraft was being maneuvered more wildly than any passenger plane in history, there is just no way to tell which way the lift vector would pull the wings, or how much. Although a surprising number of conspiracy theorists seem to think the answer is "obvious."

 

[GregoryUrich]

Answer this for me. Why would the wings suddenly stop producing lift when the plane hit the ground? Wouldn't that lift push them "up" in relation to the fuselage?

I haven't said the wings stop producing lift. Don't put words in my mouth. I said there is no reason to assume that lift would suddenly drive the wings through the fuselage.

 

[DGM]

I haven't said the wings stop producing lift. Don't put words in my mouth. I said there is no reason to assume that lift would suddenly drive the wings through the fuselage.

I'm sorry it was not my intention to put words in your mouth. It seems to me at those speeds that the fuselage would have shattered long before the wings impacted the ground. Would the impact not cause a extreme rise in internal pressure?

 

[PhantomWolf]

I would have thought that since the plane hit at an angle, and thus the fuselage was still moving forwards at the time of impact, that we should see the crater elongated in the direction of travel, which is exactly what we do see.

 

[Norseman]

In 1994 a B-52 tragically crashed at Fairchild Air Force Base when it stalled in a tight turn. The whole crew was killed. At the moment of impact the B-52 had rolled past 90 degrees to the left, nose down and had a speed of 145 knots. The size and weight of a Boeing 757-200 and a B-52 is very close. So if you want to get an impression of what a crash of an aircraft of that size looks like, go to YouTube and search for "B-52 crash"(can´t post links yet). To watch a fairly good quality version choose the one posted by MorfoAtari, it is number two from the top.

This is what it looks like when a large aircraft goes nose down in to the ground at a fairly slow speed, then we can start to imagine what happens when the speed is 500 knots. Quiet chilling if you ask me.

For more background information search Wikipedia for "1994 Fairchild Air Force Base B-52 crash".

 

[T.A.M.]

Welcome to the Forum Norseman.

TAM

 

[Norseman]

Welcome to the Forum Norseman.

TAM

Thank you for the kind welcome T.A.M. And also to SpitfireIX and DGM who have welcomed me earlier in this thread.

 

[Gravy]

Norseman, I second TAM's welcome.

The Fairchild B-52 accident was certainly impressive in an awful way, but I'm not aware of any close-up photos or witness testimony that we can use for a comparison to flight 93. A better analog might be Northwest flight 710, a 4-engine Lockheed Electra L-188 that lost its right wing in flight in 1960 and crashed into a muddy farmer's field. The plane was less massive than a 767, but it was moving faster (estimated over 600 mph at impact), and it impacted more vertically. It was before sophisticated forensic victim I.D. was possible, and only 7 of the 63 passengers and crew were identified. Here are some descriptions of the crash scene:

The airliner's fuselage emerged from the black cloud minus its entire right wing and with only a large stub of the left wing still attached. For a few seconds it continued in level flight ... and then it began an almost vertical plunge to earth, trailing smoke and fire like a spent rocket.

It struck a field at 618 MPH. Mud, dirt, grass, shrubs and mottled snow were tossed 250 ft into the air. The debris fell back around a muddy crater forty feet wide. From this gaping wound in the earth poured smouldering smoke. There were pieces of wreckage around the perfectly formed rim. Some other metal fragments were hurled fifteen hundred feet away. But the one hundred foot fuselage itself had disappeared entirely.

In the crater, buried twelve feet under this smoking cauldron, was what was left of Northwest Airlines flight 710 - and the 33 men, 21 woman and 8 children and 1 infant aboard.

From "The Electra Story" (used copies for sale)

An eyewitness to the crash scene:

There is a crater--it appears to be quite deep...perhaps 35 feet deep. There is thick smoke. I can barely make out the twisted wreckage of a large aircraft. The plane appears to have slammed itself nose first into the ground. I don't see how anyone could possibly have survived this kind of impact. As I look around in the snow I see slivers of silver/green metal, spilled fuel, and debris. I see no bodies...only indistinguishable remnants of human remains. Here is the largest identifiable piece of humanity: a part of a backbone that is still connected to a kidney. These people...these poor people. What must have happened? How long must they have known their inescapable fate? The wing and engine we first found must have been 3 or 4 miles away. I've never seen anything like this before...

...For days the Graves and Registration Troops continued to sift through the 4 or 5 acres of the wreckage, often mistaking pieces of pink airplane insulation for frozen pieces of human flesh. The smell of charred bodies, once frozen--then thawed--remains with me today. I came home from the crash site that first night and threw away my clothes. We reported the story to ABC, CBS, NBC, Canada and Mexico. A Two-inch communication cable was laid by Bell Telephone all the way from Cannelton to the crash site. Ultimately 8 or 9 coffins were provided to hold the recovered human remains of the 63 passengers and 6 crew members. All were buried in Greenwood Cemetery, but, in truth, only 2 of them actually held any contents at all. The other 6 were empty--symbolic gestures of grief.

Source: http://www.perrycountyindiana.org/attractions/aircrashnarr.cfm

The plane and its final explosion blew out a smoldering crater 50 ft. wide and 25 ft. deep. Civil Aeronautics Board crash specialists found empty, neatly laced shoes, a stray airmail letter, a bloodstained blouse, a prayer book lying open at the Litany of the Saints ("Lord have mercy on us . . .").

From Time Magazine article "Why this Failure..."

 

[tanelorn]

It seems to me at those speeds that the fuselage would have shattered long before the wings impacted the ground.

I agree with this statement, but it makes one think about what would change the trajectory of the wings, and the engines so abruptly between the nose of the plane hitting the ground and the center of the plane. If the whole plane is moving at a 45 degree trajectory then so are the engines and wings.

What would make the engines then change their trajectory to ~65 degree angle so they could make crater marks on the other side of the fuselage in the span of 70-80 feet of travel (I estimate based on this page www (dot) .airliners (dot) net/info/stats.main?id=102)

if the fuselage shatter shattered before the wings hit, it would have very little effect on the trajectory of the wings and engines.

I'm not an engineer, maybe we should take this over to the physics forum, give them the scenario, and let the engineers come up with what the crater should look like.

I think I'll do that.

 

[tanelorn]

here's a link to that thread over in the mathematics site.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88092

 

[gumboot]

This is probably a better forum to discuss the topic. Several posters here are former air crash investigators.

-Gumboot

 

[gumboot]

This is stupid. This entire discussion has dissolved down to GregoryUrich's totally unsupported claim that the wing imprint is in the wrong place. He totally dismisses a host of factors that could affect impact debris spread, and his entire opinion is based on a single very poor quality image.

GregoryUrich"s entire premise appears to be based on an assumption that:

A) The crater should accurately reflect the physical layout of the aircraft
B) The trajectory of the aircraft was in a straight line along the length of the fuselage
C) The aircraft components maintained their integrity during impact

There are fundamental flaws with his assumptions. As any aviation expert could testify, wings generate lift perpendicular to their axis of orientation, towards the upper surface. During normal flight, lift from the wings ensures that an aircraft maintains altitude, rather than nosing down and falling to earth.

If the aircraft is inverted, that lift becomes downforce. Orientate the nose of the aircraft towards the ground, and that lift pulls the aircraft down and backwards from its flight trajectory.

We can only guess at what the airframe of UA93 did in those last seconds as it struck the ground and ploughed into the earth. Air crashes are highly complex events, and I doubt even expert crash investigators would attempt to provide an absolute answer to the physics of the collision event. What I see here are many people offering up a host of speculative explanations for the final crater.

They are all plausible.

Then I see GregoryUrich, who appears to be claiming, from a single poor quality news video frame capture and a partial understanding of the UA93 FDR, that he knows exactly how the crater should look.

It is obvious where the flawed reasoning is coming from in this thread.

-Gumboot

 

[beachnut]

Just being upside down shouldn't change the position of the wings relative to the fuselage. The 757 is low wing, which means they should not be on the same side as the tail imprint. The wings would need to go through the fuselage to accomplish this.

This is what the crater looked like (looks like a high-wing aircraft).

This is something like what the crater should have looked like.

You do know the plane was turning, did you apply the turn rate of an upside down aircraft?

I cheated, I was trained in accident investigation, flight 93 impact looks exactly how it should for high speed ground impact, someone else was right about 93 and 11/175 being different, the ground impact is different, and if you can not figure that out you are not very adaptable at engineering when you have zero experience in high speed aircraft accident investigation. Please point out one thing not consistent with a high speed ground impact about 93. So far you have not shown anything that is not consistant with a high speed aircraft impact. Why do you persist in making up stuff in areas you are only guessing about?

 

[Alt+F4]

What was the weather like on September 10, 2001?

First off, welcome new person.

Next, I remember what the weather was like on September 10, 2001 in New York City. I was at my sister's house and her two little kids were running around in the backyard in their bathing suits playing with the garden hose. My sister and I were sitting there watching them, drinking wine, weather-wise it was a beautiful afternoon. I rarely visit them during the week and I don't remember why I came by that Monday but since that day I always think how happy and innocent things seemed, watching two little boys wrestle for the hose.

 

[Corsair 115]

Just being upside down shouldn't change the position of the wings relative to the fuselage. The 757 is low wing, which means they should not be on the same side as the tail imprint. The wings would need to go through the fuselage to accomplish this.

There is one other thing you need to account for. Here's Gravy's post from early in this thread where he recounted the data recorded on the FDR at the moment of impact. Below is the relevant information describing how the aircraft was oriented:

11. Pitch angle - 40 deg down
12. Airspeed - 500 kts
13. Heading - 180 deg
14. Roll angle - 150 deg right
15. AoA - 20 deg negative

Notice that last one - AoA. AoA is Angle of Attack. It describes the angular difference between the direction the aircraft is moving and the direction the nose of the fuselage is pointing (technically, it's the difference angular difference between direction of airflow and the cross-section the wing, but using the fuselage as reference is close enough for the purposes of illustration).

Think of a commercial airliner when it's coming into land - notice how while the jet is moving forwards and descending its nose is pitched up. That's a great example of angle of attack. The higher the angle of attack, the more lift that is generated - up to a point. Beyond a certain AoA, the airflow over the wing is disrupted and lift is lost.

See this web page which has a description of angle of attack along with some helpful illustrations.

From the FDR data, there was a 20° difference between the flight path and the direction the fuselage was pointing.

 

[Norseman]

Norseman, those pics were later, after digging at the impact point. (Note the crater)...............

You are mistaken on this one. The exhibit photographs from the Moussaoui trial are of an undisturbed crash site taken before any digging started (Google(com) search “911myths flight 93 photos” to see the exhibit photos, sorry no links yet).

If you compare the exhibit photos with other photos taken that day you will see that they show the same features and details. The exhibit photo below have some easily recognisable pieces of wreckage that you easily will see in the photograph taken by Mark Stahl (search Google Images for “Mark Stahl loc”, it will be the first picture). He arrived at the crash site 15 minutes after the plane hit the ground.

I have marked the pieces with 1 and 2. Just to the right of #2 is a large piece of wreckage that you also can see in the aerial exhibit photographs from the trail, but also in photographs taken by others. The fact is that the best photos to judge the look of the impact crater by is the exhibit photos from the Moussauai trail.

 

[gumboot]

First off, welcome new person.

For some reason that made me laugh.

-Gumboot