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Old 09-07-2004, 08:35 PM   #27
Mike P
Jiggin' Leper Lawyer
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: 61° 30′ 0″ N, 23° 46′ 0″ E
Posts: 8,158
I'm sure those chaps at that underground site are nice guys and all, but they don't know jack about aviation.

Most of the wreckage pix they have there are of planes that crashed while landing. They hit wings level, just a tad short of where they were supposed to land. Two shots I recognize are Delta 191 from 1985 at DFW (large shot of the burned out cabin) and a British Midlands 737 (burned outline of plane on the ground). A few passengers actually walked away from those crashes.

When a largeplane traveling 400+ mph hits an unmoveable object, the only wreckage you're going to be able to recognize as part of an airplane are the engines and parts of the landing gear. The wings don't "shear off" on impact, they disintegrate. Most of the fuselage and passengers disintegrated as the plane passed thru the several interconnected "rings" of the Pentagon. There are 5 or 6 "rings" of that building, and I think I read somewhere that the damage extended all the way thru to the E ring. A fully fueled 757 weighs over 200,000 lbs, even with a light passenger load. A 12 seater commuter plane weighs, at best, 1/10th of that. The only way a small commuter plane will ever see 400 mph is in a vertical dive, never in level flight. The power of an impact is a function of both the mass and velocity of the projectile. A small commuter plane wouldn't penetrate all that far into the Pentagon--the mass and velocity just aren't there.
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