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Originally Posted by willravel
FANTASTIC!!! (I'm not being sarcastic, I'm really interested) I was hoping to discuss this with someone who actually has the credentials. The hole in the outer wall of the outer ring - the initial strike point of the projectile; plane or otherwise - was about 14-16 feet wide (according to relating the size of the fire engine to the size of the hole in several pictures). Now each ring of the Pentagon has an outer and inner wall. Each wall is approx. 18" thick. This is steel reiforced concrete. That means that the impact point was 36" of steel reinforced concrete. This means a total of 9' of steel reinforced concrete from entry point in the outer ring, to the exit point of the inside of the inner ring. Could a 757 have punched out a 14-16' wide hole on entry and have pierced 9' total of steel reinforced concrete to make a hole of almost exactly the same dimentions?
Now the nose of a plane is not made of reinforced aluminum or anything of the sort. The nose of a plane (the part that would have been doing the punching) is called a "crashdome". This is the area of the plane that is below and infront of the cockpit; the area that would first impact. This crashdone is where the plane stores electronic navigation equiptment. To enable the transmission of signals, the nose is not made of metal, but carbon. It's shape has been designed to be aerodynamic but it is not crash resistant. The inside casting, as well as its contents, are extremly fragile. The nose would crash on impact with an obstacle, not penatrate it. You NEVER find a nose in a crashsite that involves a head on colision (the type in this case). THEREFORE, it is impossible that this carbon nose punshed a perfect 2.5 yard diameter circular hole in the steel reinforced buildings.
As for the WTC, I agree that it is an engineering conundrum. I'll meet you on the "what happened on 9/11" thread.
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The walls were NOT reinforced, the columns were, and the spacing is quite large looking at the pictures (the picture of the hole has a column on the left of the picture, no other is visible). The walls were constructed of CIP (cast in place concrete panels (according to the information I have found, but in the pictures it looks like masonry). Either way concrete without reinforcing has much poorer impact strength than you may think (and unreinforced masonry is the poorest performer under lateral loads).
In addition, there is no way that wall with the hole in it is 18" thick, the concrete visible is about 4"-6" (which is consistent with what it should be), in addition there appears to be wood framing behind the concrete that would have provided the attachment zone for wallboard and an area to run utility cables (so total wall thickness could have been 18" but that would have been insulation and wallboard and would have provided very little resistance to projectiles.
Concrete from that era would have been lucky to achieve higher than 4000psi strength (compressive, as I said tensile is non-existant). In an impact you can disregard the strength of the mud that is in the tensile zone which is approximately half the thickness. So assuming a wall thickness of 6" conservatively, 6 walls penetrated and 250000lbs traveling at 530mph I would say yes I can easily imagine that happening. The initial impact is going to transfer momentum to the first wall which then becomes part of the projectiles passing through the building.
Consider something for just a moment, the engines on the 747 weigh about what a small car would, just how much damage would a car traveling at 530mph do to that structure?
Secondly, your arguement about the nose cone is just silly. It wouldn't matter if the nose cone was made of sheet metal, because as you said it's just going to be smashed, what you haven't considered is that the frame of the plane starts behind that nose cone and the frame of the plane is going to have SIGNFICANT strength and 250000lbs attached to it.
I dont' know if you are saying that you think the nose penetrated the far wall, but I can say that it is apparent to me that one of the engines made that trip, the picture I linked shows engine debris outside the building and honestly it looks like the same people in the foreground as your picture of the wall.