I've got too many projects sitting on my desk that will take longer than I have left before I leave, so I get to revisit this. Yay, me! More wrongwrongwrong! as Redlemon so accurately put it.
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Originally Posted by crossova
Nope I've never taken a physics course. For a building that had temperatures of 2000 degrees roaring through a portion of it, I'm surprised that there wasn't further damage on the offices right next to the collapsed wall (as seen in the presentation on http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk). |
Collapse is a result of structural damage, not fire. One may contribute to the other but not necessarily. The Pentagon apparently has an efficient fire suppression system that extenguished some of the smaller, peripheral fires. You'll note that there wasn't an absence of fire damage, which is not the same as the "further damage".
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Originally Posted by crossova
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OK, let's look at a similar crash - well, similar in some respects. Flight 585 in 1991 in Colorado Springs was a 737 that flipped upside down and crashed at a near-verticle angle. The plane that hit the Pentagon hit at a near horizontal angle, and I think that we can discount the force of gravity as having any real role to play here other than trying to calculate 585's speed. The 737 was intact with engines at high speed as the pilots were trying to recover. I think that its safe to say that the plane was moving at least 550 mph when it impacted, and possibly higher. Acording to the NTSB, the impact left a crater 39 feet wide in a media (earth) softer than the hardened concrete of the Pentagon. It was also only 15 feet deep. The question then becomes the meansurement of the hole - typically craters are measured from high point to high point. There's also the physics of cratering, which basically means that the neighboring material is pushed to the point that it rebounds and turns into ejecta. With the Pentagon, there wouldn't be any true cratering because of the fundamental makeup of the building - it had rooms, so most would-be ejecta is going to flow in that direction. Fracturing would be contained by the room structure itself - you see that if you try to punch a honeycomb.
I now owe Mr. Domkowski an apology for telling him that I'd find a practical application for his class!
Oh, and to my FBI monitors who are obviously paying me to keep the lid on the real data on the crash, your check is late. Pay up before I start posting what actually happened on TFP Paranoia! You know, the truth that Bigfoot and Dracula, in conjuction with the Rand Corporation, piloted the plane into the building to try to get the Knights Templar and the Jews to stop exercising their absolute power over the media and Hollywood and put "Matlock" back on the air.