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Originally Posted by DJ Happy
Ever tried making a cell phone call at 32,000 feet? Good luck getting a signal.
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Actually I've done it, although by mistake. I forgot to turn off my cell phone on a flight to the West Coast a few years ago and had it ring somewhere near Denver. Cellular signals don't just move laterally - they also move vertically. In other words, the signal coverage doesn't look like a disk, it looks like a half-sphere. Since 32,000 feet is only 6 miles and cellular towers are on average 10 miles apart, it is perfectly reasonable to expect a decent cellular signal, especially in an area with good coverage like, say, the East Coast....
Oh, there's also the little tidbit that the TSA is considering allowing people to use cell phones on planes in flight as a matter of course since the problem has always been suspected interference with some instruments that now seems to be proven wrong. It's been big news in my circles since I'm a pretty heavy cell user when I'm on the road.
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Originally Posted by DJ Happy
Why have big pieces of plane been found at the site of every other recorded plane crash, yet none were found at the Pentagon? Why does the only video footage of the crash at the Pentagon released by the FBI not show an airplane anywhere in sight?
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First of all, where are you getting your information that no big pieces were found at the site? There were lots of pieces found, some big, some small. In the Colorado Springs crash that I mentioned earlier, the largest piece found was roughly the size of a large suitcase, and that was for a plane that didn't suffer multiple impacts with hardened concrete walls (as the plane penetrated the various walls). If its because you haven't seen anyone reconstruct the plane, that's because no one has had any reason to try to reconstruct the plane since there's no mystery around why it crashed. The plane itself had no faults or issues - it performed exactly as designed. The NTSB spends a considerable amount of money reconstructing airframes to figure out why things happened and what surfaces moved in which directions in relation to nearby surfaces. It allows them to figure out what the stresses where.
As for what videos were released and what weren't, I honestly have no idea. There may be very good reasons why not - maybe you can see passengers' faces on some of them. I don't know, but I'm making a guess. Maybe they're being held to be used at trial. Given that the video in question was of the 1 frame per second variety and focused to 15' or so, it's not surprising that it doesn't show the plane in any great detail.