Bill Sherwood

Quite true, as I provided proof for in the other thread where I gave examples of the Chinese 747-SP that briefly went to 5 G's and still hung together, and the DC-8 that was deliberately flown faster than mach one. Very high speeds simply are not going to be a problem at all, even down low though the wind noise in the cockpit would be quite high.

No need to, as all the various explanations other than what actually happened have been thoroughly dis-proven. There is no need to go over it again and again.

They have been demonstrated many times to be very possible. I'm sorry but it's not even close to begin even thinking about calling all this a point or evidence, it's pure fantasy at the very best.

I'm not going to put much of an effort into arguing this, and it's just too absurd to bother with sorry. We simply do not have the technology to make holograms like is done in science fiction movies, and there's a huge number of people that saw the aeroplanes crash into the buildings. Wreckage from each aeroplane was recovered. It really can't be any more simple than that.

I'm sorry but is simply wasn't fake as there is no way to fake all that. There's no way to do it live now and certainly no way to do it live back then. Multiple live TV feeds from all directions, and also a large number of completely independent people also videoing the events. I doubt very much the entire reservoir for the sprinklers was in the base either, as to make the system reliable you have to use gravity feed, so there should be other water tanks higher up. The south tower was the second one that was hit? (Not sure) If so then there was quite a lot of debris that came out the other side from the impact. If it was the first tower then the only video camera to record the impact was on the same side as the impact so you could not have seen what was happening on the other side.

There is the problem of many thousands of people actually seeing it happen in real life. I was in a hotel in Algiers and also watched it on the television. The basement explosion theory is at very best as thin as a hair from the head of a fly, as the towers did not collapse from the base, but from the impact points.

The controlled demolition thing is easily demonstrated as being wildly wrong - - The buildings collapsed where the airliners hit. - For that to happen, any explosives that would cause the towers to collapse at the impact point would have firstly be placed exactly in that point beforehand and also somehow survive the impact of a 100 tonne+ aeroplane moving at very high speed, and then go off reliably. There also couldn't be any other explosives anywhere else or they could easily be detected by regular people in the building, as it would take months of preparation to organise all that. That simply cannot be done with any degree of reliability with all the factors involved.

This one's pretty cool. It shows how distorted things can get with the wrong camera.

I'm not into pages and pages of questions and answers, I keep replies short so I'm not going to go through all those questions one by one. Yes a 757 could easily keep going even with large chunks of wing removed and not significantly have its flight path deviate. The reason is simple - It's going so fast that in the short time between hitting poles (call them 1,000' from the Pentagon) the plane would only drop about 20' or so and that's if you removed both wings completely. (plane is doing about 730 ft per second, so 1.3 second transit time. Vertical acceleration over that time is about 20' so not much at all) However, even with hitting a pole or two, they simply will not make a wing fall off. Just not going to happen sorry, they are far too strong for that. To give you an idea just how strong they are, look at the China Airlines 747-SP accident a few years back - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_006 They pulled five G's in the recovery and the wings didn't come off, and that's with a plane that weighs up near 300 tonnes. A couple of frangible poles are going to put some good dents in the wing for sure, but they simply are not capable of making the wing come off, full stop. I am also well aware of the damage that birds can cause to an aeroplane, having had it happen a few times. To do any real damage they have to be large birds, not small ones. More relevant would be to look at an airliner flying through hail; Flying through patches of air that contain solid lumps of ice hammering away at the airframe can cause some damage but again they do not cause large chunks of airframe to fall off. The worst I've seen is the fibreglass nose cave-in, some dents in the leading edges of the wings and tail, and a few cracked windscreens. The absence of debris is completely understandable as virtually all the aeroplane would have entered the building and then been shredded. Take a look at the multiple videos of the other aeroplanes hitting the twin towers and take special note of how much of the aeroplane gets blown backwards out of the hole they make - It's very little to none in each case. The only bits I can remember seeing leave the second tower where the engines, as they kept going out the other side due to the inertia of them - They are five to six tonnes each. The video looks fine to me. Blurry for sure but it's not a high-resolution or high frame-rate camera so I'm not surprised there's some distortion. An example of how some of those cameras can distort things, I took a photo out the window of the propeller of one of the aeroplanes I used to fly. Note that on Garrett TPE-33's there are four blades and they are all attached to the hub quite strongly. But if I didn't know that and only went on that photo I would say it has about eight blades that obit the hub in some weird pattern/ My point being that one photo like that doesn't really prove anything. The Pentagon photo certainly shows something in the right position, speed, and about the right size to match the data. I've already answered how I think some smaller bit of debris could have been blown backwards onto the lawn. The photos that apparently show a hole not large enough for a 757 are cherry-picked for angle and visibility to make it look smaller than what it is - I have seen others that show the hole correctly and it is the right size for a 757 hitting it. You also cannot use the example of the holes in the Trade Towers to show how the hole should look in the Pentagon as they are totally different structures. The steel walls of the towers were structurally very different in the way they worked to the stone of the Pentagon.

Yes otherwise plain materials can sometimes do amazing things in the right circumstances. Here's a couple of photos of some ... A bit of wind and physics goes awry.

Not really - Don't forget the wing often have a lot of fuel in them and that has substantial mass, tonnes in fact. FWIW a lot of airliners can carry their own weight in fuel alone. The wing spars are also very solid as they have to carry the weight of the aeroplane in flight. The landing gear is also very solid as it is built to take a 1000'/min rate of descent on landing at maximum weight without damage. There's also a water tank on board for drinking & washing water, and also the APU in the tail. The structure of the tail, where the horizontal stabiliser is, is also very strong as it has to take the loads of the horizontal stab and also provide a large hinge for it. The rudder & fin assembly likewise has a substantial mount to keep it attached to the fuselage. This is incorrect, the transmission of the force of a hit, sound, etc, is limited to the speed of sound so a bit over 10% of that figure. This is one of the reasons why you can't build a device that can transmit information faster than the speed of light, by having a very long pole that you wiggle back & forth to pass data; the push & pull on the pole happen at the local speed of sound. You can actually see it happen sometimes on some very long & smooth things like rails if you're lucky.

Here's another good video of what even a large aeroplane can do - a Boeing 707 doing a barrel roll.

I nearly forgot about this - an example of what happens when you exceed the maximum speed of an airliner by quite a lot. Here's a DC-8 that would normally be limited to about M 0.9 or so, deliberately flown supersonic in a test. http://www.dc-8jet.com/0-dc8-sst-flight.htm As it turns out, nothing fell off and they didn't lose control.

Already been demonstrated many times the hole is the correct size. Quite believable, though extremely lucky for it to happen. Finding the passport is not relevant anyway as the hijackers are already have known to board the airliners. Up until the first impact no-one knew what their plans were, so there was no thoughts to shoot them down. They had also turned off the transponders in the airliners so were harder to track. The military has radar good enough to track big targets like that without a transponder but they still have to be vectored to the right area to find the target. 99.9999999&% of the objects that go in & out of the Pentagon, either planned or unplanned, do so at walking speed. If they'd planned for a high-speed aeroplane to hit them they would have no doubt done things differently - I bet they do now. The real question everyone really should be asking is how the US government did not pick up on this terrible act before it was committed? Time wasted chasing easily dis-proven theories should be put to better use.

It's actually very obvious as to why the second building to get hit cam down first - It was hit further down than the first one so the weak point (where the aeroplanes hit) was subject to far greater loads. From an engineering point of view, I'm actually really surprised that both towers didn't come down as soon as they were hit, the mechanical damage to the internal structure must have been massive. Same reason as above - there was quite a lot of damage to it from huge chunks of debris crashing into it from the other two towers and that damage was mostly near the base. Because a weak point had been created right near the bottom of the structure the entire mass of the building was bearing down upon it. That, along with the nasty vibrations from the main two towers coming down right next to it make it more surprising that it too didn't come down at the same time - that's a better question in fact. I believe there was (at least) one in Spain. But there certainly have been none that have nearly been cut in half by a heavy & very fast-moving aeroplane so we only have the two famous examples of that to work with. Again, I'm quite surprised they kept standing as long as they did.

I'm not judging anyone here, but something that non-scientists really need to take the time to read and take on board is this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

I don't have any formal qualifications much other than aviation, but I do have quite a bit of hands-on experience with physics from being on a science forum for a good decade and also nearly thirty years of being involved in motor racing. So I may not be correct but I am not making a wild guess, I make an opinion on how such structures would behave based on my knowledge of physics, metallurgy, etc. From this I can see how some parts of the plane could be blown backwards from the impact point, and this is against the otherwise initial intuitive reaction that all the parts of the aeroplane must have gone into the building. Of course it may be as simple as someone moving the parts away from the burning mess to make it easier for the fire-fighters to get into the building.

There might be a couple of small inspection panels peel-off but I'd say you could firewall the engines and fly as fast as you like and the plane would stay intact. You wouldn't have enough power to go supersonic down low so it'd just be a very high indicated speed. That does mean a lot of dynamic pressure but if you don't fly around pulling big G's it'll be fine. Note that you can still pull enough G's to bend & break things at much slower speeds so you have to be a bit slower on the controls at high speed. A lot of the limitations on the airliners are actually structural, they're simply the fastest/highest/heaviest that the maker tested. For example on the 747 the 20,000' maximum altitude limit for the use of flaps is there only because Mr Boeing only tested them that high. They'd no doubt work much higher but that's as high as they were tested so that's all they are certified for. Another example is the maximum crosswind limit for the Fairchild Metroliner - It's an 'observed' limit of 20 kts, which again means that's the highest they tested them for. I know they can take 30 kts because I've done it ..... though I certainly wouldn't recommend it, it was a real handful!

... and part two, 'cause the forum won't let me make too many quotes. The higher the speed the less you notice ground effect. The faster you go the more easily the plane will go where you point it. For sure hitting a light pole at speed would do some damage to the wing but as for ripping it off, not a chance. Remember the mass of a wing is probably in the order of 100 times more than the pole, and far better mounted and constructed than the pole. A pole is a simple hollow structure that once starts to crush creases and folds in half. A wing has many layers in it and also two thick spars to control the bending movement. There may also have been a fair bit of fuel in the wing around the point where it hit and jet fuel weighs about 800 kg per cubic metre - that would increase the effective mass of the wing again by many factors and make it more resilient to hitting such objects. I'm surprised there's anything left of any real size after hitting such a solid structure. Also, the heavy pieces of the Pentagon falling onto the remains of the plane would do additional damage. And I imagine the fire from the jet fuel would also have burnt a fair bit of the smaller pieces. If they weren't sitting in fire then they most likely wouldn't have been singed. I can imagine bit of the tail being blown backwards a bit as the air inside the fuselage compressed and started to blow away the tail, especially as the tail would have also started to come apart from the rapid deceleration as the plane began to crumple as it entered the wall of the Pentagon. Unsurprisingly, it would have been a bit like a bomb going off.

There's nothing on a Boeing to stop you flying as fast as you like. For example the mach limit on a 747 is M 0.92 (And I've flown one that fast as well) but in testing Mr Boeing had the prototype up to M 0.991. Whilst that's a mach number the same principle applies for indicated speed for when you are flying down low. The published limit for most Boeings is up around 380 knots but there's nothing stopping you from going a good 20% faster if you felt like it. The twin-engined jets have quite a lot of thrust available, in case they lose an engine on takeoff, so they can still climb away, so down low with both engines running they can very easily go past the limiting speed, Vmo. There's normally an artificial limit of 250 knots below 10,000' and that's for traffic regulation (everyone doing the same speed makes things easier for the controllers) and for bird-strike protection on the windscreens. IF you ignored those two factors and could stand the noise in the cockpit you could very easily go about twice as fast and not damage the aeroplane at all. Not particularly difficult at all - You're hitting an immobile and very large target, and also much larger than your plane. There's an old and very reliable trick where you pick a point on the windscreen in front of you (use a marker pen to make it easier) and manoeuvre the plane around to put that dot on the target. As long as you keep the dot on the target the plane will hit it. Teaching people to fly an aeroplane around the sky isn't difficult either, landing is harder, using the radio adds another level of difficulty, and so on. But the task of controlling up/down and left/right can be taught adequately to nearly anyone in a couple of hours. You can learn on something as small as a Cessna 150 and the skills you learn work exactly the same on an Airbus A-380.

I'm a 25-year pilot. I spent the last ten years as a 747 pilot and have flown all around the world. I've also taught many people to fly.