kytc

^Good man, good man

mfbenson

That's a standard approach for a strong cross-wind landing. Nothing unusual about that.

I used to work in field operations at an international airport. I've seen a few approaches that were way scarier than that.

mfbenson

ok, from the article we have a descent of 3500 feet in the final turn that was witnessed from ATC. Considering a rate of turn for a 767 at a maximum 60 degree bank (which would test the limits of even a highly skilled airline pilot) for a 180 degree change in course is 3 degrees a second, or 60 seconds. If you descend 3500 feet in those same 60 seconds, your rate of descent is 58 feet per second, in other words, 1 second before impact you are still 58 feet in the air.

More realisticly, the turn was no more than a 45 degee angle, meaning a turn rate of 2.5 degrees a second, so it took 72 seconds, which yields a rate of descent of 48 feet per second. That means that 1 second before impact the plane was 48 feet in the air, 2 seconds before impact it was 96 feet in the air, etc.

1 meter has 3.28 feet in it.

SciontCya

My brother, a pilot, sent me that and there is nothing "standard" about it.
The theory yes, the severity, no.

Scott

matt_a

I'm not talking about what a few firefighters supposedly claim to have seen. I'm talking about the hundreds of controlled detonations that would have been needed. The ones that in every other building demolition are clearly seen and heard from outside.

HeathenBrewing

It is interesting to note what the flight training school pilots had to say about the hijackers flying skills. A student’s first solo flight involves a simple circuit: take-off, followed by four gentle left turns ending with a landing back on the runway. This is as basic as flying can possibly get.
Not one of the hijackers was deemed fit to perform this most elementary exercise by himself.
In fact, here’s what their flight instructors had to say about the aptitude of these budding aviators:

Mohammed Atta: "His attention span was zero."
http://www.willthomas.net/911/911_Co...on_Hearing.htm

Khalid Al-Mihdhar: "We didn't kick him out, but he didn't live up to our standards."
http://100777.com/node/237

Marwan Al-Shehhi: “He was dropped because of his limited English and incompetence at the controls.”
http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%2...till_alive.htm

Salem Al-Hazmi: "We advised him to quit after two lessons.”
http://www.willthomas.net/Books_Vide...Stand_Down.htm

Hani Hanjour: "His English was horrible, and his mechanical skills were even worse. It was like he had hardly even ever driven a car. I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all.”
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/hanjour.html

Sanjuro

Thought I did, sorry. "moments" is not a quantifiable unit of measure. Feet and meters are. If you can give me what you meant by 'moments' in some quantifiable measurment I would appreciate it. And, you say their data is incorrect.. can you post 'primary source' for that statement?

Sanjuro

That was SWEET! Did a Cessna trained pilot pull that off? WOW! If so, I might have to rethink this stuff!

HeathenBrewing

A "few" firefighters? Shortly after 9/11, the New York Fire Department recorded over 500 oral histories, in which firefighters and emergency medical workers recounted their experiences of that day. [Emergency Medical Services had become a division within the Fire Department (Dwyer, 2005).] Mayor Bloomberg’s administration, however, refused to release them. But then the New York Times, joined by several families of 9/11 victims, filed suit and, after a long process, the New York Court of Appeals ordered the city to release the bulk of these oral histories,which it did in August 2005 (Dwyer, 2005b). The Times then made them publicly available (NYT, 2005).

Several people reported multiple explosions. Paramedic Kevin Darnowski said: "I heard three explosions, and then . . . tower two started to come down” (NYT, Darnowski, p. .

Firefighter Thomas Turilli said, “it almost sounded like bombs going off, like boom, boom, boom, like seven or eight" (NYT, Turilli, p. 4).

Craig Carlsen said that he and other firefighters “heard explosions coming from . . . the south tower. . . . There were about ten explosions. . . . We then realized the building started to come down” (NYT, Carlsen, pp. 5-6).

Firefighter Joseph Meola said, “it looked like the building was blowing out on all four sides. We actually heard the pops" (NYT, Meola, p.5).

Paramedic Daniel Rivera also mentioned “pops.” Asked how he knew that the south tower was coming down, he said: It was a frigging noise. At first I thought it was---do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'? . . . I thought it was that. (NYT, Rivera, p. 9)

Collapse Beginning below the Strike Zone and Fire According to the official account, the “pancaking” began when the floors above the hole caused by the airplane fell on the floors below. Some witnesses reported, however, that the collapse of the south tower began somewhat lower.

Timothy Burke said that “the building popped, lower than the fire....I was going oh, my god, there is a secondary device because the way the building popped. I thought it was an explosion” (NYT, Burke, pp.8-9).

Firefighter Edward Cachia said: “It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit. . . . [W]e originally had thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down” (NYT, Cachia, p.5).

The importance of these observations is reinforced by the fact that the authors of the NIST Report, after having released a draft to the public, felt the need to add the following statement to the Executive Summary: NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001. . . . Instead, photos and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward.

Firefighters Burke and Cachia presumably now need to ask themselves: What are you going to believe, your own eyes or an official government report?

HeathenBrewing

Regarding the explosions:

Some of the witnesses spoke of flashes and of phenomena suggestive of demolition rings. Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory said: “I thought... before...No. 2 came down, that I saw low-level flashes....I...saw a flash flash flash . . . [at] the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building?” (NYT, Gregory, pp. 14-16).

Captain Karin Deshore said: “Somewhere around the middle...there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode.... [W]ith each popping sound it was initially an orange and then a red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building" (NYT, Deshore, p. 15).

Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: “[T]here was just an explosion. It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions” (NYT, Banaciski, pp. 3-4).

Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick said: “It looked like sparkling around one specific layer of the building.... My initial reaction was that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those implosions on TV" (NYT, Fitzpatrick, pp. 13-14).

A few witnesses spoke of horizontal ejections. Chief Frank Cruthers said: “There was what appeared to be . . . an explosion. It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse” (NYT, Cruthers, p.4).

This testimony is important, because the official theory holds that the ejections were produced by the floors collapsing. So listen to firefighter James Curran, who said: “I looked back and...I heard like every floor went chu-chu-chu. I looked back and from the pressure everything was getting blown out of the floors before it actually collapsed" (NYT, Curran, pp. 10-11).

Battalion Chief Brian Dixon said, “the lowest floor of fire in the south tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it because.. everything blew out on the one floor" (NYT, Dixon, p. 15).[44]

mfbenson

Ok, ok. You're right, I watched it again and it looks like everything was very sudden and not real well planned out. But I've seen a couple landings in person that were just as scary, and a takeoff that was worse.

"Standard" was a bad word choice, but the corrective actions he applied to the control surfaces was textbook (assuming you ignore the part in the textbook about aborting the landing altogether and landing on a different runway that has friendlier winds).

THE_DON

I'm at work so I can't watch the video right now... But I am interested in what he had to say.

-THE DON

Sanjuro

Aliens? Huh? What?

SciontCya

As to the "eye witness" accounts. Those are notoriously bad and often incorrect.
Ask any law-enforcement officer or trial lawyer.

Fact is, there may be good reason for "explosions" or other loud noises there - jet planes just smashed into the towers. It could be pockets of jet fuel, or maybe even explosives on the planes themselves.

And I don't think anyone will argue that the planes in and of themselves did not bring down the towers - it was the internal fires from the fuel and the incredible heat. Given that it was internal, the way the buildings collapsed seems "normal"

Sanjuro

None-the-less, that doesn't explain how the temperatures of the fires required to melt the steel surpassed that of the fuel's ability.

HeathenBrewing

Sure, it could be pockets of fuel just as it could be charges. More investigation is needed to come to a truthful conclusion.

You say that the planes were not the main factor in bringing down the three towers, but the fires. As was already stated, the maximum temperature of jet fuel could not have been hot enought to melt steel. Add to that the fact the smoke coming out of those towers was black shows the fires were oxygen starved further shows the fuel did not reach its maximun burning potential.

Lets look at the Meridian Fire in Philly that had a raging fire (flames coming out of all sides of the building) that burned for 18 hours. Despite the severity and duration of the fire, as evidenced by the damage the building sustained, no part of the building collapsed.

Or the First Interstate Bank fire in LA. From the late evening of May 4, 1988 through the early morning of the next day, 64 fire companies battled the blaze, which lasted for 3 1/2 hours. The fire caused extensive window breakage, which complicated firefighting efforts. Large flames jutted out of the building during the blaze. Firefighting efforts resulted in massive water damage to floors below the fire, and the fire gutted offices from the 12th to the 16th floor, and caused extensive smoke damage to floors above. The fire caused an estimated $200 million in direct property loss.

A report by Iklim Ltd. describes the structural damage from the fire:

"In spite of the total burnout of four and a half floors, there was no damage to the main structural members and only minor damage to one secondary beam and a small number of floor pans."

mfbenson

I edited my answer, and I should apologize for the snippy response - I really shouldn't post from work, sometimes it puts me in the wrong frame of mind.

For my 'primary source' I was using the article itself - it has inconsitencies in it. They claim the plane descended 3500 feet while executing a 60 degree bank, well, all you have to know is the rate of turn for a 767 in a 60 degree bank and you know how long the turn took, and if you know how long the turn took you can calculate the rate of descent. If you know the rate of descent you know how high the plane was at a given moment before impact.

SciontCya

Those other two fires were "normal" and not filled with jet fuel. I don't think you can/should compare them.

As for the smoke, the towers were filled with a lot of items such as furniture, carpet and wood - all can account for the color. I'm not sure that anyone can say it didn't reach "max temp" as it couldn't have been measured. But if you've looked at pix of the beams inside the towers, they most assuredly were melted.
That's how I think the towers fell.

Now, if there's real evidence to the contrary, I'm all ears.

Scott

HeathenBrewing

There were several street light poles located up to a mile away from the Pentagon that were snapped-off by the incoming aircraft; this suggests a low, flat trajectory during the final pre-impact approach phase. Further, it is known that the craft impacted the Pentagon’s ground floor. For purposes of reference: If a 757 were placed on the ground on its engine nacelles (gear retracted as in flight profile), its nose would be about fifteen feet above the ground! Ergo, for the aircraft to impact the ground floor of the Pentagon, Hanjour would have needed to have flown in with the engines buried in the Pentagon lawn. Some pilot.


None of these fellows even knew what a navigational chart looked like, much less how to how to plug information into flight management computers (FMC) and engage LNAV (lateral navigation automated mode)

Do you really understand the aerodynamic impossibility of flying a large commercial jetliner 20 feet above the ground at over 400 MPH? A discussion on ground effect energy, vortex compression, downwash reaction, wake turbulence, and jetblast effects are beyond the scope of this forum.

HeathenBrewing

How do you explain WTC7 then? That tower was not hit by an aircraft, but collapsed in the same manner as 1 and 2.

Photos do not allow us to peer far into the interior of the building; in fact the hole is black, with no flames visible. On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia’s Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that "beams and girders sagged and twisted," but "despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage". Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we see at the WTCs.

Second, severe structural damage to the WTC towers would have required fires that were not only large but growing throughout the buildings and burning for a considerable period of time. None of these conditions was present. "The lack of flames is an indication that the fires were small, and the dark smoke is an indication that the fires were suffocating," points out Hufschmid. Eyewitnesses in the towers, as well as police and firefighters, reported the same thing.

Third, the impact opening was 15 floors lower in the South Tower than in the North Tower, where core columns were thicker, so the South Tower fire had to produce more heat to raise the steel temperatures to soften up (thermally weaken) the steel columns. Yet its fires were considerably smaller and 30 minutes shorter in duration. The Tower collapsed after burning only 56 minutes. The North Tower stood for another 29 minutes and its core steel was thinner at its upper stories. The 1991 Meridian Plaza fire burned for 19 hours and the fire was so extreme that flames came from dozens of windows on many floors. It did not collapse.

Fourth, implicitly trying to explain away these difficulties, the current NIST investigation, conducted by "an extended investigation team of 236 people," makes "dislodged fireproofing" the key variable to explain the collapses. Supposedly, "the probable collapse sequence for the WTC towers are (sic) based on the behavior of thermally weakened structural components that had extensive damage to fireproofing or gypsum board fire protection induced by the debris field generated by aircraft impact". "Had fireproofing not been dislodged by debris field," this team of government-paid experts claims, "temperature rise of structural components would likely have been insufficient to induce global collapse". Perhaps acknowledging the lack of direct evidence for its conjectures, the NIST admits that "a full collapse of the WTC floor system would not occur even with a number of failed trusses or connections" and it "recognizes inherent uncertainties" . The NIST will have to boost its creativity to plausibly explain the WTC 7 collapse because it won’t have the benefit of tales of aircraft and debris fields.

Aside from specific defects in the fire collapse theory, a wide variety of facts undermine it:

-Photos show people walking around in the hole in the North Tower "where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel were supposedly burning. The women seem to be looking down to the ground" (the NIST "Response" pdf, p. 62, also shows a similar photo of the same blond woman with light-colored slacks looking over the edge of the 94th floor).

-By the time the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower’s flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes.

-The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating rather than the sprinkler system dousing the fires.

-FDNY fire fighters remain under a gag order to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a 9/11 gag order.

-Even the 9/11 Commission (Kean-Zelikow) Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible". It shocked everyone that day, amateur and professional alike, although some firefighters realized that so-called secondary explosive devices were a risk.