Professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled WTC

[SylphOne]

this is the most absurd thing i have read in quite awhile.
the fact that it has not been reviewed in anyway or published in any scientific journal....combined with the general stupidity of the overall theory should be a huge red flag for 'attention seeking pseudoscientist'
in addition to all the structural arguements against this....would the Pentagon not have been 'bombed' as well according to this theory. assuming there were pre-planted bombs...would they not have gone off there as well despite the fact that the plane never hit.....

 

[cantdog]

Well, what the fuck did hit the Pentagon? There wasn't any airplane wreckage at all.

 

[cantdog]

Well, the towers, like all real skyscrapers, aren't built like other buildings. I don't actually see a structure like the trusses we mentioned for mere-mortal-type buildings. I assume, as Colleen does, that some sort of mechanism to promote collapse before toppling was designed in. They do certainly come straight down, as a demolition job makes buildings do.

Your argument about the ballistic impact of the aircraft is immaterial. The collapses happened well afterward. In one case, better than an hour after impact. The impact did not bring them down, consequently. It had to have been the fire.

 

[Liar]

Your argument about the ballistic impact of the aircraft is immaterial. The collapses happened well afterward. In one case, better than an hour after impact. The impact did not bring them down, consequently. It had to have been the fire.

Wht's to say it wasn't both? The impact severely weakening the structure, and the fire finishing the job. From my very limited knowledge of fires, planes and skyscrapers, that still seems self evident. And that's why I have to shake my head at that professors argument that no skyscraper have collapsed due to a fire before. This wasn't "just" a fire. It was a big fucking sledgehammer. Then a fire.

 

[china-doll]

Wht's to say it wasn't both? The impact severely weakening the structure, and the fire finishing the job. From my very limited knowledge of fires, planes and skyscrapers, that still seems self evident. And that's why I have to shake my head at that professors argument that no skyscraper have collapsed due to a fire before. This wasn't "just" a fire. It was a big fucking sledgehammer. Then a fire.

There might have been some damage to the building it's self from the impact of the plane but it was probablly negligible, structurally speaking. A modern airliner isn't all that heavy for it's size. They are built out of aluminium and plastic to keep them light. The lighter the plane the more passengers it can carry and less fuel it will burn. As a result, a passender plane doesn't have all that much weight for it's size. A Boeing 767-200 with a full load of fuel weighs about 175 tons+/-. An impressive amount of weight but figure that each tower of the world trade center probablly weighed around a half a million tons and the weight of the plane suddenly seems fairly insignifigant.

What was probablly the demise of the WTC was how they were designed. All of the structural load of the building was supported by a series of steel beams that surrounded the building 39" on center. It was called something like a Steel Pipe design. The massive beams at the central core of the building were dedicated to supporting the massive elevator and utility system. THroughout most of the building the central core was actually designed to be able to move independantly of the rest of the building due to wind loading.

When the plane hit the skin of the building it damaged enough of the outer columns to be dangerous but obviously not enough to be immediatly catastrophic due to the fact that the building didn't fall right away. The remaining columns still held. But as the fire raged, the remaining columns started to get hot and the steel started to soften. The same was happening to the deck trusses. Eventually something gave under the stress. Most think it was a deck truss. The floors of the WTC were a steel deck covered with 4" of concrete and supported by trusses underneath. Each floor probablly weighed in the neighborhood of 1500 to 2000 tons and was supported almost entirely by the perimiter columns. A failure of a section of that perimiter would mean that the deck in that area was now unsupported. As the heat attaked it it started to sag and eventually streched far enough that it tore free from it's supporting structure and down it went onto the florr below starting a chain reaction.

 

[BlackShanglan]

this is the most absurd thing i have read in quite awhile.
the fact that it has not been reviewed in anyway or published in any scientific journal....combined with the general stupidity of the overall theory should be a huge red flag for 'attention seeking pseudoscientist'
in addition to all the structural arguements against this....would the Pentagon not have been 'bombed' as well according to this theory. assuming there were pre-planted bombs...would they not have gone off there as well despite the fact that the plane never hit.....

Ah, excellent point! Somewhere, according to this theory, we should have seen a building explode all by itself while flight 97 (I think?) crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

There might have been some damage to the building it's self from the impact of the plane but it was probablly negligible, structurally speaking. A modern airliner isn't all that heavy for it's size. They are built out of aluminium and plastic to keep them light. The lighter the plane the more passengers it can carry and less fuel it will burn. As a result, a passender plane doesn't have all that much weight for it's size. A Boeing 767-200 with a full load of fuel weighs about 175 tons+/-. An impressive amount of weight but figure that each tower of the world trade center probablly weighed around a half a million tons and the weight of the plane suddenly seems fairly insignifigant.

What was probablly the demise of the WTC was how they were designed. All of the structural load of the building was supported by a series of steel beams that surrounded the building 39" on center. It was called something like a Steel Pipe design. The massive beams at the central core of the building were dedicated to supporting the massive elevator and utility system. THroughout most of the building the central core was actually designed to be able to move independantly of the rest of the building due to wind loading.

When the plane hit the skin of the building it damaged enough of the outer columns to be dangerous but obviously not enough to be immediatly catastrophic due to the fact that the building didn't fall right away. The remaining columns still held. But as the fire raged, the remaining columns started to get hot and the steel started to soften. The same was happening to the deck trusses. Eventually something gave under the stress. Most think it was a deck truss. The floors of the WTC were a steel deck covered with 4" of concrete and supported by trusses underneath. Each floor probablly weighed in the neighborhood of 1500 to 2000 tons and was supported almost entirely by the perimiter columns. A failure of a section of that perimiter would mean that the deck in that area was now unsupported. As the heat attaked it it started to sag and eventually streched far enough that it tore free from it's supporting structure and down it went onto the florr below starting a chain reaction.

It should be noted too that aivation fuel burns hot. It's highly volitile. One exampl eis frm WWII. At the batle of midway, the US Carrier Yorktown was hit by 3 200 lbs Ap bombs. But her aviavtionfuel was stored, the lines had been filled vwith non Flamable Co2, and in under 30 minutes she was making 12 knots and able to recover aircraft.

The Japanese carrier Akagi was hit by 3 2000 pound bombs as well. But her avivation fuel caughtfire and within thity minutes she had to be abandoned as deck plates turned white hot.

The supposition you can't just wander into one of the world trade centers, set a fire and see it come down like it did is probably valid. The actual, flammable materials inside, have a relatively low burn temperature. Not that they don't burn hot, but they don't come anywhere near the flashpoint and sustained temp of aivation fuel. Most load bearing beams, truses and columns in major skyscrapers are coated in fire retardant material. But that material will brek down in sufficent heat. While avivation fuel woul dnot burn hot tneough to deform or significantly weaken the main suppoert, or the tubular skeleton, it was easily hot enough to weaken the steel clips used to hold the floor trusses to the main skeleton.

You need only realize the amount of jet fuel dumped into the towers by the explosions is on the order or 90,000 liters. While it isn't going to burn hot enough to melt steel, it will burn hot enough, long enough, to weaken steel. On the order of 50%. The floors of the WTC were steel secking covered in about 4 inches of concrete. When one went, the floor beneathi it, also subjected to fire weakening of the clips went too, and by the time the avalanche hist a floor without weakened clips, the cumulative weight coming down was too much for even fully intact clips to bear.

 

[zeb1094]

Well, the towers, like all real skyscrapers, aren't built like other buildings. I don't actually see a structure like the trusses we mentioned for mere-mortal-type buildings. I assume, as Colleen does, that some sort of mechanism to promote collapse before toppling was designed in. They do certainly come straight down, as a demolition job makes buildings do.

Your argument about the ballistic impact of the aircraft is immaterial. The collapses happened well afterward. In one case, better than an hour after impact. The impact did not bring them down, consequently. It had to have been the fire.

True the collapse didn’t happen until an hour or so after the impact, but that impact caused quiet substantial damage. Kinetic energy is a powerful factor. Add to that the additional joules from the burning fuel and there was little else that could have happened. It was a tragedy that it happened and a lot of planning and mind power went into pulling it off by the terrorist.


The equation for calculating kinetic energy is:

KE = ½ * m * v ^2


175 tons = 350,000 lbs. = 158,757.34 Kilograms (Mass) of the Airliner

350 mph = 156.33 meters per second (Velocity) of the Airliner

.05 * 158757.34 * 156.33 ^2

.05 * 158757.34 * 24439.59 = 193,998,215 joules of Kinetic Energy

That’s enough energy to raise the temperature of 48,499,553 grams of water one degree in one second.

 

[elsol]

It was those FUCKING liberals!

--Uh... I'm sorry. I had an Amicus moment.

Sincerely,
ElSol

 

[Wetwire]

Have to agree, WTC collapse is due to catastrophic impact and sustained high temp burn from jet fuel. Impact dislogded any sprayed on fireproofing and after beams deformed and failed,floors pancaked. There is no stopping that kind of weight moving downward. And to the clowns that are pushing this "9/11 Conspiracy" CD showing a puff of smoke coming out of a lower floor as the tower collapsed as proof of demolition type explosives,
The building is filled with smoke and as the floors above rush downward, the air pressure will jet smoke out of an opening..like a broken or open window.

 

[zeb1094]

Gee, you would think a professor of physics would think of something like that. D'oh!

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Have to agree, WTC collapse is due to catastrophic impact and sustained high temp burn from jet fuel. Impact dislogded any sprayed on fireproofing and after beams deformed and failed,floors pancaked. There is no stopping that kind of weight moving downward. And to the clowns that are pushing this "9/11 Conspiracy" CD showing a puff of smoke coming out of a lower floor as the tower collapsed as proof of demolition type explosives,
The building is filled with smoke and as the floors above rush downward, the air pressure will jet smoke out of an opening..like a broken or open window.

200km per hour. That's how fast the floors were coming down. the same weight in free fal would have reached over 300km/hour. Over 41,000 tons falling at 200KM/per hour will displace one heck of a lot of air. AS well as demolish most anything in it's path.

 

[Wetwire]

To R.Richard,
The "conspiracy"scuttlebutt is not that the terrorists planted the bombs in the trade towers but that the fed gov. in cohoots with the terrorists or with forknowledge of their plans, planted the demolition charges. I am not really a fan of the present adminstration but I think this is an absurd theory

 

[Wetwire]

200km per hour. That's how fast the floors were coming down. the same weight in free fal would have reached over 300km/hour. Over 41,000 tons falling at 200KM/per hour will displace one heck of a lot of air. AS well as demolish most anything in it's path.

On the money, Colleen.
I don't know if you have seen this CD but they have a photo of a small hole (aprox. 15-20' in dia') purported to be a picture of the impact zone at the Pentagon with a caption basically saying "no way a jetliner could have made this hole". It is such an obvious fake it begs the question, How dumb do they think we are or better yet how dumb are their supporters and believers

 

[zeb1094]

On the money, Colleen.
I don't know if you have seen this CD but they have a photo of a small hole (aprox. 15-20' in dia') purported to be a picture of the impact zone at the Pentagon with a caption basically saying "no way a jetliner could have made this hole". It is such an obvious fake it begs the question, How dumb do they think we are or better yet how dumb are their supporters and believers

One of two crash sites I have had the displeasure of seeing while in the Air Force was of a six passenger/two engine Learjet. Straight in from 25,000 ft.

Hole not much bigger than 10' in diameter and about 10' deep, filled to the top with burnt plane bits and people bits. If it hadn't been for the engines would never have known that a fairly big airplane had crashed there.

 

[Wetwire]

zeb1094,
I know what you are saying but we are not talking about a 6 passenger Twin engine Learjet. My point is not as much the size of the hole, it is that the photo's used are not the Pentagon shots. The impact zone at the Pentagon was larger and the aircraft fully penetrated the building and disintergrated. I to have had the misfortune to have been onsite at more than one planecrash and I know that the impact crater if there is one and the amount and dispersal of fragments, both organic and non-organic depends on many factors, Mid-air collision, missle strike, crashlanding or driving the plane right into the ground.

 

[kendo1]

It should be remembered that the spray on fire-proofing wasn't designed to withstand an aircraft strike. It's similar to spray on insulation used in the home- no structural integrity.

 

[elsol]

It's sort of funny in a way.

You see an airplane strike a building... a jetliner at that... and the buildings collapse and you think.

"Well... it couldn't have been that?"

If I watch a jetliner hit a fucking building... and the building doesn't 'collapse' the way I expect it to.

I'm not going looking for other reasons the building might have collapsed; my first thought is going to be...

"Hmm, I wonder where my calculations were flawed."

Sincerely,
ElSol

 

[BlackShanglan]

Nothing, however, will stop the conspiracy theories, however insane. They weren't based on logic or factual understanding in the first place, and as such - like most such theories - will probably not be dented by them. It's like they exist in their own little universe with its own laws, just around the corner from the Holocaust deniers.

Shanglan

 

[BlackShanglan]

I'm not going looking for other reasons the building might have collapsed; my first thought is going to be...

"Hmm, I wonder where my calculations were flawed."

Sincerely,
ElSol

Now then, ElSol, do stop that. How are we going to make a proper pseudoscientific conspiracy theorist of you if you go around examining your first unfounded impulses and considering the possibility that your gut instinct might be wrong?

Shanglan

 

[thebullet]

You see an airplane strike a building... a jetliner at that... and the buildings collapse and you think.

"Well... it couldn't have been that?"

Last night I saw Penn and Teller make a submarine disappear right in front of everyone's eyes. Do ya' think that maybe they could make it look like an airplane crashed into a building? Maybe we should be taking Penn and Teller in for questioning - but I bet Teller won't talk.

I'm first on board with most conspiracy theories, but this one? Uh, I don't know...

 

[BlackShanglan]

Speaking of conspiracy theories ...

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/42384

I love the Onion.

 

[zeb1094]

zeb1094,
I know what you are saying but we are not talking about a 6 passenger Twin engine Learjet. My point is not as much the size of the hole, it is that the photo's used are not the Pentagon shots. The impact zone at the Pentagon was larger and the aircraft fully penetrated the building and disintergrated. I to have had the misfortune to have been onsite at more than one planecrash and I know that the impact crater if there is one and the amount and dispersal of fragments, both organic and non-organic depends on many factors, Mid-air collision, missle strike, crashlanding or driving the plane right into the ground.

I wasn't disputing your point, you can do anything to a picture in this day and age, I was just giving a really world example that I personally experienced. That's all.

 

[cantdog]

There might have been some damage to the building it's self from the impact of the plane but it was probablly negligible, structurally speaking. A modern airliner isn't all that heavy for it's size. They are built out of aluminium and plastic to keep them light. The lighter the plane the more passengers it can carry and less fuel it will burn. As a result, a passender plane doesn't have all that much weight for it's size. A Boeing 767-200 with a full load of fuel weighs about 175 tons+/-. An impressive amount of weight but figure that each tower of the world trade center probablly weighed around a half a million tons and the weight of the plane suddenly seems fairly insignifigant.

What was probablly the demise of the WTC was how they were designed. All of the structural load of the building was supported by a series of steel beams that surrounded the building 39" on center. It was called something like a Steel Pipe design. The massive beams at the central core of the building were dedicated to supporting the massive elevator and utility system. THroughout most of the building the central core was actually designed to be able to move independantly of the rest of the building due to wind loading.

When the plane hit the skin of the building it damaged enough of the outer columns to be dangerous but obviously not enough to be immediatly catastrophic due to the fact that the building didn't fall right away. The remaining columns still held. But as the fire raged, the remaining columns started to get hot and the steel started to soften. The same was happening to the deck trusses. Eventually something gave under the stress. Most think it was a deck truss. The floors of the WTC were a steel deck covered with 4" of concrete and supported by trusses underneath. Each floor probablly weighed in the neighborhood of 1500 to 2000 tons and was supported almost entirely by the perimiter columns. A failure of a section of that perimiter would mean that the deck in that area was now unsupported. As the heat attaked it it started to sag and eventually streched far enough that it tore free from it's supporting structure and down it went onto the florr below starting a chain reaction.

Not really, China Doll. The outer skin of the buildings didn't at all carry most of the weight. The WTC towers were built with the strongest structural portion at the core. The outer skin was piers strapped together with these plates, but deeper in, there were the really serious columnar elements, arranged in a rectangular array around the middle. I don't see deck trusses in the WTC design. There are huge concrete slabs for each floor.

 

[cantdog]

I can't extrapolate the reaction pf the WTC structure to fire stress by looking at the way it was built. But Colleen is correct to say that collapsing vertically is always better than toppling, when you talk something as tall as those towers.

The slabs (that is, each massive floor) may have finished in narrow steel elements near the walls? In the early XX century, the building style called 'fireproof construction' had every floor joist narrow down near the place where they socket onto the masonry shell, in order to have a thin and weak spot at the wall. That way the thin wood right there at the join was to have burned through and have allowed the floor to fall down, preserving the masonry shell and avoiding torsional stress on the masonry.

But looking at the construction of the WTC towers, I still do not see the place which would have been designed to fail. Besides, jet fuel is just diesel, right? Oily, not very high octane, not really explosive, you know, just flammable. An hour later, it'd all be long gone. The stuff burning an hour later would be rugs, insulation, office furniture, all the usual fire load.

Tall, tall buildings like skyscrapers have to consider wind loads, too. The Towers would have been built to sway, to yield somewhat to the wind. That elasticity would have helped them withstand the lateral impact of the airplane, by letting them bend and come back. They did not topple over sideways as a result of the lateral force of impact, but collapsed straight down an hour and a quarter (in one case) and something like three quarters of an hour (n the other) after the airplanes hit. So it was the fire, in some way. But there have been damn few skyscraper failures from fires. They are designed to withstand fires.

Tower 7 was blown up deliberately, wasn't it? Because it was a hazrd?