"Truthers" and 9/11

[Bongolation]

and why is the hole in the pentagon so small where the impact was??? I would expect a bigger hole from a passenger plane.

Are you an authority on airliner crashes?

Real experts and peer reviewed investigators have no technical problem with the crash happening as described, never mind that identifiable parts of the plane were recovered at the site and there were witnesses who saw it go in, etc...

But never mind all that. Let's put all that aside and cut to the chase.

Answer this question, just as a putatively "reasonable man":

If Flight 77 and its passengers didn't crash into the Pentagon, where DID they go?

 

[Deluge Of Sound]

Bermuda Triangle?

 

[Schlyder]

No I am not a jet crash expert... but I stayed in a Holiday Inn before ... LOL yes, that is a good question... and I said there are lots of things on both sides of the coin that don't jive. That is a big hole , no pun intended... I just wanted to add, some info about spray on fireproofing and metalurgy etc, that I do have knowledge on.

 

[sloasdaylight]

No I am not a jet crash expert... but I stayed in a Holiday Inn before ... LOL yes, that is a good question... and I said there are lots of things on both sides of the coin that don't jive. That is a big hole , no pun intended... I just wanted to add, some info about spray on fireproofing and metalurgy etc, that I do have knowledge on.

I find it hard to believe that you actually have any metallurgical knowledge since you seemed to be implying in your previous post that steel would have to melt to lose it's structural integrity.

Edit: I'd also like to add that the open air burning temperatures of different fuels doesn't really count for much when there is a concentrated amount of it. The firebombings the US and Britain did to Dresden and Tokyo in WWII are all the evidence you need to look at what happens when you get a centralized blaze going full force, as the estimated temperature at the center of each blaze was WELL above the normal ignition temperature of the materials used. Some estimates put the temperature at the heart of the Tokyo Bombing at over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

[Bongolation]

I don't know what happened that day... but I do know that the evidence doesn't add up with the story...

The objections are trivial to those confronting the conspiracist alternative, certainly.

In the real world, stuff doesn't usually work 100% according to lab specs which are best-case under controlled conditions...never mind that materials and practices contract specs are largely ignored in big NYC porkbarrel projects built by Mafia unions and contractors and signed off on by bent inspectors. I've lived in Manhattan and watched that process up close and personal. I often wondered why stuff didn't fall down on its own.

Every time I've seen a news story about a building somewhere in the world being tragically destroyed by some natural or accidental disaster, the backstory is that it wasn't supposed to happen, the building was supposed to be fireproof, or seismically stable or able to better withstand whatever befell it. Every freakin' time! "Authorities promise an investigation into the contractors and their relationship with Mayor Quimby," etc., etc., etc.

The WTC is no different.

to me those towers looked like they came down under controlled demolition....

How expert are you on that?

What WTC7 absolutely didn't look like was a controlled explosive demolition, if you see the footage taken in direct view nearby.

And as to building 7.... how did they place the charges in a matter of hours to bring it down, when that kind of job takes weeks to prepare. And all during a fire????

That was one of the objections in the BBC doc. First of all, better and much closer camera footage shows there were no (zero) explosions at WTC7, and a controlled explosive demolition requires many, many, many of them to bring down a structure as anyone knows who's watched the numberless examples we've all seen on the news when they demolish hotels, housing projects, etc. Rigging for explosive demotion is not, nor can it be, a stealthy undertaking performed in an occupied building.

It takes large crews weeks to rig a building to blow, and it requires stripping out the interior to get to the proper supports (which are manually pre-weakened) to place the charges. In one of the most 24/7 busiest buildings in Manhattan that is under constant surveillance, no such crews were ever seen there, nor was there any evidence of the interior being stripped out to access the structural stress points seen by the huge number of workers who were going to and from their jobs at all hours. This huge undertaking never happened. There was also no residuum of the explosives or any demolition-related rigging debris in the wreckage, which is extensively present in real explosive demolition sites.

1: There were no crews...

2: There was no preparatory stripping and cutting of the structure...

3: There were no explosions...

4: There was no explosive-demolition debris

There was a lot of heat pretzeled structural supports that also showed intensive degradation and weakening from superheated corrosive fumes, a crucial point engineers only noticed much later in the investigation.

 

[Schlyder]

No, structural steel doesn't have to melt to lose structural integrity, but burning jet fuel isn't going to be hot enough to get it to a temperature that will make the whole 100+ story building collapse... or it shouldn't be able to. But apparently it did, we are told.
Like I said before... I am not putting money on either side, because there are too many pieces of the puzzle that don't fit. I don't believe either side knows, or is telling us everything there is to know, of what exactly happened.

who did it is not where my curiosity lies, it is the amazing destruction these three jetliners made, and the explanation put forth by the authorities, and others ....
there are lots of things that were strange about the events that occured that day, and I am curious about the inadequate explanations.

 

[sloasdaylight]

No, structural steel doesn't have to melt to lose structural integrity, but burning jet fuel isn't going to be hot enough to get it to a temperature that will make the whole 100+ story building collapse... or it shouldn't be able to. But apparently it did, we are told.
Like I said before... I am not putting money on either side, because there are too many pieces of the puzzle that don't fit. I don't believe either side knows, or is telling us everything there is to know, of what exactly happened.

Incendiary bombs aren't "supposed" to create a 1000+ degree Fahrenheit firestorm, yet with proper wind and air fueling it, they do.

However it is obviously out of the realm of possibility that when several thousand tons of steel, concrete, glass, and other office building materials come falling down on previously weakened supports that the supports would fail.

 

[Bob Lee (QSC)]

Truther, birthers, et al … IMHO they're all frothers.

 

[Munjibunga]

No, structural steel doesn't have to melt to lose structural integrity, but burning jet fuel isn't going to be hot enough to get it to a temperature that will make the whole 100+ story building collapse... or it shouldn't be able to. But apparently it did, we are told.
Like I said before... I am not putting money on either side, because there are too many pieces of the puzzle that don't fit. I don't believe either side knows, or is telling us everything there is to know, of what exactly happened.

who did it is not where my curiosity lies, it is the amazing destruction these three jetliners made, and the explanation put forth by the authorities, and others ....
there are lots of things that were strange about the events that occured that day, and I am curious about the inadequate explanations.

The explanations are fully adequate, but too technical for some to comprehend. The structures were not designed to sustain the vertical dynamic impact imparted by the upper floors falling onto the lower structure when the one or two stories collapsed. The temperature could easily have reached over 2,000 degrees, as demonstrated by experiment after the fact (the type of experiments that the "truthers" have not bothered to conduct).

Once the beams were softened (they did not melt), they no longer had the strength necessary to support the upper structure, so they deformed and collapsed, leading to the catastrophic collapse of the floors below, which could not sustain the impact.

It is really frustrating to have to deal with the superstitions of people who have neither the facts nor technical expertise who sit around dreaming up "what ifs" that have no relation to reality. If you don't understand, why not just say you don't understand instead of conjuring up these whimsical flights of fancy that amount to mental mastubation?

Think about it. Prior to 9/11, if someone had asked you if the WTC towers could sustain the impact of a fully-fueled 757 striking them at 500 miles per hour, what would you have said? "Sure, why not?" The highly-respected structural and geotechnical engineers who have investigated and analyzed the collapse have nothing to gain and their reputations to lose by falsifying their results. You can rely on sources like Rosie O'Donnell if you like, but I'm going to stick with people whose heads see the light of day.

Finally, are you even qualified to assess whether the pieces of the puzzle fit or not?

 

[Bongolation]

No, structural steel doesn't have to melt to lose structural integrity, but burning jet fuel isn't going to be hot enough to get it to a temperature that will make the whole 100+ story building collapse...

It doesn't have to.

It only needs to get a very small part of it hot enough to collapse, and a massive chain reaction will take care of the rest, which it did.

Not only was the fireproofing damaged and defective (I saw the footage of the foam peeled off due to trapped water and condensation causing corrosion to delaminate it from the beams), the fire-resistant work was -- even ideally! -- done to earlier standards with methods now known to be inadequate.

I don't believe either side knows, or is telling us everything there is to know, of what exactly happened.

Of course they don't. But they DO know, say, that armies of skilled demolition technicians didn't descend on these very busy and observed buildings and spend weeks stripping them out and prepping them for explosive demolition, nor did they do so for demolition by magical thermite charges, an even more ridiculous assertion by the head "truthers" when confronted with video proof of the absence of explosions that they previously said happened.

How is this absence of demolition crews and activity explained?

Jones, one of the truther "experts," says in the BBC docs with a straight face that this "proves" that the charges (that didn't explode or leave debris, mind you!) were planted in the buildings during construction in the early 1980s!

Is that credible to you? Is belief in it even consistent with your views of sanity?

there are lots of things that were strange about the events that occured that day, and I am curious about the inadequate explanations.

Hundreds of obscure and relatively meaningless "answers" will of course never be forthcoming because they will of necessity be speculative.

All we need to know is which "explanations" seem the most highly improbable and illogical -- such as Flight 77 disappearing with its entire compliment of passengers and crew without a trace, or nefarious plotters wiring all the WTC buildings with semi-magical demolition technology during their construction nearly twenty years in advance of need.

 

[Munjibunga]

you are talking about THERMITE.

and why is the hole in the pentagon so small where the impact was??? I would expect a bigger hole from a passenger plane... after all they took down the WTC towers, but only put a 15ft hole in the wall of the pentagon??.

Do you know how thick the aluminum skin is on a commercial airliner? It's about 0.05 inches thick. There's not going to be a heck of a lot of big chunks of it left after it hits a heavily-reinforced building at 300 to 500 mph. Also, how do you account for the recovery of bodies of the passengers and crew who were manifested on Flight 77 from inside the Pentagon? You think our government could engineer something like that?

 

[ModulusFan]

Do you know how thick the aluminum skin is on a commercial airliner? It's about 0.05 inches thick. There's not going to be a heck of a lot of big chunks of it left after it hits a heavily-reinforced building a 500 mph. Also, how do you account for the recovery of bodies of the passengers and crew who were manifested on Flight 77 from inside the Pentagon? You think our government could engineer something like that?

I'm only surprised it took two days for your bobber to sink.

 

[Munjibunga]

I'm only surprised it took two days for your bobber to sink.

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Although I must say I was genuinely repulsed by the show I was watching.

 

[Schlyder]

so where did the thermite come from... noone has explained the presence of the thermite...that didn't just spontaneously create itself.

 

[Munjibunga]

What thermite? You mean the aluminum and iron oxide particles that guy found somewhere around the debris field? The particles that neither he nor anyone else knows their source? The particles that have not been confirmed to be thermite? I saw pictures of the chips, and they looked to me like some molten aluminum had bonded to some oxidized iron.

Or, if you're talking about the cascading metal from the corner of one of the structures before it collapsed, that's most likely the aluminum cladding used on the structure or that from the plane itself. Here's a little light reading for you if you are interested in the truth. Of course, it may diminish the pleasure you derive from making stuff up which, admittedly, can often be more fun than facing facts.

Aluminum on 9/11

 

[Schlyder]

from that site...
quote '"....It is indeed ironic that the progressive collapse of the Twin Towers has prompted many
9-11 researchers to reach the erroneous conclusion that deliberately placed thermite
“cutter charges” must have been used to bring down these buildings. The findings
outlined in this article show the underlying reasons for this misconception. Simply put,
thermite-induced reactions were largely responsible for the destruction of the Twin
Towers on that terrible September day in New York City – but the fatal damage was not
from deliberately planted thermite charges. Molten aluminum was the culprit, and the
true terrorist! "...

So they admit thermite is present , but claim it was created by the fires and contents of plane and the building.... what are the odds of that happening?

 

[cassanova]

The exception being, the plane that went down in PA....passengers by that time knew what was going on, and DID take the matter into their own hands.

I'm not so sure about that one. There is still a big part of me that believes that plane was shot down by USAF fighters. Primarily, due to Donald Rumsfeld's own admission that the plane was shot down by an F16. That's not something I think the Secretary of Defense would say if it weren't true. I'm thinking he recanted his statement because most people wouldn't understand and accept why we'd actually shoot down a bird that had American citizens on it.

 

[cassanova]

Are you an authority on airliner crashes?

I know you're talking about the bird that hit the Pentagon, but I'm more curious about flight 93.

I'm not an authority on airline crashes but I have had to guard a few crash sites from military aircraft going down. None ever crashed into a building, only wooded areas much like flight 93 did. So I have some limited knowledge of what they look like.

The crash site in PA doesn't resemble any type of crash I've ever had to guard. The fire from the sites I've guarded incinerated a fairly large radius around the debris. Where's the fire damage? The Harriers and F16's that went down were carrying less fuel than flight 93 and are significantly smaller birds, yet the military aircraft left more fire damage and larger craters.

Real experts and peer reviewed investigators have no technical problem with the crash happening as described, never mind that identifiable parts of the plane were recovered at the site and there were witnesses who saw it go in, etc...

There were witnesses that claimed they heard shots from the grassy knoll, and at least one other direction were Oswald was not positioned when Kennedy was assassinated. Not to mention everyone has witnessed the Zapruder which shows Kennedy holding his throat after he was hit, yet the government and history books try to force us to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gun man in the assassination. Just sayin.

 

[PSPookie]

It may also be worth noting that the WTC was not designed to withstand an impact from a fully-fuled 767. It was designed to withstand an impact from the largest commecial airliner of the time: 707s and DC8s.

 

[Eric Perry]

I guess this is where I submit to your awesomeness, perry.

Also, just to be fair, i didn't try that hard.

You apparently save the truly hard work for trying to fit in, n00b. Good on you. Hey, while we're at it, why don't you wow us on more tales of The Qintar, NTB, and he who shall not be spoken. Perhaps you can just sniff on Daren's jock some more, since that appears to be a pasttime of yours.


...Naw. Maybe you just do that 'cause you're hungry.