Reply #38: That is a remarkable photo. [View All]

[eomer]

So much easier to interpret than looking at a bunch of separate photos with one part or another obscured or cropped out. Thanks for posting it.

I'm not a no-planer; don't really have a staked out position. But I will say that it doesn't look like the hole I would expect if a 757 mostly went through the outer wall, with most of the airplane ending up somewhere inside.

For that to be the case it looks like the fuselage would have needed to be as low as it could go so that the bulk of it went in underneath the floor of the second floor. That would mean that at impact with the wall the fuselage was low enough that the engines had to have previously hit the ground and sheared off before impact with the wall.

Or else the angle of approach was steep enough that the nose could hit low enough to get in underneath the second floor while the engines were still clearing the ground. It seems unlikely that the plane could hit at such a steep angle and then scoot in underneath a second floor that remains mostly there, not punched through.

Or else the plane was somewhat higher at impact with the wall and some upper part of the fuselage went through a hole on the second floor. But the only hole in the second floor that is completely punched through without a vertical member remaining looks to be less than 10 feet in width. Maybe the fuselage went through the horizontal location that is centered on that hole in the second floor, but it still doesn't look like much of a hole for the fuselage to have punched through. Also, there appears to be a vertical member standing in the ground floor directly underneath that hole in the second floor, but the photo is not clear enough to tell for sure. If that is a vertical member at that position then it would rule out the fuselage having gone through that horizontal location, it seems to me.

Or else most of the plane didn't end up inside; much of it was deflected and ended up outside. We have to resort to other photos to evaluate that, but I'm including it just to cover all the possibilities.

BTW, while I agree that the hole is wider than 14 feet, it is also narrower than the 90 feet that some claim. The widest hole with no remaining vertical members looks to me to be about as wide as two stories are high. I assume that means about 20 to 25 feet wide; someone correct me if each floor is taller than about 12 feet. You might squeeze out another 15 feet or so of width if you count the area behind the two leftmost spools. Counting that area, then at most you can find an unobstructed hole of maybe 30 to 35 feet wide. Certainly there is not a 90 foot wide hole here. I guess we can argue the semantics of hole versus damage -- I'm not really into games of gotcha so maybe we can agree that there is damage that could be as wide as 90 feet but that the biggest hole, as such, is in the range of 20 to 35 feet wide and mostly one story high, with one possible part of it that could be two stories high and maybe 10 feet wide.