Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
Do you have any understanding of physics and or structural engineering at all? The weight and inertia of at least 15 floors falling would overload the design load AND the safety factors by what? At least a factor of 100, IMO. The floors would instantly be sheared off of the columns, with virtually no resistance. There's no building contents even remotely strong enough to have any significant effect on that.
It's clear that no one had ever considered planes being used as weapons, as they were. Thus, the results of what happened when a plane intentionally hit the buildings were never considered. It's not that hard to understand is it? All the talk around the accident was that the engineers had considered the possibility of a 707 accidentally hitting a tower in some fog on final approach. The 707 is a much smaller plane, and a plane on final approach would not have had a huge quantity of fuel on board, and would have been going 1/3 of the speed.
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I understand that the weight and inertia of the tops of the towers are substantial. Of course it is.....Do you undertsand the symmetry required for the caps to plunge straight downward with little deviation? Even with classical implosion demolition (like WTC-7), you will often see the top section tilt somewhat on the way down. The planes did not impact perfectly on center of the buildings, and therefore did not destroy all the core columns, if any. Yeah, yeah I know one of the tops tilted slightly, but like I said, the path of greatest resistance was taken, and the time it took to collapse (about 10 seconds) is the smoking gun.
The structure below definately would have slowed down the collapse due to the "pancaking" effect........that never happened because everything was blown out of the way. There were no pancakes. However there were multi-ton beam sections imbedded into neighboring buildings for crying out loud....like they were shot from a cross bow. That requires huge lateral force.
Frank DeMartini, part of the WTC design/management team, said that the twin towers could absorb and survive "multiple" impacts from a 707 plane. Perhaps the government never considered planes being used as weapons, but the WTC design team saw an accidental impact as a possibility. I have demonstrated before that the 757 is not
alot heavier than the 707 despite being larger in size. They use lighter designs/materials nowadays.
Here is Frank's statement.
http://youtu.be/IRoONuSQgGE