Why did that 2nd plane melt into the steel and concrete building without the nose buckline and wings tearing off. It left a hole in the shape of the plane. How can that be?
I've said too much. I didn't want to see some things either, and some of them we will never know for sure.
This week, I saw a new video, all speculative, but mentioning the Israeli art students. I don't have the whole answeer but there are articles in the NYT and a very well-researched article in Salon.
The NYT article confirmed that some of the students stayed In a suite on the 91st floor of Tower 1. There are photos. Maybe they are fake. I don't know. They built a cantilevered "deck", took the glass out of a window, installed the deck for a very brief time, and stood out on it in safety harnesses with lines suspended from a heavy hook installed in the ceiling. They were surrounded by lots of boxes piled up to the ceiling. The ceiling had been removed. It was all an "art" project, and they published a book about it called Gelatin the B Thing.
The NYT article couldn't confirm about the "deck" but the article appeared on August 18, 2001. The NYT published nothing about that since.
Yeah I've said too much already.
When you are designing an airplane one of the most important design requirements is that the wings stay firmly attached to the aircraft no matter how hard the pilot tries to shake them off by erratically turning and twisting and diving and such. The wings while light, are filled with "compartments" or "chambered" for strength like the bones of a bird. Another design feature of wings is that the leading edge functions rather like a asymmetric knife so that its thin leading edge offers little resistance to anything flowing towards it, be it air or something more substantial. This combined with the high speed of a windborne object, is the same thing that makes it possible for a tornado to drive plastic soda straws through birds or even into telephone poles. (The asymmetry that distinguishes a wing from a knife is because a wing has to not only be a knife but it also has to create lift to keep the plane in the sky. Airflow over the upper surface has to cover a longer distance than the air below the wing to the trailing edge. This creates a lower pressure on the upper surface which draws the wings upward - lift.)
The "chambers" in the wings are, so soon after takeoff, full of fuel, making them heavier and stronger than they would be if empty, as is a pop can when it is full- only pop cans do not have interior "chambers."
The building, in contrast, was designed like a pop can that is hollow with strong vertical sides all around the outside. When you press down on an empty pop can you can make it collapse much easier if you tap the side while applying downward pressure than if you try to crush it without dinging the side. This is intentional because in order to be useful, a building has to have a lot of interior space and minimizing interior structure by making the outer walls the load bearers, maximizes interior space. Since buildings may eventually have to be demolished to build a different building, you also want a future demolition to cause as little damage to neighboring structures as possible, so you might want to design the structure to pancake a level at a time under controlled circumstances.
Bin Laden, an engineer whose father and other relatives were involved in the construction biz, was well aware of this design feature and planned accordingly. This is why when the planes approached the towers, they were traveling very, very fast [a fast object strikes with a greater force than a slow one of the same mass] and why at the last minute the pilots tipped the wings a off the horizontal so as to take out more than one floor at a time to maximize the structural damage and increase the force of that first "tap," making sure it would be sufficient to shear the vertical supports. The hijackers tried to hit as low as was practical to cut the legs out from under the as many upper storeys as possible so that the extra compressive force of the upper storeys' weight [rather than just starting at the top] would cause the floors to start pancaking rapidly out of control. The added *bonus* for the terrorist was the fuel which ran down the inside of the elevator shafts, etc, that once ignited, created a giant blacksmith's furnace.