Posted on 12/17/2001 6:40:25 PM PST by classygreeneyedblonde
Federal investigators still have no evidence indicating that a benign structural failure played a role in the tail breaking off Flight 587 last month, sending the plane tumbling into Queens, N.Y., according to AviationNow.com. But as National Transportation Safety Board and other safety experts wrestle to solve the mystery of the powerful forces that ripped the plane’s fin off and then cast the engines from their mountings, one aviation expert said sabotage of the aircraft’s left engine while still on the ground could explain what shook the aircraft to pieces.
Expert Marshall Smith opined, "A single point failure, the in-flight actuation of the left engine thrust reverser, can account for all three observed phenomena of the clean breaking off of the tail and the failure of both pylons holding the engines.”
"If the left engine thrust reverser had either partially or completely actuated during flight, it would cause the plane to go into a flat spin to the left. The airplane would spin something like a flat Frisbee with the right engine pushing forward and the left engine pushing backwards,” Marshall explained.
"Within a second of the flat spin occurring, the sideways windblast would rip off the tail assembly, since it was never designed to take such a side blast of air.
"As soon as the tail assembly broke off, there is now very little wind resistance to the flat spin. At this point the engines would cause the aircraft to spin even faster with the g-forces away from the center of the spin becoming so great that both engines would be violently ripped off the wings and thrown outward away from the plane,” Marshall said.
Marshall’s opinion is that the spin accounted for why the engines were found so far away from the crash site and why the tail came off first.
Terrorist Scenario
The mechanical engineer, aviation ground school instructor and former NASA adviser painted this scenario:
During the night, a terrorist saboteur disguised as a ground crew mechanic reached up in the back of the left jet engine of the American Airlines Airbus and cut the hydraulic line going to the thrust reverser actuator and the control safety sensor lines.
The next morning after the jet engines were started, the hydraulic fluid began dripping from the cut line.
When the aircraft was about 3,000 feet in the air, the sound of an "airframe rattle” was heard in the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) record. Cause: the tampered-with left thrust reverser had started to close, causing the plane to turn to the left.
The pilot compensated by applying right rudder to bring the nose back to straight flight by turning to the right.
The aircraft commenced a "side slip.” During this condition, the burbling air flowing over the extended control surfaces made the plane shake, rattle and roll, accounting for the airframe rattle noise heard on the CVR at 107 seconds into the flight.
The pilot thought he had overcompensated, worried about losing too much airspeed, and returned the controls to normal. The rattling momentarily stopped as indicated on the CVR.
The plane continued to turn back to the left.
Seven seconds later, one of the flight crew commented about "air turbulence.”
The pilot again tried to compensate for the strong drift of the plane to the left caused by the partially closing thrust reverser by again applying right rudder and opposite aileron. The same rattling sound is heard again at 121 seconds into the flight.
Four seconds later, at 125 seconds into the flight, the first officer calls for "full power,” presumably to compensate for the side slip, which had again slowed the plane down to dangerously slow speed.
As soon as the power went to full, the spinning effect caused by the partially or fully actuated thrust reverser caused the plane to spin out of control in a flat spin.
Two seconds later, at 127 seconds, the CVR indicated the flight crew making a comment about being out of control. No more comments are made after that, and the recording ends 17 seconds later when the plane hits the ground.
Fighting to control the aircraft, the pilot held full right rudder and hard left aileron just as the left thrust reverser came into the full-on position. The application of full power greatly increased the turn to the left, created a huge side force on the tail and rudder assembly, and snapped them off cleanly.
Within another second, without the vertical tail assembly to slow the spin, the plane spun violently to the left about the center of gravity of the airplane. The plane spun horizontally with the full power from both engines increasing the spin faster and faster until both engines broke off.
The flight crew at the front was thrown violently forward with such g-force they were instantly rendered unconscious or killed, explaining why no more comments from the flight crew are heard after applying full power.
With the plane completely out of control and the engines still running at full power, the engines broke away ripping the fuel tanks in both wings and igniting the plane. Wake Turbulence Discounted
Marshall created his saboteur scenario because he concluded early that it is not possible for any type of wake turbulence from a preceding jet to rip off the tail of an airplane. Furthermore, he concluded, even with the vertical stabilizer gone, Flight 587 would not have gone out of control in such a way that both engines would also fall off.
He pointed to 1985 incident where a Japanese Boeing 747 with the vertical tail assembly completely torn away continued to fly in large circles for over half an hour before hitting a mountain.
According to Marshall, Flight 587, an Airbus A300, used a modern "fly-by-wire” computer system and would fly quite easily with complete loss of the vertical fin and rudder.
"Most air accident investigators would easily conclude that the chances of three simultaneous airframe failures all occurring at the same time is not probable. It must be one or the other but not all three. It would be much easier to conclude that something else actually caused all three failures,” Marshall said.
Marshall pointed to a statement by New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani at a news conference Nov. 14 that the rescue workers recovered 262 bodies including "a man still holding a baby.” "
Certainly no man can be strong enough to hold on to a baby through that force, unless instead the plane was in a flat spin. For the passengers in the center of the plane, the force would have been downward [not forward] as the plane hit the ground, and the baby would be simply forced deeper into the man’s lap as he sat in the passenger seat.
Further clues pointing to his theory, said Marshall: news videos of the crash scene as firemen put out the flames. A large section of the central part of the plane is lying on the ground almost intact but in flames.
I would think that any significant loss of hydraulic pressure to any system would have been caught during the pre-flight check.
Ha ha ha. It is an inconvenient fact that he brushes away as a coincidence.
IMHO, the sabotage angle is correct, and the events after the engine problem are correct...the sideways turning of the craft took the tail off. However, I believe the two "rattles" heard on the CVR correspond to the two expolsions seen by eyewitnesses. I believe explosives were planted inside the wing, near the junction to the plane.
And the fact that you received an e-mail AFTER the crash didn't trigger your bullshit meter?
Please. God gave you a brain. Use it.
Newsmax's expert, Marshall Smith, is evidently unfamiliar with some of the A-300 features, as well.
From an earlier thread, which included A-300 pilots and an aircraft engineer with a company who manufactures nacelles, we discovered that any damage to the hydraulics would make it impossible to deploy the thrust reversers -- the exact opposite of what the expert contends.
Moreover, the A-300 edition that American flies is not "fly by wire". This controversial approach was first employed on the A-320.
Let's put it this way: if it was sabotage, it had nothing to do with the thrust reversers.
And this doesn't trigger your bullshit meter, either?
Come on, people. Eyewitness testimony, unless it is captured IMMEDIATELY after a crash is notoriously unreliable.
Your post proves it.
John. You're correct, of course.
But the government covered it up!
Get with the conspiracy, man. Rationality has NO place when a juicy opportunity to gin up a cover-up presents itself.
If Michael Rivero hadn't been kicked off Free Republic, we'd have seen fifteen threads on this foolishness by now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.