Posted on 11/17/2001 10:58:21 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Saturday, Nov. 17, 2001 11:39 a.m. EST Flight 587 Video Shows 'Puff of Smoke' in Sky A second-by-second videotape of the final moments of doomed American Airlines Flight 587 shows a puff of smoke in the sky seconds after it crashed outside New York's JFK Airport Monday, lending credence to eyewitnesses who say the jetliner exploded before slamming into a Rockaway, N.Y., neighborhood. Though Flight 587 probers have not released the key videotape, shot from a Metropolitan Transportation Authority highway surveillance camera, reporters from New York's Daily News were allowed to view it Friday. "The tape ... shows a white outline of the jetliner against a clear sky in fairly steep decline," the News reported in Saturday editions. "Seconds later, the outline disappears and the video shows a blurry, white, undefined patch as the plane apparently breaks apart." Visible in one of the final frames of the sequential videotape is "a puff of white smoke in the sky." The images of Flight 587's final moments are said to be "very unclear." FBI and NTSB investigators hope to learn more through video enhancement techniques. On Friday, MTA spokesman Tom Kelly told NewsMax.com that the FBI had turned the videotape over to the NTSB, but apparently both agencies now have copies and continue to analyze them. Enhancement of the Flight 587 video could confirm the accounts of eyewitnesses like Jackie Powers, who, minutes after the crash, told both ABC News and WABC Radio in New York that she saw "an enormous flash" near the wing on the A-300 Airbus before it dropped from the sky. "I don't know if it was fire or an explosion," she said. "It appeared that debris fell from the left side [of the plane]. It just plummeted. It had no momentum whatsoever. It just plummeted." Dozens of other witnesses told various media outlets they saw the jet either explode or catch fire before it crashed. An explosion would be a problem for NTSB officials, who spent the better part of the last few days trying to sell the idea that the plane's vertical stabilizer snapped off, causing the in-flight breakup, because of "wake turbulence" from a Japan Airlines 747 that had taken off from JFK two minutes earlier. Independent aviation experts have generally scoffed at the NTSB theory. "[747 wake turbulence] is not strong enough to be able to break off a tail or to compromise any sort of a normal airplane," said ABC News aviation analyst John Nance on Friday. "They could turn a little airplane upside down. But especially an A-300, which is a jumbo jet - no way in the world should that ever have any potentially disastrous impact on the aircraft or the tail," he explained. On Wednesday, an unnamed aviation expert quoted in New York's Newsday said one likely explanation for Flight 587's breakup was a bomb exploding on board. (See: Aviation Expert: Bomb One Likely Cause of Flight 587 Crash.)
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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No. Think of it as a boat in the water. The heavier it is, the larger the wake at a given speed.
But hey, Rachel is gonna have Ross's baby!
I do not see a puff of white smoke (could be steam, but not likely) as evidence of an explosion at the wing root. I do not pretend to know what it was, but I do not see it as an explosion.
Concentrate is right. At a given velocity, a heavier plane MUST generate more lift to stay in the air, and thus it must displace more air per unit time. Translation-- a heavier plane (of same type or larger) all things begin equal, WILL produce a heavier, more forcefull wake. The 747 was flying from NY to Japan. Obviously it was heavy with fuel, passengers and freight.
Do heavier subs generate more wake, design & velocity constant?
Well said. If the people who did the design, did it right, there should not be a normally encountered sudden load that could cause such a material failure. Most standard kinds of engineering design review catch problems of this kind. If it is a sudden load that ripped appart the composite matrix structure, it is likely that the load was far greater than anticipated under any normal or abnormal situation likely to be encountered. That in itself would suggest some form of terroist interaction. The lack of physical damage on the surfaces further suggests that this is relatively unlikely.
In design errors, fatigue fractures are far more common, due to the relatively unknown number of and magnitude of the cyclic loadings. All things being equal, a fatique failure is more probable. One thing that could have happened is if the tail surfaces were removed and in the replacement of pins scratches or "stress concentration points" were created in the composite material surfaces. This is another way that things could have failed in the way the photos indicate.
Neither encounter was particularly severe, investigators said, and were certainly not violent enough to rip an airworthy A300-600's tail off.
Which is what many here have been saying, also what my coworker the retired Jarhead pilot and the Zoomie crew chief were saying.
Since the author of the above had the same photos to look at, and included the one which showed the apparent delamination the best with the article, one would expect him to jump on the appearance of delamination harder than he did, unless he, like me, thought that it could have been either a cause, or an effect, and was willing to wait for more analysis, rather relying on "photgraphic evidence" alone. The analysis would includ both FDR data and physical/chemical examination of the failed parts.
Meanwhile we can, and will, speculate
Those Euro's need to go back to engineering school.
PS: Are you really a newbie or masquerading as one?
Rokke is right about the 2 camps Trust and Distrust. But I think the anger comes from the BRUTAL and TERRIFYING deaths the people on these airplanes [and buildings] are suffering.
And the lack of consequences suffered by anyone in USgovt. Where is the accountability? Someone please post a list of those fired/lost their jobs as a result of the massive breakdown in security that allowed 9/11. Think it's a very short list.
CIA dir George Tenet must have compromising photos of...well...everybody...
Valu-Jet
TWA 800
Egypt Air
American Airlines A300 Error Bus
(nothing to see on this thread folks)
Do heavier subs generate more wake, design & velocity constant?
No, or not exactly. Mainly because there is no such thing as a heaver sub for a given displacement, at least while submerged. Subs pump out or take in water so as to remain the same weight as the water they displace. A submarine does not fly through the water, it floats like a blimp. A blimp though can use some aerodynamic lift to change altitude. A submarine can too for that matter, that's what they do when they swim down or up, using the diving planes (and the hull) to generate hydrodynamic forces to aid the boyancy force to change depth more rapidly. A physically larger sub will generate more wake than a smaller one, but a weight difference between two subs of the same design just won't exist under normal, submerged condition.
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