The lift is lost almost immediately as the center of gravity of the plane is moved backwards drastically by the loss of the almost 57,000 pounds of the nose which balanced the fulcrum of the "teeter totter" on which the two forces of gravity and lift were contesting. The center of lift did not change as it rests above the average of the wing surfaces. Calculations demonstrate that if you remove 57,000 pounds of nose, the center of gravity moved back 11.9 feet behind the center of lift, instantly. Multiple 747 pilots have come forward to say that if you move the center of gravity of a 747 10 to 12 feet behind the center of lift, the plane will almost immediately pitch up and go immediately into a stall condition and cannot fly that far out of trim, nor is there anything that can be done to trim the aircraft that far out.
The force of drag which is being countered by the thrust of the engines is no longer being countered because the engines are now at idle, and is suddenly increased by the loss of aerodynamic presentation of the nose and instead a flat surface of the noseless fuselage is being presented to the 385 knot speed of the air colliding with the column of air in the passenger and freight cabins. Combining these, the noseless airframe pitches up rapidly presenting even more of a flat surface to a 385 Knot colliding air.
The engines (per Boeing) are at idle and producing zero thrust. Even were they operating at 100% thrust, each, if they were the maximum power Rolls Royce engines Boeing installs on 747s (they weren't, they were GEs) which can produce 64,000 Lbs of thrust each, they could only produce a combined 256,000 pounds of thrust, an amount totally incapable of lifting a 550,000 lb, the dry weight of the 747 in question, any amount at all.
The CIA claimed the plane climbed 3,800 feet above the 13,800 feet where the initiating event occurred in 18 seconds. The NTSB's cartoon reduced that by more than half, to 1200 feet in the same 18 seconds, but still, there was no energy with engines at idle to power the climb. With losing 57,000 pounds of nose, there is no way that plane could keep a trim to fly. Boeing stated that the maximum climb rate for that 747 under ideal lift conditions with the engines operating at full thrust is 3800 feet per minute! Yet both the CIA and the NTSB cartoons would have us believe that particular crippled 747 succeeded in climbing 3800 feet or 1200 feet in a mere 18 seconds. . . with the engines at idle! Impossible.
The apologists claim that the momentum of the aircraft was used up to make the climb. . . but the math doesn't work out either. Applying the math to convert ALL of the upward momentum of the aircraft's current climb at the initiating event shows the plane could make that altitude, but then the plane would fall like a rock directly beneath the initiating event, having zero forward momentum left to go anywhere at all other than drop. Instead, the 747 of Flight TWA-800 fell in a ballistic fall from the initiating event without any climb at all:
"Ballistic Fall.The captain of the NOAA research ship Rude entered Flight 800's last secondary radar position, speed, heading and gross weight into his computer and it predicted the landing point by calculating a ballistic fall. He went to that spot and immediately found the main wreckage including the fuselage, wings and engines."
The plane was tracked by secondary passive radar until it dropped below the radar horizon, about 200 feet above sea level. We know exactly where and when it was at each sweep. We know within 4.6 seconds when the even occurred and when the bulk of the wreckage fell into the ocean. That leaves a 9.2 second margin of error due to the plane being out of radar sight. It's actually less than that because there were a couple of other passive radars and triangulations were made. However, a law of ballistics says that the time to climb to an altitude equals the time to fall back to the starting point. Ergo, if the plane was at 13,800 feet, and then climbed under either of the CIA or NTSB theories to their ultimate Zoom climb altitudes in ~18 seconds, by the laws of ballistics, it then requires an additional 18 seconds to fall back to 13,800 feet before the plane can begin to fall below that initial altitude. That's a total of ~36 seconds before the plane can start its fall from 13,800 feet.
Flight TWA-800 Secondary (passive) Radar and Debris Trails
However, DesertRhino, we know from the radar tracks that Flight TWA-800 the time between the initiating event to splashdown of the main fuselage wreckage into the Atlantic Ocean was ~43 seconds plus or minus 2 seconds. If we add ~18 seconds for the zoom climb and another ~18 seconds for the fall from the top of that zoom climb, we have accounted for a full ~36 seconds of the time which simply doesn't exist in the radar record!
We would have to allow only 5 to 9 seconds for the wreckage to fall the additional 13,800 feet. . . 2.6 miles of fall accelerated only by gravity and opposed by drag. If that were done in 5 seconds the wreckage would have to splash in at more than 1850 Miles per hour. if it were the longer 9 seconds, it would be a slower, but still absurd 1050 MPH! My calculations put the terminal calculations of the crippled 747 at only 450 mph due to atmospheric drag.
However, the main point is that ~43 seconds does not provide ANY TIME AT ALL FOR ANY ZOOM CLIMB! NONE, ZERO. NADA. ZIP! Such a climb is impossible according to the laws of physics, aerodynamics, and by the radar record!
PS: DesertRhine, I posted all of my calculations in detail on these and more back in 2002 on FreeRepublic. I also posted my detailed timeline of the event.