bill smith
Philosopher
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2009
- Messages
- 8,408
I see. Your wife can help you with your English but not with maths. Don't worry, I'll tell you the answer.
If you look at page 86 of NCSTAR 1-2B, you'll see that the fuel tank in the wing tapers from 166" near the fuselage to 46" near the tip, so the figure of 120" for the length of the slug of fuel is the difference between the length of each end.
http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/NCSTAR1-2index.htm
Now read the next couple of pages (for comprehension), and you'll find that the fuel tank in each wing was split approximately into two halves. According to NIST and the airline companies, only the inboard half contained fuel at the time of the alleged collision with the south tower.
In the schematic of observed damage to the wall on page 238, you can see that columns were cut by the outboard section of the left wing, where the fuel tank was empty. Not only that, many of the columns that would have been hit by the full tank would have already been destroyed by the engines. In other words, where fuel was needed to break the columns, there was none. And where fuel was available to break the columns, it was redundant.
This suggests that Mackey's calculations are a waste of time and the slug of fuel model is a con trick.
That looks like RM is fairly well blown out of the water. Well reasoned. So the light aluminium wingtips could not have cut through the multiple steel box columns. Just as I thought.