On 4/1/06, Igor Roshchin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > BTW, probably not that many people know that Empire State Building > withstood a B-25 bomber hitting it and being stuck in the building > at the 79th floor in 1945. <snip>
Actually I've known that since I was a kid. Although some said that the WTC's semi-monocoque design (the outer skin is a stress-bearing structure) was part of its demise, and it was pointed out that the Empire State Building did indeed survive the B-25 collision, here are some facts as I understand them: 1) The B-25 Mitchell is a medium sized (even for WWII) twin engine fighter-bomber, not nearly as big as, say, a B-17 flying fortress, and certainly dwarfed by the jetliners that were flown into the Twin Towers, 2) The B-25 carries much much less fuel, even on full tanks, than a modern passenger jet, and when it hit the ESB, thousands of gallons of fuel did ~not~ leak to floors below, 3) Modern jetfuel is much more volatile than what would have been used in the B-25, 4) The jets of 9/11 had just taken off and were about to embark on transatlantic flights, so they were as heavy with fuel as any jetliner is ever going to be, a fact that was planned on by the terrorists, 5) The terrorists purposely flew the planes into the towers at a 45% angle, so that from wingtip to wingtip, damage was effected on about 10 stories for each building. The B-25 was horizontal as it hit the ESB, so only a couple of floors were damaged 5) The WTC Towers in fact survived the impact, as evidenced by the fact that they stood for several hours until the fires below the planes, fuelled by thousands of gallons of jetfuel leaking down between the walls, weakened the metal structure, causing that structure to fail. I don't know whether the ESB would have survived such a collision by modern a modern jet, under all of those conditions. The WTC almost certainly would have survived the B-25 collision. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
