Since you knew nothing about the temperatures involved, you are a poor one to carp about them. Who says efficiency is necessary? There is an 800 F margin between the two numbers. The stuff that burns will burn at the flame temperature. Even Diesel engines and gas turbines will produce soot, and they are supposedly optimized for high efficiency. You certainly can't substantiate your claim.
No squibs necessary. The video I watched of WTC7 showed a steady, undisturbed collapse with no shocks or expulsions of blast. Noise? You must be kidding. A building collapses and there would be no noise? Serious structural failures would make loud sounds. People are conditioned by bad movies to associate loud sounds with "explosions," when they be nothing of the kind.
At least I don't insult people. I have no idea what Dunning-Kruger has to do with me, nor do I think you know.
Here is a link to the Pentagon security camera 2 footage, which goes really fast. The airplane forward fuselage is visible at 0:24 seconds. The fireball is visible at 0.25 seconds. I recall viewing a version posted on this site that had slightly better time division (maybe every half second) and allowed a brief glimpse of the entire fuselage, enough to see the American Airlines livery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_77#Security_camera_videos
Here is also an article that debunks the claim that no wreckage was reported. The reporter who supposedly made the report is the debunker. https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-911-pentagon-attack-footage-415983695442
I notice you have no refutation of my statements about cruise missiles.
Perhaps I am simply ignorant, but I am actually surprised that there are so many newspapers in the state of Maine. (I am thinking these are dailies, not weeklies.)
I agree. This video proves nothing. If it was Biden, the guards were merely outside of camera range when nobody else was around (though maybe poor procedure---which argues that it was not Biden). If it was not Biden, I didn't hear him claiming to be Biden or pretending to be Biden. It could have been just another dude with white hair. He sure seemed to walk with more balance and control than Biden.
Also, when and where was this supposed to have taken place. Too many videos without provenance.
First, the altitude was above sea level, so it is not clear what it was in relation to terrain. But the odds are good that it was in what we call the "ground clutter" for any ground-based radar (half a mile up at 10 miles distance would be an elevation above terrain of about 3 degrees, farther being less), so it would not have appeared on any surveillance system. Can't see it for the nearby trees or buildings.
Second, it was performing hover flight maneuvers (as they declared). I expect this was a training exercise or possibly an equipment check.
-
No plane. So what. That was never a point.
-
No airplane fuel. So what. That was never a point.
-
Everything that was not steel or aluminum or glass was potentially combustible, including flooring, ceiling materials, wall, partitions, doors, as well as office furniture. The history of other fires does not disprove the existence of this one. There is always a first time for everything. The fire took a while to generate, and if it is confined, the temperatures can get very high.
-
As mentioned as simple fact, the burning of carbonaceous materials (wood, etc.) results in temperatures higher than the melting point of steel (wood @ 3596 F, iron @ 2800 F). The collapse would compress the air in the floor spaces and eject any molten materials by aspiration.
-
Nobody describes what is actually found. There would have to be aluminum oxide present. The fact that it is not mentioned is a "tell" for me that the people making the claim do not understand the chemistry of thermite. The presence of iron micro-spheres would only be evidence for the existence of molten steel, which would be resulting from the high temperature. Also, structural failure by compressive shear results in flaking of the steel from the shear surface.
-
Free fall. Nothing mysterious here. You have a building whose weight is supported by structural columns, based on design levels of compressive stress and safety margins of strength. A fire originates within the building, turning it into a furnace within. The strength of the steel columns will steadily drop with the increasing temperature until the strength at a given floor (it doesn't matter which one) will reach zero margin...and some column will fail in shear, which is essentially instantaneous. The compressive load will be redistributed among all the remaining columns at the speed of sound in the hot steel, taking maybe a millisecond, and then another column (or columns) would fail in shear, leading to a chain reaction that would take maybe a tenth of a second to accomplish across all the columns. And then the supported mass would descend at free fall. As it collides with floors beneath, the whole overload chain reaction would occur again in another tiny fraction of a second. Until it reaches bottom, at which time the now-unsupported walls would collapse inward. The tiny delays for the chain reaction would not be noticeable in an analysis that wouldn't have the timing resolution to notice a difference.
-
No squibs. Just the compression of air in the collapsing floors and its exhaust through perforations in the building walls. Blowing out dust and smoke. What else would you expect? You have to understand what is going on, in order to understand what you are seeing.
How do you think we get molten steel in the first place? Burning carbonaceous fuels (e.g., coke in blast furnaces). The flame temperature is much higher than the melting point. We burn kerosene in gas turbine engines all the time and it is impossible to make the engines from steel, as it would not withstand the combustion temperature. I don't regard this as a mystery at all, and if you think it is, you are not listening to the relevant facts.
A pile that burned for weeks? What's mysterious about that? You are aware that there are coal mines that have been burning for 60 years? Smoldering piles of wreckage are not uncommon.
I did take a peek, but the conclusive videos at the opening page were nothing of the sort. And the quotations from the principals was an immediate flag of prejudice animating their approach.
Where was the debris field found? In the middle of a parking lot, or in the forest beyond the suburbs? If the airplane ran out of fuel, there would be no smoke. If it was capable of stable flight, it would not be "erratic." Why do you think it is so unlikely that it ran out of fuel? Do you know how much fuel it was loaded with, and how much it had already burned off? If it was in hover mode, it wouldn't have traveled very far before running out of fuel (or the front fan failed). If the pilot wasn't on board, it wouldn't have been in afterburner. You are really operating on the basis of a fancy, not facts.
I shudder at these things. Happy landings!
And it is bunk. I happen to be quite familiar with the dimensions of the AGM-86 cruise missile (having walked many times past inert bodies in a transportation corridor in a building on plant) and if it had been one, it wouldn't have been visible in that video. The fuselage is only 2 feet in diameter. That was a cherry-picked poor video with no resolution. There is a better one that shows the 757 fuselage in profile with the distinctive American Airlines livery. Nor do such missiles follow a trajectory so close to the ground. And if such a missile had clipped a streetlight (witnessed, verified), it would have ripped off the wing and the missile would have gone out of control.
All this shows me is that you are very easily gulled by people who are not qualified to make such identifications, nor are you expert enough to know what you are seeing. You are convinced only because it panders to your desire for bias confirmation. I haven't been fooled for many years. You have been fooled for maybe 20 years.
I'm not saying everyone was totally on the up and up. Problems of that sort in the 1980s (cross-charging between Space Shuttle and B-1B contracts) gave rise to increased financial scrutiny in the defense industry. Don't assume that it all goes without notice or correction nowadays. Congress has never been happy with such costs, but they want the products.
Just look up the program cost and realize that the vendor amortizes that cost across the production run. Lots of complicated software (not cheap to develop), sophisticated sensors (not cheap to develop), powerful and efficient engines (not cheap to develop), and lightweight, stealthy airframes (not cheap to develop).
Just as a comparison, the Eurofighter Typhoon, a less advanced aircraft, cost a total of 37 billion GP pounds for 250 aircraft, which amortizes out to $182 million each. These are not tricycles or even cell phones.
Who says the transponder was switched on? Or that it wasn't disabled by the system faults that came up? The down side of modern system design is that all electromechanical functions are mediated by software.
Actually, the original Barrett model 82A1 is semi-automatic.
A typical reason that an unguided aircraft flies into the ground is that it runs out of fuel. You seem to think that the crash happened in view of anyone.
They cost what they are quoted to cost. You may say that's too much, and it would probably be true, but that is what they cost regardless. It is tough to meet requirements. Especially when the customer wants to change them partway through the program. And also especially when the vendor didn't have a complete grasp of their problems. (Lots of time and expense went into perfecting the clutch for the vertical fan on the -B model.) My perspective? I only worked for the military side of the Boeing Company for 40 years.
Sauce? I don't for a minute believe that any "reporters" were able to access the physical scene initially. Nothing "magical" about identification of airplane components that had been mixed in with the building destruction. Did you expect them to pop out all on their own? And how would any be identified as "not even belonging to the airframe" when passenger accommodations (for example) are not matched to the airframe serial number?
Same question for the Pennsylvania crash. What "whistleblowers"? And how are they verified? Frankly, conspiracy zealots are not above perpetrating a hoax (e.g., chemtrails). Interesting how much factual information they have to deny and push under the rug. Where did the airplane go? What happened to all the passengers? And the passenger attack on the killer pilots was all part of the conspiracy to cause a seeming crash? These questions are more serious than any puzzlement over the crash, and any alternative "theory" must have answers for them. Or it's all just a brain fart.
Very good account. The only thing I might add is that the F-35 undoubtedly has some protection against (or resistance to) warhead fragments from air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles. Modern composite structure has much in common with Kevlar construction.
Radar stealth is essentially a passive affair, established by the shaping of the fuselage and wings, and by special absorptive coatings. Active systems light you up, but may be necessary to dodge an air-to-air missile by using ECM. Transponders make the airplane "visible" to the transponder tracking system, which is not a radar.
It's actually a bit worse. Cars have to worry about 3D (x and y...and time) in order to anticipate future position. Planes have to worry about 4D, accordingly. If it sounds more complex, it is.
What "I think" is that AI is not to be trusted, which I presume was hinted at in my closing sentence. It is not a "youthful dream" of mine at all.
What "thermal expansion" theory? What I have read is that the center of the building collapsed from weakening of the structural members (loss of strength with temperature). It may well be that the heating distorted the structural frame and created stresses that accelerated the process. Upon collapse of the center, the exterior walls followed suit. This is so unremarkable that I wonder how you can avoid it.
It had building materials. No building is all steel and glass. Desks, chairs, carpets, paper, etc., are all carbonaceous (carbon-containing) fuels---which is why I did not say "hydrocarbons.". You don't have to get close to the melting point before structural steel loses nearly all its strength.
You don't sound like the kind of guy who should be shopping for warplanes. They are expensive for a lot of reasons, and you can't expect to get high performance without a price tag. (A Bugatti Veyron costs $1.9 million on the hoof.) The technology (of which there are many involved) is not "useless." We simply don't know what the cause of the accident was. Time to be patient and not hyperventilate.