PART 6. FUEL LOAD ANALYSIS.

The previous analysis examined the question of whether it was possible for the plane to have been cremated in the context of the damage to the Pentagon wall. It was shown not to be. But is such a cremation possible anyway, in any situation? The only available source of energy is the plane's fuel.

Jet fuel burns at 800 degrees C. Aluminium, from which a large part of a plane is constructed, melts at 660 degrees C.
http://www.kitco.com/jewelry/meltingpoints.html

During the aluminium recycling process, it is heated to 700 degrees C, and then poured into moulds.
http://203.202.189.6/waste_stop/act_09.htm

So it is possible in theory for burning jet fuel to melt aluminium, although this is not the same as cremating it. Whether it's possible in practice depends upon the ratio of fuel to aluminium and how efficiently it is applied.

One look at the shape of an aircraft tells us that it's a very difficult shape to efficiently apply such energy to. Long and thin one way, crossed at 90 degrees by another section, also long and thin. So if one was to try to melt a 757 by sitting it in a tub of burning jet fuel, the tub would have to be a very specifically designed shape, unless you wanted to waste an awful lot of fuel. No such intelligently designed, controlled and efficient application of fuel can occur in a crash, so even if all of the fuel burned or exploded, only a small proportion of it could have been applied in an efficient manner to the task of melting the plane.

How much fuel was on board? A maximum possible figure can be calculated from the specifications referenced at the beginning of the article. According to the official story, the plane left Dulles, flew about 400 miles to Ohio, and then 300 back to Washington before crashing - about 15.7 % of it's maximum range. So if it had a full tank on departure, then the most fuel it can have had when it crashed was about 85 % of it's maximum capacity. This is 9765 gallons. The maximum take off weight of the plane is 255,00 lbs. Let's assume a rounded figure of 200,000 lbs of aluminium and other materials in this plane. I'll call it 180,000 lbs of aluminium.

This is a guess, but not a completely uneducated one. According to

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~en0daar/Materials.htm

about 80% of the structural material of a plane is aluminium, although it doesn't specify whether this is by weight or volume. If we assume that it refers to weight, then if the plane's weight - minus the fuel load was 200,000 lbs at take off, this gives a figure of 160,000lb of aluminium. The other significant materials are steel and titanium. (See the above link) Since both steel and titanium have higher melting points than aluminium,

http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Ti/heat.html

http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/fe.html

thus increasing the work needing to be done by the burning fuel, a factor which then needs to be offset by such materials as glass and plastic, then assuming the other 40,000 lbs of plane weight to be roughly equivalent to another 20,000 lbs of aluminium in terms of the energy required to melt the plane would appear to give an accurate enough estimation for the analysis which follows.

Such crude approximations are only a problem if the result is marginal, so lets see if it is.

It means that each gallon of fuel, even applied with intelligent efficiency would have to melt about 18.5 lbs of aluminium. Does this sound possible? Assume a 50 % efficiency rate, which would seem extraordinarily generous. The result is the equivalent of half the available fuel being applied with intelligently designed efficiency, and the other half being completely wasted. So the equivalent ratio for the problem is the need for each gallon of fuel being able to melt 37 lbs of aluminium, in a controlled and designed situation.

Let's translate this data into an everyday example. 1 gallon is about the size of the small emergency fuel cans that motorists carry. 1 lb of Aluminium makes about 29 and a half standard soft drink cans.

http://www.westfield-ma.com/tips/aluminium.htm

So 37 lbs of aluminium is about 1090 cans. Can you melt 1090 aluminium cans with a 1 gallon can of kerosene? Let's reduce the alleged cremation of AA 77 to a crude model with a scale about 1 to 10,000. This model is extremely crude, but nowhere as crude as simply saying “The plane burned - end of thought process.” The model doesn't take into account other materials such as glass, plastic, fibreglass, steel, titanium etc. And the scaling is extremely rough. But the only point in exploring this model further would be if it gave any indication that the melting of the aircraft was even remotely possible. Reduce the fuel load to a scale of 1 to 10,000 - about 1 gallon, and then halve it to account for the 50 % efficiency. Reduce the weight of the plane to the same scale - about 18 lbs of aluminium. Reduce total cubic volume of the plane by the same scale, in order to keep the same weight to size ratio- and material to air ratio. This means reducing the dimensions to a scale of about 1 to 22. ( 22 times 22 times 22 = close enough to 10,000 ) The result is a fuselage about 7 ft long, about 6 inches wide and about 7 inches high, with a very thin cross section representing the wings, about 5 ft 6 in long. This structure is made from 18 lbs of aluminium - about 530 compressed aluminium cans. To give an idea of the density, each foot of the fuselage would contain about 70 cans worth of metal. Fill a section in the middle with half a gallon of kerosene and set fire to it, and see if you can melt it. Better still, attach a fuse to a small firecracker placed inside, to give the fuel the best chance of going up in one sudden catastrophic explosion, rather than burning slowly, to see if we can not just melt, but actually cremate the model - reduce it to a pile of dust and ashes. It is of course, impossible.

Lets look at the small scale model from a different angle. 1 gallon is about 12 standard soft drink cans. So we need 12 cans worth of kerosene to melt 530 cans. That's about 44 cans to be melted for each full can of kerosene. Expressed another way, take one standard soft drink can, a screw top lid from a cordial bottle, put two lid fulls of kerosene into the can, drop in a match and see if it melts.
1 gallon of kerosene cannot melt 18 lbs of aluminium even in the most efficiently applied, controlled situation one could devise.

And we're only talking about melting, not cremation. Even if this ridiculous scenario was possible, we should see a big block of something approaching 100 tons of melted aluminium somewhere. This would be a little hard to miss, if it was there.

The US government may be the most powerful on Earth, but if it believes that it has invented legislation that changes or suspends the laws of physics, then it needs a reality check. Things can only happen if there is enough energy to drive the process. All such processes are calculable and predictable. If there was insufficient energy for an alleged event, then it never happened. There wasn't enough energy in the fuel load to melt, let alone cremate the plane, which means that it didn't happen.
Once more, the argument is concluded, but for the sake of hard line sceptics, lets move on to another aspect.

 

PART 7. WERE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS DIFFERENT ON SEPT 11?

 

There are some who like to point to the WTC crashes to make the point that planes can and do explode into nothing in a crash. It is curious that the only examples which can be found of this allegedly explosive cremation of crashing planes just happens to be on Sept 11, 2001. A thorough examination of the history of aviation disasters on any other day shows that this simply doesn’t happen. This will be demonstrated by a library of aviation disaster photos to be presented shortly.

Unless the laws of physics were different on Sept 11 2001, all that the WTC crashes demonstrate is that these planes must have been loaded with explosives, because a tank of kerosene does not have the capability for that kind of explosive force without the input of an extra energy source, nor the total available energy to do the job. Following is a series of photos of planes which crashed into mountains, nosedived into the ground, collided with other aircraft, crashed on take off, crashed into buildings, streets or forests, had bombs planted aboard them, or crashed next to petrol stations. Note the remarkably intact wreckage compared to what happened in the WTC crashes and what is alleged to have happened in to AA 77.
Not all of the crashes are entirely comparable in terms of impact and fuel load, but there are enough different situations here to make the point that total cremation of crashing aircraft, without the input of additional energy other than the fuel load does not and cannot happen.

Here’s a good comparison. An American Airlines Boeing 757 which crashed into a mountain.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w951220.htm

Here’s three more 757 crashes and a 767
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/britannia226/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/transavia.1/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/xiamen8301/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/lauda004/1.shtml

This plane crashed into a field 80 degrees nose down.
http://www.airdisaster.com/photos/yr-lcc/photo.shtml

This DC 10 crashed into a mountain.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w791128.htm

This one crashed right next to a petrol station and still didn’t blow anything up.
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/swa1455/1.shtml

And here’s a whole lot of other crashes This is what real wreckage of real plane crashes looks like.

http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/aa1420/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/korean1533/1.shtml
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w651111.htm
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/hapag-lloyd3378/2.shtml
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w601216.htm
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w551101.htm
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w920928.htm
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w850219.htm
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w820709.htm
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w720618.htm
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w650520.htm
http://www.airdisaster.com/photos/f-ogqs/photo.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/crossair3597/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/aa587exclusive/25.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/vladivostokavia/4.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/sq006/4.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/af-concorde/6.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/allianceairlines7412/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/airphilippines541/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/airfrance.3/1.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/alaska261/2.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/qantas001/3.shtml
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/uni873/2.shtml
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w580206.htm
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/w000419.htm

Wreckage photos of the plane which crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945 are unclear, but here is a description of the wreckage.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/misc/blempirecrash.htm

[[Some debris from the crash fell to the streets below, sending pedestrians scurrying for cover, but most fell onto the buildings setbacks at the fifth floor. Still, a bulk of wreckage remained stuck in the side of the building. After the flames were extinguished and the remains of the victims removed, the rest of the wreckage was removed through the building.]]

Here's the wreckage of the Cessna which crashed into a building in Tampa in Jan 2002.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/01/06/tampa.crash/

That should be enough to make the point. But in case you want to see more, these sites - from which the above photos were sourced,

http://www.airsafetyonline.com/photos/
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/
http://www.airdisaster.com/photos/

have photos of hundreds more crashes which I haven’t linked to individually. In the first list, they are listed from top to bottom by date. One famous date is conspicuous by it’s absence. Sept 11, 2001. There were 4 plane crashes that day. But none of them left any wreckage. What it means is that the WTC crash planes and whatever hit the Pentagon were destroyed with powerful explosives. Information about UAL 93 has been so scarce that its hard to comment. ( Why the secrecy ? )The preceding photos demonstrate that the WTC crashes were unique in aviation history. It’s already been demonstrated that a full tank of jet fuel doesn’t have the available energy to do the job.

The analysis below demonstrates from a different perspective why crashed planes do not explode in massively destructive fireballs. Kerosene (jet fuel) is not a volatile enough material. But what would happen, just supposing we could get a fuel tank to blow up? Although jet fuel is not a particularly explosive substance, it is possible to get it to explode in some situations.

Because it so rarely happens, we are forced to examine a different kind of air disaster - TWA 800, which blew up in mid air, shortly after take off. The official story is that it was caused by an exploding fuel tank. Sceptics say that it was hit by a missile. Regardless of which it was, there was plenty of wreckage. The following analysis of arguments relating to TWA 800, demonstrate that both sides of the argument act to debunk the official story of AA 77. If it was hit by a missile, then it demonstrates that even an impact of this ferocity still doesn’t reduce a plane to dust and ashes, and doesn’t set off a catastrophic fuel tank inferno capable of cremating a plane. If the official story is true, then the arguments put forward to support it (several years before AA 77) act as inadvertent rebuttals to the official AA 77 story.

In this article on TWA 800,
Petroleum engineering research offers clue to TWA 800 explosion by David S Salisbury,
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/july30/twa800.html

he discusses a theory put forward by Stanford University Professor Sullivan S. Marsden about why TWA 800 exploded. Professor Sullivan has had to propose a very complex set of circumstances to try to explain how such a unique event as the alleged explosion of a fuel tank could have occurred.

Salisbury writes

[[Jet fuel normally is not explosive at temperatures below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But on TWA 800 the air-conditioner heat exchangers probably warmed the air/fuel mixture in the tank above that point. When the aircraft is flying, the energy given off by the heat exchangers is effectively dissipated to the outside air. But when the air conditioners are run while the aircraft is on the ground and the tank is nearly empty, the heat exchangers put out enough heat to raise the temperature of the air/fuel mixture into the danger zone, Marsden says. ]]

In other words, it’s impossible to blow up a full tank of fuel, without input of extra energy, because the air /fuel mixture isn’t right, and the presence of the full fuel load cools it to below explosive temperature. Even a full fuel tank falls ridiculously short of the energy required to even melt a plane, let alone cremate it, and this theory is saying that the only real risk of an explosion is with a near empty tank. Which is why TWA didn’t get blown into nothing . And why it simply can’t happen, even when planes have bombs planted aboard or are shot down.

TWA 800 was a 747. Marsden’s theory cited very specific concerns with the fuel delivery systems of 747s. Whether or not his ideas on TWA 800 are plausible, what it demonstrates is that aviation experts, even when concocting cover stories for the government, if this is what Marsden was doing, do not accept that aircraft simply explode and are cremated as a matter of course. It’s a very complex argument to try to explain how a fuel tank might have exploded. Or at least, that was the official view before Sept 11, 2001

Sceptics claim that even Marsden’s theory is ludicrously overestimating the explosive capabilities of jet fuel. From this Washington post article.
http://members.aol.com/bardonia/washtime.htm

[[September 27, 1997
William S. Donaldson says the "misted fuel" in the airliner's center wing tank wasn't hot
enough to explode and that only a blast outside the plane could have set off the chain of events.
Legislator Probes TWA 800 counter theory
Congress has quietly begun probing a retired Navy officer's claim that jet fuel in TWA flight 800's center wing tank was too cold to explode without being first shaken into a volatile mist. William S. Donaldson's assertion challenges virtually every remaining theory of the NTSB in its search for the cause of the July 17 .... crash. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., Ohio Democrat, who has been probing the issue virtually alone, was asked by aviation subcommittee Chairman John J. Duncan Jr., Tennessee Republican to "investigate all the circumstances" and report back. Mr. Duncan ordered staff help for Mr. Traficant, whose staff has consulted with Mr. Donaldson. "You could basically sit in that tank with a lit cigarette and snuff the cigarette out in the fuel and it won't explode," said Paul Marcone, Mr.. Traficant's top aide. "Your agency has been depicting the volatility of the fuel as if it were nitrobenzene," the former navy jet pilot said in a combative letter to NTSB Chairman James E. Hall, accusing him of covering up important facts and basing his judgments on fuel-temperature testing done on the ground in a desert. he said the fuel never reached the danger point of 127 degrees Fahrenheit and believes only an explosion outside the plane could have set off the chain of events.]]

 CONTINUE