Quote:
|
Originally Posted by JayUtah
Amost any structure is more vulnerable to lateral loads than to downward loads. This is why we generally slam wrecking balls into the sides of buildings to knock them down. I have no way of knowing whether the pilot of the airplane followed that line of reasoning while aiming his airplane, but I find the notion that a more vertical approach "must" have been considered more potentially damaging fairly absurd from a structural engineering point of view.
|
This was obviously a hot topic for discussion at work right after it happened. Where I worked at the time, I saw a lot of people over the span of the week, and always the same people. We would talk about things and speculate. Based on what little I knew and thought I knew about this, I had two ideas to maximize damage from crashing a jet in to the Pentagon. The first was approach on about a 30 to 45 degree angle and hit the top of a wedge section spreading out the debris along the rings of the building rather than go into the side.
The other was to try to hit the inside ring by attacking from the opening in the middle. The thinking here was that building was more reanforced along the outer edge, and that firefighting efforts would be more difficult since access was much more limited.
Someone did suggest straight down, but I think we decided that on a building that low, there wouldn't be a lot of penetration like there would with a taller one. I have no idea and make no claims about how effective either of those might have been, they were just the thought at the time.