Actually, the cause of the crash WAS mechanical failure. I've seen a few other planes that lost their vertical fin due to wind effects. That's basically what wake turbulence is. There was a B-52 in California that went low level in the mountains, and caught got in a wind blast that hit it from the side, and snapped of all but about 3 or 4 feet of the leading edge of the vertical fin, which is the only reason they landed.

There were previous reports that this pilot was a lot heavier on the rudder than he needed to be in light turbulence conditions. This puts a lot more stress on the tail. If there was any kind of fatigue condition, or a crack that they had missed, then this, combined with the wake turbulence put more horizontal stress on the tail than it could withstand and it sheared.

WHY... WHY ....

did I have to read this thread.... April 20th I'll be flying home from L.A. in an Airbus A319 jet.

argghhh... darn computer..

sorry double post

[edit on 2-4-2007 by elevatedone]

I think you're pretty safe elevated. I haven't heard of anything happening to a vertical fin or rudder on an Airbus in several years. There was a spate of them right around this time, but it appears that they fixed the problem and it hasn't happened since.

Originally posted by esdad71
I am talking about the NTSB toll booth video? Go jack another thread.

It is clearly doctored.

Once the tail comes off (in what appears to be an explosion, because you have electrical and hydraulic connections back there), you're going to have fire and possibly even an explosion due to the fact that hydraulic fluid burns. The one and only engine fire my father ever saw on a plane in flight was due to a hydraulic pump failing and spraying fluid in the engine. But once the tail is gone, you lose all lateral control and you start putting stresses on the engines that they aren't designed for, and they're going to come off as well (which is reported to have happened here too), and you're going to have MORE fire from that.

As for the F-15s doing drills, you will NEVER have a live fire drill within even SIGHT of an airport, let alone where you might accidentally hit an airliner. If there's a live fire drill going on, it's in military controlled airspace, and a NOTAM is put out for pilots. They block off a section of airspace generally 50-100 miles across, and do the shooting somewhere near the middle, so the missile won't have enough range to travel out of the box.

The CVR also didn't pick up the sound of explosions or other effects of a bomb going off, right up until it failed. If there was a bomb or an explosion onboard then I'd expect the CVR to have heard it, or at least some of the effects of it. Or the pilots to have gotten on the radio and said "There's been an explosion!" or "We just had a bomb go off!" and not "We're stuck in something here!"

[edit on 4/2/2007 by Zaphod58]

Originally posted by esdad71
That video was not mechanical failure, and I find it funny that you talk in a condescending manner about the Hollywood explosives when you think nanothermite was used on 9/11.

Uh, nanothermite isn't Hollywood. It's military. Los Alamos, even. I don't know what cynic you've been reading but you've picked up the wrong impression about it being Hollywood.

Have you looked up what high explosives do? I don't care what you believe man, but you aren't going to convince me that a heel's worth of any high explosive is going to cause an explosion visible from that far away.

Why believe the NTSB and not NIST or FEMA?

If you're talking to me, I just said I don't trust them, and I'll never take any federal agency's word and leave it at that. The NTSB actually released important 9/11 flight data that directly contradicted other sourcesm like NIST and LDEO. So there's good reason to believe that they could be very wrong, if not lying outright.

I believe in nanothermite, and nanotechnology. I jsut do not believe that it applies here. Sorry I did not clarify that.

This shows that a shoe bomb or another small explosive could destroy a plane. Look at the NTSB video. It shows it all. that is no rudder failure....

The copilot was in command of the plane, and had been reprimanded SEVERAL times for excessive rudder force on other planes. The rudder on this type of plane was known to not provide feedback to the pedals like other rudders, and the conditions the plane was in made it quite easy to put way too much pressure on the rudder.

But you're right, it wasn't rudder failure. If it was rudder failure then just the rudder would have come off. There was an Air Transat operated Airbus that had rudder failure, and ONLY the rudder came off. This was vertical fin failure caused by excessive side force FROM the rudder.

The Airbus rudder system in this plane, the faster the plane is flying, the less you have to press the rudder pedal to get the same response. It was easy for pilots to push the pedal too far thinking that they had to use a lot of rudder to get the response they wanted, because in other planes you DID have to. That's exactly what happened here, as shown in the FDR and CVR.