Lear:
Can I venture a guess on lat-long equivalency? I'd guess they are equal at the equator but long lines get cloeser together near the poles while lat
lines remain parallel so the further north or south you go the more difference there is.
If I'm wrong no loss, just wondering.
Good points Justin D!
Originally posted by justin-d
I confess that I've only made it through about 14 pages of this thread so far, but concerning the misalignment of the NTSB animation and the heading
of the aircraft, has it been considered, possibly, that :
- perhaps the NTSB simulation/recreation software which interprets the data does not link directly with satellite map data? Does anyone know this for
sure?
- assuming the former, then to get the photo of the pentagon into the animation (for dramatic effect or point-of-reference), someone would have had to
have added it in ex-post-facto
- the recreation is plotted in a virtual 3D space, to put the pentagon in there, someone simply had to cut out a chunk of a satellite map and plop it
into the rendering software giving it a set of coordinates to put in in the right place
- the virtual 3D space is entirely referenced to magnetic north, as it should be and as all aviation is done. Maps, however, are generally referenced
to proper north. If someone simply took the pentagon map and dropped it into the rendering software, assuming north was north, then the pentagon
image would be the thing that is not in the right place, with its northward facing vector aimed at magnetic north and not map-north, thus giving it an
anticlockwise rotation of 10 degrees in the map space and putting the approach vector of FL77 on the north side of the citgo station
The rest of the ground is not filled in with reference details, but it does have geo plots along it - I''m not sure if anyone has mapped these out
to see if the final map is off from these or not. John Farmer (spcengineer) would be a likely guy is anyone to have looked at this.
As for effect, well it made Pandora's Black Box, and even tho there's supposed to be no direct relation (??) it helped set the stage for the
PentaCon. So it's raised a lot of questions.
As for reason, now that I'm fairly sure this is an NTSB error or "error:"
This could be the honest mistake that was made by the NTSB - the data and the animation do match, but just the decorative addition of the pentagon
could have been the thing that was put in the wrong place. Then everything is exactly as it should be, or at least exactly as we're meant to
believe. It doesn't settle the altitude or approach-pitch problem nor does it address the issue of the police witnesses seeing the plane on the
other side of the station, but at least it leaves the csv and the animation self-consistent.
This seems a likely explanation. If no one else has figured it out for me, I'll checkinto it sometime and see how that map lines up. Hopefully I'll
have the disc fairly soon.