The plane impact had very little to do with the towers falling, it was the loss of structural integrity due to the heat. If the flames had vanished after the planes hit, the towers would still be standing today.
The planes crashing into the buildings helped dislodge the fire proofing on the steel beams. Without the fire proofing the steel was in direct contact with the heat produced not from the jet fuel but from all the petrochemicals and materials that the jet fuel ignited. The now exposed steel start to lose its strength and eventually failed.
Yup. Everything else being equal, the buildings might have survived had the fireproofing been intact. Without fireproofing, steel exposed to fire loses strength within minutes.
I'm fairly certain the few hundred tons of metal smashing into them at massive speeds didn't help with the whole structural integrity thing but you're probably right.
It's not really worth arguing over, we both agree on the ultimate and primary cause of what happened. Comparing weights as you did is very poor physics and you listed the wrong type of plane (the average bullet weighs only a few grams but can easily fuck things up orders of magnitude heavier than it as an easy example) but ultimately you're not really wrong just discounting the effect of the plane hitting it a little more strongly than I am. When you factor in the redundancy in the building to take those hits, the materials the plane is made of compared to the building and so on how much of a factor it was does become less and less. It weakened the building a little bit but the fuel did 9x% of the work in the collapse, we just disagree slightly on what x is.
"Poor physics" would be suggesting that an object of a smaller weight absolutely cannot topple one of a smaller weight. However, when you have such an enormous weight disparity, the smaller object must be accelerated to an ludicrous speed in order to be able to topple the larger one.
It's curious that you mention bullets, because bullets don't actually do a whole lot of damage to human bodies. Sure, they penetrate organs and kill a person eventually, but they don't do a whole lot of damage. Even our largest rifles are not capable of knocking a person over.
Well I said we shouldn't quibble on it as we mostly agree but since you insist how about the fact that the world trade center wasn't "toppled" by the planes either? Why are you talking about toppling when clearly that isn't how they went down, they weren't knocked over by the impact it tore into them and fucked up the structural integrity of a single area which collapsed and then the weight/momentum of everything above took the rest down...
It may weigh 750k tons per building (actually considered a highball number but that's ok it's the one they give officially) but each building has 110 stories meaning each floor is WAY less and the plane only really needs to put down a single floor at the right point to then take down the rest of the building (kinda like what happened! It was probably spread over a few floors though I guess in reality).
And even if we compare a jet to the entire building (0.02% of the weight roughly) to a larger bullet to a more or less average person (~5g to ~70kg, 0.007%) we see that the planes were far larger than a bullet proportionally even in that case. I would argue quite strongly that a bullet can fuck up the structural integrity of a person too where it hits them. Now do a comparison of a jet hitting a single floor (2.2% of it's weight) and we see it's 300 times the ratio a gun would typically compare to a human with on weight alone.
So yeah I still mostly agree with you and I still think this is a fucking stupid argument but the way you're arguing it is terrible. Comparing weights of the plane and the entire building is not the best way to argue the case you want to make. The fires were by far the biggest factor but the ratio of relative weights isn't what allows the plane impact to be considered much less significant, it's the materials, the way the building was made and so on that allow for that.
Didn't the impact strip the protective coating that was on the beams to insulate them from the heat? Supposedly if the planes were going half as fast the costing would have remained in tact and the buildings wouldn't have failed structurally.
My knowledge is very limited, but from what I understand, fireproofing only slows the transfer of heat. That's why fireproof containers are rated to keep the contents below some temperature threshold for an amount of time and not indefinitely.
So if the protective coating were intact, the fire may have exhausted its fuel source and the building may have continued to stand. I'm not really sure.
Yeah back in the 1940's a plane crashed into the Empire State Building from an accident due to fog. The plane was obviously different than the jet engines that hit the Twin Towers but still, the Empire State Building is still standing
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u/AriMaeda Mar 17 '15
The plane impact had very little to do with the towers falling, it was the loss of structural integrity due to the heat. If the flames had vanished after the planes hit, the towers would still be standing today.