Keef,

It appears from your questions that you are really unwilling to consider any evidence other than your own opinion. You described the planes that hit the towers as "relatively fragile alloy airframe." The 767 weighs approximately 300,000 pounds fully loaded. That is 150 TONS. Accelerate that mass to 500 mph (give or take of few) and the resulting energy is immense. Yet, the buildings stood after each impact because of their design. The strenth of the buildings was their EXTERIOR not their interior. You seem to think that the strength of the building was interior vertical steel supports. That is absolutely wrong. The usual design of massive vertical supports was replaced by having the exterior walls provide the main vertical support. This saved valuable interior floor space and made the buildings more profitable. The fatal weakness of their design, and ultimately the construction, was that once the exterior had been breached there was no primary interior vertical support system. The horizontal steel girders that gave the buildings their stability and supported the floors became pliable in the inferno that came from tons of burning jet fuel. As the girders buckled and the floors collapsed they had no where to go but straight down. The exterior walls maintained their design strength and contained the collapse in a verticle "tube". Thus, the buildings fell in their own footprint.

Even the core of the building was not built with your "reinforced concrete." The elevator and stairwells were not protected by such concrete, as it was deemed to be too heavy. Therefore the stairwells were simply "protected" by drywall and in the blast of the "relatively fragile alloy airframe" as you put it the walls were shattered, making escape impossible for those above the points of impact. If the core of the building was as strong as you suggest, with the "reinforced concrete" and steel girders then the stairwells would have remained open for those above to escape. You can't have it both ways - either the interior was a mass of steel and reinforced concrete providing protection from a light and fragile airframe, or it was not. The evidence is that the interior was not protected, and the mass that struck the towers could not be described as "fragile."

You reject explanations given in "Popular Mechanics." I have seen documentaries on three separate tv productions (one cable, two on PBS) and the explanation was virtually identical. My guess is you would reject those explanations as well because you are mesmerized by your "construction photographs". Just exactly what evidence do you demand? Your "construction photographs" are really meaningless if you dismiss the physical force of 150 tons of aircraft striking the buildings creating unbelievable internal damage and also creating the ultimate destructive power of the inferno.


Freightdawg