Where did all of Flight 93's fuel go?

[bushatbooker]

It just dawned on me that there was never a big fire at the Shanksville scene. Early photos show almost no fire going on, just tiny amounts of grey and white smoke smoldering in these early photos (ones with no hazmat guys in white/yellow jumpsuits). There is only ONE small fire truck there that's not doing much and no foam fire trucks are there spraying the area...








And only a small section of forest was singed...




Flight 93 was http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/22/911.flight.93/">fully fueled and said to have crashed still http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56110-2002May8¬Found=true">heavily laden with jet fuel. I'd estimate that is had at least 6,500 gallons of fuel at impact.

Where did all of its fuel go?


Compare the Shanksville scene to another plane crash...

[Bolo Boffin]

1. There's something about plowing down into the ground that

just smothers fire.



Not a lot of fire here either. Big plane, lots of fuel. Yes, that's water. Earth works just as well to deny a fire oxygen.

[bushatbooker]

2. so

you are saying most of the fuel plunged underground with the rest of the plane?

What percentage would you say, 80, 90?

[Ezlivin]

6. That's the Everglades crash

So it's mostly swampy land; not much solid earth.

"Former NTSB member Vernon Grose said the search would probably continue to be difficult because the water was four to five feet deep in the area where the plane crashed. He also said that larger pieces of the aircraft could be buried in the muck." (http://www.cnn.com/US/9605/11/plane.crash/8p/)

Two witnesses fishing from a boat in the Everglades when flight 592 crashed stated that they saw a low-flying airplane in a steep right bank. According to these witnesses, as the right bank angle increased, the nose of the airplane dropped and continued downward. The airplane struck the ground in a nearly vertical attitude. The witnesses described a great explosion, vibration, and a huge cloud of water and smoke. One of them observed, “the landing gear was up, all the airplane’s parts appeared to be intact, and that aside from the engine smoke, no signs of fire were visible.”

Two other witnesses who were sightseeing in a private airplane in the area at the time of the accident provided similar accounts of the accident. These two witnesses and the witnesses in the boat, who approached the accident site, described seeing only part of an engine, paper, and other debris scattered around the impact area. One of the witnesses remarked that the airplane seemed to have disappeared upon crashing into the Everglades." (http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/1997/aar9706.pdf)

And note what they found about the passenger's bodies:

A medical examiner has identified remains from eight victims of the ValuJet Flight 592 crash, according to the coroner, while a Miami television station has reported a new theory on the cause of the crash that killed them.

Officials estimated they've recovered about 20 percent of the remains of the 110 people who were on board the DC-9 that crashed May 11 in the Florida Everglades.

There were no intact bodies found, they said. The eight victims were identified through tattoos, fingerprints, jewelry and dental records. (http://www.cnn.com/US/9605/25/valujet/index.html)

Also in the same article:

Thursday, workers gathered 200 pieces of the aircraft and transported them from the Everglades to a hangar at the Tamiami Airport, where they are assembling a three-dimensional reconstruction of the forward cargo area of the DC-9. This area is where oxygen canisters, which may have contributed to the crash, were stored.

An eyewitness on the recovery scene had these comments:

Maybe it was because of my obvious lack of deadline that the investigators made an exception in my case. They slipped me into the front seat of a Florida Game and Fish helicopter whose pilot, in a fraternal gesture, invited me to take the controls for the run out to the crash site. From the staging area we skimmed north across the swamped grasslands, loosely following the levee road, before swinging wide to circle over the impact zone -- a new pond defined by a ring of turned mud and surrounded by a larger area of grass and water and accident debris. Searchers in white protective suits waded side by side through the muck, piling pieces of people and airplane into flat-bottomed boats. It was hot and unpleasant work performed in a contained little hell, a place that one investigator later described to me as reeking of fuel, earth, and rotting flesh -- the special smell of an airplane accident. We descended onto the levee, about 300 yards away from the crash site, where an American flag and a few tents and trucks constituted the recovery base.

It was, of course, a somber place to be. Human remains lay bagged in a refrigerated truck for later transport to the morgue. A decontamination crew washed down torn and twisted pieces of airplane, none longer than several feet. Investigators tagged the most promising wreckage, to be trucked immediately to a hangar at an outlying Miami airport, where specialists could study it. Farther down the levee I came upon a soiled photograph of a young woman with a small-town face and a head of teased hair. A white-suited crew arrived on an airboat and clambered up the embankment to be washed down. Another crew set off. A boatload of muddy wreckage arrived. The next day the families of the dead came on buses, and laid flowers and cried. Pieces of the airplane kept being hauled up for nearly another month.

Much was made of this recovery, which -- prior to the offshore retrieval of TWA's Flight 800 -- the NTSB called the most challenging in its history. It is true that the swamp made the search slow and difficult, and that the violence of the impact meant that meticulous work was required to reconstruct the critical forward cargo hold. However, it is also true that the physical part of the investigation served to confirm what a look at a shipping ticket had already suggested -- that ValuJet Flight 592 burned and crashed not because the airplane failed but, in large part, because the airline did. (Source

So this aircraft impacted the ground in a similar fashion to Flight 93, except in this crash (remember it was into water four to five feet deep), they found "20 percent of the remains" and, at the time of the article, "200 pieces of the aircraft" enabling them to do a partial reconstruction.

Contrast how the NTSB operated and the statements made about the condition of the aircraft and the remains they found with what they said and what was witnessed at Shanksville.

[bushatbooker]

13. So does it say how many people they identified?

[Andre II]

16. Thanks, ezlivin,

for clearing that up!
:toast:

[LARED]

3. Look at the trees near the impact site

[bushatbooker]

4. Ok?

Now what?

[LARED]

7. That would indicate

there was a big fire at the Shanksville scene

[bushatbooker]

11. No

that would indicate a small section of forest got singed. A few small fireballs could have flung over there (along with the human remains) and set a couple of trees on fire which could have spread to the rest.

[Andre II]

15. LARED

Do you have any witness that saw a fire or smelled burnt jet fuel on September 11?
Why is the grass around the crater not burnt?

[petgoat]

5. The book "True Lies" by the GNN TV bunch has a chapter

about their independent trip to Shanksville.

If memory serves, they reported that there was no fuel in the
groundwater at the flight 93 site.

If the plane was holed in the air (and the six-mile debris field
suggests that it was), perhaps the fuel was dispersed before
the plane hit the ground.

[mirandapriestly]

8. Yes, I remember reading

that tests conducted showed there was no fuel found in, I thought, soil, but it must have been groundwater. I was looking for articles, then I saw your post. This article tries to obfuscate the significance of it by talking about the "crash" site as a burial ground, etc...

http://html.thepittsburghchannel.com/pit/news/stories/news-100064120011002-151006.html
""Three groundwater monitoring wells show no evidence of groundwater contamination and nearly 6,000 cubic yards of dirt sifted for human remains and aircraft debris will soon be returned to the crater left Sept. 11 by United Airlines Flight 93.
...
Betsy Mallison, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said that investigators still don't know how much jet fuel was spilled at the crash site. But whether it burned away or evaporated, much of it seems to have dissipated, Mallison said.

...""

[petgoat]

9. Could be I got soil and groundwater mixed up. It was a while

ago that I read "True Lies" in the bookstore.

[mirandapriestly]

10. no you're right groundwater.eom

[bushatbooker]

12. lol, get this part...

Betsy Mallison, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said that investigators still don't know how much jet fuel was spilled at the crash site. But whether it burned away or evaporated, much of it seems to have dissipated, Mallison said.

How did most of it "dissipated" if most of it was perserved underground?

[mirandapriestly]

25. It just goes into the memory hole with everything else!

Fuel, unexplained explosions, living suicide hijackers, cans that say "Pepper Spray" in luggage, it's all in the memory hole.

[bushatbooker]

14. So did most of the fuel go underground , or burn outside?

I'm getting conflicting answers from the "Osama did it" crowd.

[bushatbooker]

17. Well, did the fuel go underground, or not?

The "Arabs did it" crowd is awfully silent about this little anomaly!

[bushatbooker]

18. I think I just found the smoking gun for Shanksville crash!

The missing 7,000+ gallons of jet fuel!

[salvorhardin]

19. You know...

It's kind of creepy when you talk to yourself.

[bushatbooker]

20. You know what's creepier?

When someone can't explain to me were 7,000+ gallons of fuel went.

[salvorhardin]

21. Just a suggestion

You could try to go out and research the answer yourself. University and college libraries are a good start.

And no... talking to yourself is still way creepier than your not being able to understand how jet fuel can burn or dissipate in an explosion.

[bushatbooker]

22. I have, reports say the soil wasn't contaminated, but

it's clear no huge jet fuel fire existed at the crash spot.

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking there was a conspiracy at Shanksville!

[bushatbooker]

23. Missing fuel alert!

Where did it all go?

:shrug:

[bushatbooker]

24. Still no answers

guess this smoking gun is a little too hot for everybody.

[mirandapriestly]

26. Here is what a real crash looks like, btw

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060822/ap_on_re_eu/russia_plane

They aren't going to blame it on "Chechen" terrorists" this time (their political scapegoats) I guess.
Wow are there usually actual plane parts in plane crashes?

[TheWraith]

27. Actually, those photos prove there was quite a bit of a fire...

That area of forest that was burned appears to be at least 100 feet wide, maybe more, and just as deep. It takes a lot of heat to burn green trees, particularly down to the ground as in the center of that burned are. Add to that the fire in the field (as evidenced by the smoking debris), and that's a considerable amount of fuel. As for the rest, it's possible that Flight 93 clipped the ground or the treeline just as it came down, or landed on its nose, either way causing it to begin disintegrating and explode while most of the plane was still above the ground. That would account for the size of the debris field.

[bushatbooker]

28. The ENTIRE plane went underground.

how did all the fuel end up over at that tree section that wasn't even in the plane's trajectory?

Based on the scene, it's obvious MOST went underground with the plane.

[Carefulplease]

29. When it hit the ground...

It broke up into bits. It lost all its vertical momentum (some debris also rebounded) but not its horizontal momentum. So, most of the unburned debris got dispersed in the forest. They were indeed found there, dispersed over a wide area.

[TheWraith]

31. An entire plane can't go underground.

Simply can't happen without a backhoe and a lot of time. Now, a significant part of the plane may have ended up embedded in the ground, but that's not the same thing. In a straight nose-in dive, the nose may have buried itself (in a crushed and broken form), but the rest of the plane would have shattered and spread debris all over the area--including fuel, on a straight line path along the line of flight. Hence, a big area of burned woods, shaped like, say, a splash pattern.

[bushatbooker]

32. Well that's what officials told us happened.

The said they had to dig "15 ft" just to find the darn thing.

Also, sounds like you didn't look at the crash scene photos very well.

[sgsmith]

30. A more valid comparison

Would be to the crash of N999UA at Colorado Springs on 3-Mar-1991. This was a Boeing 737 that crashed short of the runway, killing all on board. It's interesting because the flight was on approach to the runway, with landing gear and slats/flaps deployed when the aircraft performed a sudden roll and went nearly vertically into the ground. Altitude above ground was about 1,000 ft from what I read.

From the NTSB accident report: http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/2001/AAR0101.pdf

1.4 Other Damage
There was no damage to structures on the ground. Trees adjacent to the impact
crater were damaged by flying debris and soot, and nearby patches of grass north and
northeast of the crater were scorched. The size of the impact crater measured
approximately 39 feet by 24 feet and was about 15 feet deep.

1.12 Wreckage and Impact Information
...Witnesses saw no pieces of the structure fall from the airplane prior to the impact.
An aerial search along the flightpath found no debris that had separated from the airplane
before ground impact. There was no evidence of fire south of the principal impact crater.
The airplane's fuselage had severe accordion-like fore and aft crushing throughout its
entire length with overstress breaks. Except for two aft fuselage sections of skin and small
debris, the entire fuselage was contained within the impact crater. ...
...The left engine was buried about 10 feet nose down in the ground under the left
wing at about a 75-degree impact angle. ...
...The forward portion of the right engine was buried about 7 feet in the ground
under the right wing at an angle of about 50 degrees. The portion aft of the combustion
section of the right engine was separated, and some parts were located about 25 feet north
of the impact crater. ...

1.14 Fire
An intense ground fire melted localized sections of the airplane structure and
scorched nearby trees and the ground surrounding the crash site. There was no indication
of any fire prior to the impact with the ground. ...

An photo of the Colorado Spring crash is similiar to Shanksville.

[bushatbooker]

33. Now THAT looks like a plane crash

unlike the shanksville scene.

[Jazz2006]

34. What do you mean "it just dawned on you"?

This has all been explained to you in great detail through more than 60 pages and 2400 posts here:

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=61633

[bushatbooker]

35. Looks like the JREFs got bitch slapped over there!

They seem to think a huge explosion wouldn't burn the grass around the crater!

[greyl]

36. "Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?" nt