How to make an airplane disappear
A few years ago (1988), some people at Sandia were working on a project on nuclear reactor safety, and decided that a good test would be to fly an airplane into a nice thick concrete wall, just to see what would happen. So they attached at F4 to a rocket sled, put a 12' thick concrete block and a bunch of high-speed movie cameras at the end of the railroad line, and fired up the rocket.
There were some complaints about this test; the concrete block wasn't anchored, so the jet managed to push it back a few feet when it collided (the anti-nuclear people complained *bitterly* about this, because the film makes it look like "jet hits thick wall, jet goes away, and there's no damage to the wall!" when, in reality, the protective shell around a nuclear reactor *won't* be moving and the heavy parts of the airplane may end up punching through or shattering the shell instead of simply pushing it forward.
But this was in 1988, when the whole idea of flying aircraft into structures was (at least according to the B*sh junta) not something anyone would think about. These days, well, this video is interesting in a somewhat different way; today, there's a large and annoying group of conspiracy theories wrapped around the 9/11 version of the Reichstag fire, including one that claims that the B*sh junta had AA77 hijacked, then made it disappear and either (a) launched a missile into the Pentagon, (b) set off explosions in the Pentagon, or (c) I dunno, faked the whole thing? And the primary piece of evidence supporting this theory is "but where is the airplane?!? You can't just have a big old airplane disappear when it rams a reinforced concrete structure at 500mph!!!"
Oh, really? It certainly doesn't look like there's much in the department of recognisable airplane parts detaching from this F4 when it magically disappears in a puff of smoke. But, given the intellectual rigor of the various 9/11 conspiracy theories (which combine a wilful ignorance of structural mechanics [I'm not an engineer, but you don't have to look very far to find copious quantities of fire safety documents regarding the effect of fire on steel-framed buildings. They don't give insulation 4 and 5 hour ratings for nothing, you know] with a firm-held belief that the B*sh junta can pull off a large and elaborate evil plot when everything else they've done has been done so sloppily that it gives incompetence a bad name) I'm not really expecting that I'll convince any of them. It would be nice, though, if I could convince some of the otherwise-sensible lefties to stop believing this crap, because, boy, it's really annoying when regular old lefties buy into this "we don't believe in reality!" mindset.
[Oh, and a note to the conspiracy theorists. Mathematics might convince me, but proof by repeated assertion will not. I will delete comments that attempt proofs by repeated assertion, so you can save your breath.]
(video link via a comment on xymphora)
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[conspirovision nonsense deleted. I have no interest in illuminati-style “oooh, there’s a big scary conspiracy and all we can do is gossip about it!” comments. -Orc]