Originally Posted by
cordwainer
Thanks very much for your reply. Only one minor quibble: You misquote me - I stated that no one asserted it slid inverted.
I understood you. No one said it slid inverted. The CAB said it slid tail first.
So, I'm going to go ahead and ask the totally dumb non-pilot question (pilots and aviation experts, feel free to laugh):
Why do you keep saying the wings inverted too? Looking at the photos, it appears only a piece of the tail section is broken away and inverted. Why couldn't that piece alone have flipped?
This is absolutely key to the whole puzzle. It's not a dumb question, and it doesn't seem to be hitting home for most of the readers here.
The main gear has a housing between and behind the wheel pair, covering hydraulic lines. When the gear is retracted, the gear hinges up toward the front of the wing. This leaves the hydraulic housing facing the ground.
If you look at the wing remnants in the overhead view at
https://ibb.co/kvz8N6 you can see the hydraulic housing looking up at the sky. This means the wings are inverted. And because the main gear swings up toward the leading edge, you can tell from the wreckage that the leading edge is to the east.
If the wings arrived on a backward-sliding plane that was upright, the wings must have flipped over to put the hydraulic housing pointing up. This could happen if the wings broke free of the aft fuselage and flipped over, but if that happened the leading edge would be pointing west. If the wings arrived on a backward-sliding plane that was inverted, the wings would look like they do now. But the vertical stabilizer would be toast, and instead it's nearly intact. QED the plane was not sliding backward.
I made a cardboard cutout to help me envision this, because I was sure this couldn't be right. Take a ruler or something, put tape on one edge to call it the leading edge, mark one side to show where the gear is, and try it out. It'll make a believer of you.
Anyway, my question is: could the post-crash explosion Wurbia saw have flipped the tail section? It was severe enough to send pieces of wreckage flying about the length of a football field according to his statement. And the piece that's inverted doesn't appear still to be 60 feet long (looking at the photo with the ladder for scale). Nor does the flipped bit seem to be any longer connected to wings or anything else.
What you're proposing is one of the ideas I tried out, when trying to deny that the CAB was wrong. But it just doesn't work. Because the wing is inverted and the leading edge is east, it matches the orientation of the aft fuselage.
As for the grim stuff, I've lived with that for 55 years.
Perfectly OK with being corrected or mocked if that's a ridiculous question.
It's the primo question of the month.