Originally Posted by Horas
It all seems to be asking a bit much from a parking brake to do a high power run up with a large 4 engine jet facing a jet blast wall. I say high power because that aircraft litterally climbed the wall.
Well, not quite. At 30 kts such a heavy beast has quite a lot of energy, and the wall is sloped. So until the tailskid would strike, the aircraft only had to "swing" around the main landing gear for the front section to "climb" the wall; not all that much energy involved, depending on the centre of gravity. Only after the tailstrike almost the entire airframe would have to be lifted.
The kinetic energy at 30 knots is enough to lift the centre of gravity by about 12 metres (this is true for any object in earth standard gravity). Well, without friction, but it seems quite possible that it would have climbed that wall the way it did, even with the engines completely shut down, once it had reached 30 knots and failed to stop normally.
Bernd