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Old 12th Aug 2010, 22:08
  #1869 (permalink)  
HarryMann
 
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Any ideas as to why the supposed slick should have that bifurcated shape ?
The only way I can see is the a/c hit hard and quite fast, possibly with one low wing.
Lost a whole wing in a bounce, which altered its trajectory. The wing with its fuel diverged over orders of hundreds of metres (1 or more) from the rest of the aircraft.

There would be fuel at the initial impact point plus two streams diverging.
Subsequent drift and dispersion of these two fuel trails, resulting in the pattern you see, which covers a spectrum up to tens of hundreds of metres (30 hours later?)


If this was the case, one could perhaps imagine the a/c direction being from NNE towards SSW ? The smaller pattern to the West would be the separated wing...

If so, it impacted across rather than along the swell?

==== ===== ==== ==== ==== ==== ===== ==== ==== ====

We are now a long way from the current evidence, probably even further from reality, but experiments and computation of a modelled situation could show whether this sort of pattern is likely or even possible.

.. and if so, which direction it was travelling at impact.

Last edited by HarryMann; 12th Aug 2010 at 22:32.
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