Originally Posted by
G0ULI
The rear fuselage and tail section are almost completely inverted where they came to rest. Whether they rolled, tumbled or spun to arrive at this position isn't really an accurate indication of aircraft attitude at the moment of initial impact with the ground.
First of all, thanks for your thoughts. This is what I came here for.
The key evidence at the final wreckage is the position of the wings. They are inverted with the leading edge pointing back along the path. So either the plane slid inverted, which the remaining rudder rules out, or it arrived upright. That, plus the ditch, tells us a lot about that final site and how the plane got there.
I didn't mean to say (in my document) that the final position was simply maintaining a position it had been in at the moment of initial impact. Many things happened in between. My point was that to arrive upright at the final site with as much energy as it had means that the plane cannot have been dissipating that energy in a cartwheel. It's the final site's energy, as much as position, that rules out the tumble.
Unfortunately the original investigators notes and measurements are no longer available, but almost certainly the severed high tension cable lengths would have been measured to give an estimate (and rough confirmation) of the angle at which they were severed. Detailed measurements would have been taken to order replacement cables to splice in repairs no matter what.
I'm following various paths to try to locate more documentation. Something may turn up.
A previous post mentioned that the cables would be measured, but there's no need to do so from the power company's point of view. If they trusted the remainder of the snapped span, they could splice new line on one of the ground-level pieces, pull it to the opposite tower by pulley, and splice it in up there. If they didn't trust the snapped span, they would pull new line up to one tower using a pulley, over and on to the next, pull taut and splice it in.
None of that demands that they know exactly where the breaks were, and determining the break point would slow them down. I suspect they would measure only if asked by the investigating authority. I'm confident that such measurements would be routine today, but have no reason to think it would have been routine then.
I also don't have a description of the power lines. The measurement would be useful only if the lines had significant vertical separation. So in the absence of any explicit statement, I don't see any reason to say that some hypothetical measurement should be presumed to exist and therefore admitted as evidence. We just don't know.