Originally Posted by
megan
there is absolutely no reason to doubt the angles of bank at the various stages.
Piffle. There are excellent reasons for doubting the bank angles. A few posts back you said witnesses are notoriously unreliable, yet here you are saying their word is gospel.
For one, no increasing bank can get to the impact site. It will end east of the impact. That's the nature of a spiral. The plane turned through only about 130 degrees, so it's got more movement parallel to the runway axis than it has at right angles to it. The impact from the start of the turn is a greater distance orthogonal to the runway than along the axis. Simple geometry. If the plane gets there by flying, the bank must moderate.
If you depend on going ballistic to get you to the impact site, the plane has to go ballistic roughly 1500 to 2000 feet from the impact given an increasing bank, depending on when and how fast you think it increases. At 200 feet up the plane has under 2 seconds of air time before it hits, and that means it has just over 500 feet of forward movement before it hits. You can't stretch 500 feet to cover 1500 to 2000.
ETA: oops, filled in the wrong numbers. About 3.5 seconds, or 900 feet forward.
After dropping from 200 feet in ballistic mode, the plane has a downward velocity of about 70 knots. It strikes the right wing on the tracks, and then drops another 30 feet or so in the next 300 feet. In other words, the downward component goes from 70 knots to 17 knots upon striking the right wing. It defies imagination.
On the other hand, if you remember that witnesses are notoriously unreliable, and if you remember that all the witness statements are being filtered by whoever wrote the report, it's relatively easy to see what's wrong here.