Raven:
That's definitely true and is something I think about (for a split second) every time I go for another flying lesson!! But whereas five grenades would usually be thrown by hand, a flying plane is hurtling in a certain direction at speeds possibly in excess of 170mph, and if it explodes, the explosion itself is also travelling in that direction at the same speed, so the force is still directed along the vector of acceleration. You'll remember the copycat incident where a kid flew a cessna into a high rise and it only took out only one room, but had that plane expoloded inside that room, the room itself would form a casing, turning it into a kind of bomb.
I was a bored kid, and my mother was a physics/science teacher. I used to make all kinds of explosions and bombs, and something I learned is this
.
You can be standing next to a small explosion say, one stick of dynamite, and be quite safe, it's the impact of your body upon some solid object which causes the real damage (your ears will be pretty sore too.)(and any kids reading, read on before you rush off to gather dynamite for some fun..)
A bomb is the containment of explosive material within a solid object, so that you have, shrapnel which is the thing that does most of the damage in a low powered bomb like a grenade. It's designed to contain the reaction, and so the lead casing only gives way when this pressure is at it's maximum containable point. The actual explosion within the grenade, (if you were to remove the lead casing first) is quite trivial.
Now (this is why kids!) your body itself can become shrapnel, and do immense damage to other parts of you, but a bomb is specifically a device which maximises the energy transfer from fuel to kinetic movement of a solid, by means of compression.
A plane, is solid, and also pressurised in the case of a jumbo jet, making it in effect, a flying bomb. But still, the area of damage would be quite limited to the area in front of the impact point(or the vector of acceleration) because fuel, plane, compressed air, everything is moving along a line which is governed by acceleration, lifting action of wings and gravity.
If you were to see a plane explode in midair, travelling at great speed, you would note that the only thing left behind the point of explosion was exhaust.
sit an
immobile plane next to the pentagon wall, and stick a lit rag in the fuel tank, and things would be quite different!!
Yes, then you'd have (for our intents and purposes) half the force spewing towards the lawn, and the other half invested in the action of destroying the wall.
It's just like if you were on top of a car, and it went off a cliff. You might think to yourself:
"It's o.k, I'll just jump off before it hits the ground"
But as your legs simply cannot propell you off the car fast enough, and since you are travelling towards the ground at exactly the same speed as the car
(drop a pebble and a rock at the same time if you don't believe me) You are mangled with the wreckage just the same as if you'd said to yourself:
"Well, time for one last drag on that ciggarete"
ZX Spectrum 48k Issue 3, Radio shack Tape drive, Rank arena 12" T.V. set.
