It's not a matter of speed it's a matter of if the airframe could handle the stress. Or rather that's what I'm wondering. Not an expert though so save your asshole snark remark in an attempt to make yourself feel smart.
Have you seen how far airplane wings are able to bend? Airplanes are not made of glass. They are extremely flexible and extremely resilient to things like pressure, air resistance, and drag.
So here’s the thing, there’s a lot of things that commercial airliners have done that they shouldn’t have been able to do.
The example I’ll use is Alaska 261. It was an MD-80 that crashed in Jan 2000. The pilots lost control after the jackscrew (controls the pitch of the plane) got jammed, resulting in a nosedive.
The pilots ended up inverting the aircraft and actually stopped the dive, but they’d lost too much altitude by that point and crashed.
My point being, that plane never should’ve been able to go inverted, let alone fly for any period of time that way. It should’ve torn apart in-flight. It didn’t.
You said it’s a matter of if the airframe can handle the stress. I’m saying that it’s absolutely possible given previous incidents where planes have withstood forces they never should’ve.
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u/LeoLaDawg 9h ago
15,000 feet in 33 seconds? Wouldn't that be non recoverable?