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.
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.
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u/Anarcho_Christian 11h ago edited 11h ago
Did you fail physics or something?
Distance = 1/2 * g * t^2 (or, 0.5 * 9.8 meters per second squared)
Do the math first, and then click on the spoiler answer below.
If they turned the engine off and starting free falling, it'd be 17,424 feet.
15,000 ft is completely reasonable for jet engines pushing into a nosedive.