Shoreham Air Show Crash.

I watched footage of the Shoreham crash on the news, a massive fireball of aviation fuel engulfing a stretch of the A27 and its unfortunate motorists. The Hawker Hunter involved was a trans sonic fighter weighing 20,000 lbs with a single Rolls Royce Avon engine and a range of 2,000 miles.

A Boeing 737 by comparison weighs 70,000 lbs, has a similar range, two Pratt & Whitney JT8D engines and carries around three time the fuel load. In Shoreham the damage apart from the cars appears minimal given the impressive fireball that engulfed it all. Aviation fuel will burn like that but only for a relatively short time. And although it burns hot it doesn’t reach the temperature to melt steel. You can probably see where I’m going with this. The last time I saw a massive fireball of aviation fuel like that in Shoreham was on 9/11. Back then it engulfed several floors of Towers 1 and 2. I’ve just watched an old video of that and the burn lasted less than twenty seconds before it turned to black smoke. It’s funny how seeing such a catastrophic image obliterates all thoughts of physics. Could the massive steel structure of the towers really be brought down by twenty seconds of burning fuel? Most structural engineers, physicists etc (outside NIST) think not, but the public saw it with their own eyes. Try this at home; put a kebab skewer in the gas flame for twenty seconds. Did it melt, even bend, even get white hot? No, the melting point of steel is around 1510*C where the hottest a petrol fire gets is 1200*C. Thermite as used in controlled demolitions though burns at 2200*C. You do the maths.