posted 12-12- 08:58 PM               

How does a plane change direction? You increase the angle of attack of the wing hitting the air and the plane flies around the turn.

So what part of the plane actually causes the turn? It's the wings. The wings pull the plane around the turn and the fuselage is basically pulled along. The wings pull up and the fuselage hangs from them.

So when the structure fails the fuselage keeps going fairly straight and the wings flutter behind it. From the cockpit it looks like the wings pulled up. A better description would be that the fuselage fell off the wings.

posted 12-13- 09:54 PM               

Meanwhile, most of the "dead weight" in the airplane is concentrated in the fuselage. When you pull, say, 6 G, the fuselage literally weighs 6X what it weighed in level flight. The wings, meanwhile, are producing lift in excess of that weight, or you'd just plow into the ground and not pull out of your dive. That lift acts through a point out on the wings, thus giving a lever arm and twisting moment (up) to the wings.

Balance a yardstick on top of two coffee cups. Put the cups 12 inches from each end. Those are the lift vectors. Now put a book (the fuselage) in the middle of the yardstick. That's "1G." Put on a second book. 2G. Keep stacking books in the middle of the yardstick. However many you put on, the cups exert that much "lift" force up. What's the yardstick look like with 8 books on it?