At 04:27 PM 5/31/2006 -0300, Don wrote:

>But yes, the real puzzler was Mantell's disregard for anoxia. He knew

>better. I can't understand why he would have gotten so excited about this

>object, more excited than if he had been in combat, to ignore this obvious

>danger.

I also found this in Ruppelt's TRUE article, a note by editors:

(In a letter to TRUE on this point, Capt. William B. Nash, wrote: "As a

pilot, Ruppelt must know that he wrote pure deception when he said of the

Mantell case, 'The propeller torque would pull it into a slow left turn,

into a shallow dive, then an increasingly steeper descent under power.

Somewhere during the screaming dive, the plane reached excessive speeds and

began to break up in the air.' Any Dilbert knows that as the speed of an

airplane increases its lift increases, and the plane's nose would come up

until the speed decreased again and the nose dipped once more to pick up

speed and lift, thus creating an oscillation all the way to the ground-not

a 'screaming dive.' The plane could spin or spiral instead of oscillate,

but a spin is a stall maneuver, and planes do not come apart in a stall.

This oscillation would he especially likely to occur if the airplane had

been trimmed to climb . . . and . . . Ruppelt says, 'The wreckage showed

that the plane was trimmed to climb."