Debris Field Pattern Explorer

Run the Debris Field Explorer Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

The shape of a wreckage field is one of the first clues an investigator reads. A tight cluster at a single point says the aircraft hit the ground intact. A long trail of wreckage, sorted by weight, says the aircraft broke up in the air — and the longer and more sorted the field, the higher the breakup happened.

This MicroSim turns that reasoning into an experiment. You control the breakup altitude, the wind, and the aircraft speed, and the map shows how the debris scatters. Heavy pieces (engines, landing gear) carry forward; light pieces (panels, insulation, paper) fall short and drift with the wind. A live readout reports the field length and a plain-language verdict.

How to Use It

1. Start with Breakup altitude at 0 m. Notice the wreckage collapses into a tight cluster at the red impact marker — an intact ground impact.
2. Drag the altitude slider up. Watch the field stretch to the right and sort by weight: dark-blue heavy pieces lead, light-gray pieces lag.
3. Read the Field Readout: the debris-field length and the inferred verdict update as you move the sliders.
4. Change the wind speed and direction. With a Crosswind, the light debris fans out sideways.
5. Adjust Aircraft speed to see a faster aircraft fling its wreckage farther downrange.
6. Toggle Show density sorting off to see what an unsorted scatter looks like — then back on to recover the weight signal. Press Reset to return to the defaults.

What You Can Learn

• Interpret debris-field length and sorting to infer roughly how high an aircraft broke up.
• Distinguish an intact ground impact from a low-altitude and a high-altitude in-flight breakup.
• Explain why heavy and light pieces end up in different places, and how wind skews the light-debris scatter.

You can embed this MicroSim on your own web page with this iframe:

<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/forensic-science/sims/debris-field-pattern-explorer/main.html"
        width="100%" height="602" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Audience: High-school forensic science (grades 9–12) Time: 15–20 minutes Bloom level: Apply (L3) — interpret a debris field.

Core routine (Manipulate-Observe-Explain). Give students a described scenario — "wreckage spread over 8 km, strongly sorted by weight" — and ask them to set the sliders until the readout matches, then explain what altitude that implies and why.

Guided questions:

• With altitude at 0, why is there no density sorting?
• Two crashes have the same aircraft speed, but one field is twice as long as the other. What does that tell you about the breakup altitudes?
• A field is long but the light debris is fanned far to one side. Which wind setting reproduces that, and what would it mean at a real scene?

Extension. Connect to the Pan Am 103 and TWA 800 cases from the chapter: a wide, high-altitude field was an early signal of an in-flight event rather than a controlled descent into the ground.

References

• Aircraft accident analysis (Wikipedia) — how investigators read wreckage and debris fields.
• Pan Am Flight 103 (Wikipedia) — a high-altitude breakup whose scattered field signaled an in-flight explosion.
• TWA Flight 800 (Wikipedia) — seabed wreckage distribution and reconstruction.
• p5.js reference — the library used to build this simulation.

Specification

This MicroSim was generated from a specification in Chapter 19: Aviation Crash Forensics and Aircraft Accident Investigation.

Design note: the scatter uses a deliberately simplified ("physics-lite") ballistic model — fall time from altitude, with heavy pieces carrying forward and light pieces decelerating and drifting on the wind. The goal is to build intuition for reading a field, not to compute a forensically exact trajectory.