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Flight 77 flight data recorder details

Summary

There are two animations of the flight path of Flight 77, the one that (allegedly) hit the Pentagon. One was put out by the official Commission, based on who knows what, and the other by the NTSB based on the flight data recorder.

They don't agree with each other. The Commission animation shows the official story, i.e., the flight comes in low, hits light poles, and then plows into the lower floors of the Pentagon.

The flight data recorder provided by the NTSB shows the flight too high and too far north to hit the light poles. It also shows the plane never levelling off, although the video released by the Pentagon shows something hitting completely horizontally. According to the flight data recorder, the flight would have gone over the top of the Pentagon; it was too high to hit it.

The NTSB animation that came with the data has been described as a "blatant cover-up" by the pilot doing the voice-over on the Pilots for 9/11 Truth DVD about Flight 77, because of the altitude discrepancy. This gets slightly technical, but bear with me. The altitude shown in the cockpit is affected by the barometric pressure setting. As pilots cross 18,000 feet, whether ascending or descending, they adjust the barometric pressure setting to get the true altitude. The hard data file shows the barometric pressure being changed on the way up and again on the way down. But the animation fails to make the adjustment on the descent, so the animation shows an altitude about 300 feet lower than it actually was. Apparently the voice-over pilot doesn't think this is an innocent error.

The NTSB flight animation also shows that the pilot of Flight 77 could quite easily have gone straight in and smashed into the Pentagon without the fancy maneuvering that was done. But instead, it did a sort of time-consuming 330 degree turn, apparently to get an angle on the particular wedge of the Pentagon that it wanted to hit -- a wing that happened to be the only one with recently reinforced walls, that had no top brass, that was sparsely populated, and that happened to contain the financial records needed to investigate 2.3 trillion dollars of missing DoD money. Strange targeting, and strange that the pilot was so totally unconcerned about being shot down, taking all the time he needed to do his maneuvers instead of just going with the straight on, shortest-line shot.

Source: Pilots for 9/11 Truth. Pandora's Black Box Chapter Two: The Flight of American 77. DVD.

Analysis

What troubles me a bit is that the same flight data recorder information is used to say 1) there's no way this plane hit the Pentagon, and 2) the way this plane hit the Pentagon is weird (the unnecessary spiral to hit the West Wing).

But still. We're not here to say what happened, we're here to say what's fishy, and this is fishy. As the Pilots for 9/11 Truth point out, there's no guarantee that the flight data recorder was even actually from Flight 77. Whatever plane it was, the data do not support it hitting the Pentagon. One scenario that seems to fit is that the plane does its maneuver to get into position to drop a missile, which is what then hits the Pentagon. I know it sounds crazy, but it is not entirely unsupported by evidence (this flight path, the nature of the hole and the damage, etc.). I don't know what to believe, but I find this flight data recorder stuff rather suspicious indeed.

Bottom line, me, I give it:

rather suspiciousrather suspiciousrather suspicious

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