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Crash scene evidence inconsistent with 757
Summary
This is one of the most contentious aspects of the whole 9/11 business. You've got deep and bitter divisions within the Inside Job community itself, with some people saying these "it wasn't a 757" folks are discrediting the otherwise fine credentials of the Truth movement. What's an unbiased investigator to think? Well, here's a summary of the claims.
- The entry hole is too small for a 757: Photographs taken before the upper floors collapsed indicate a hole about 15-18 feet in diameter, with no damage above or to the sides of it. No evidence of wings going in, not even the big engines on either side. Also, the tail makes the plane about 40 feet high, and there's no evidence of anything hitting above the entry hole. The official account has the whole plane getting sort of sucked into the one small hole.
- The lawn is pristine: no sign of any damage to the lawn in front of the hole, strange if a 757 had zoomed in at about ground level at 400-500 mph.
- The damage to the building wasn't nearly as much as what you'd expect from a 757. Only the outer ring was completely destroyed, according to DoD, the second and third rings were merely penetrated.
- The official story has the plane being almost totally obliterated, accounting for the near-total lack of plane parts in the aftermath. Only tiny, hard-to-identify pieces. But something penetrated the C-ring wall and left a 7 foot hole at the furthest edge of the damage. A nose cone? An engine? Where is it? Did it completely disintegrate just after making the final hole after making it through a bunch of reinforced walls?
- The first official story had the fire burning so hot that the aluminum body and steel engines not only melted but were vaporized, while not burning the upper floors, and leaving some crash victiims identifiable by fingerprints.
- A later, revised story has the FBI claiming that it had almost completely recovered the plane parts and had them catalogued with the correct serial numbers in a warehouse. Why not let people see that, and dispel all these crazy theories?
- Most people reported not seeing any plane parts, only small pieces, e.g., Lee Evey, head of the Pentagon renovation, who said that evidence of an aircraft was "not very visible...None of those parts is very large...You don't see big pieces of the airplane sitting there extending up into the air." Fire chief Ed Plaugher agreed, at the time, saying there were "some small pieces...but not large sections...no fuselage sections and that sort of thing." But later on, after the official story was revised, Plaugher also changed his account, saying he had seen "pieces of the fuselage, the wings, landing gear, pieces of the engine, seats..."
- The earliest photos show a pristine lawn, then a photo taken later on has this airplane part looking thing on it. Odd.
Source: Griffin, p. 28-35, Marrs, p. 30-36, and various Web sites with the photos and pilot comments.
Analysis
This is kind of a hard one. I've seen the photographs where everyone says it's a small entry hole. All I see is smoke. I can see that the area above the smokey hole thingy is undamaged, and I can see that there are no obvious wing entry points, and I can see that the lawn is undamaged, but the hole itself? Maybe it's just me, but I can't see it clearly.
There are photographs you can find of the rubble where some vaguely planey-looking parts can be spotted, but the overall picture still just doesn't look like a 757 crash, especially when you consider the extreme difficulties (impossibilities) of flying that fast that low.
I don't know! I kind of throw up my hands. Witness testimony is dealt with elsewhere, but just from the physical aftermath, I don't really know how to judge it, but it certainly seems somewhat suspicious at the very least.
There are photographs you can find of the rubble where some vaguely planey-looking parts can be spotted, but the overall picture still just doesn't look like a 757 crash, especially when you consider the extreme difficulties (impossibilities) of flying that fast that low.
I don't know! I kind of throw up my hands. Witness testimony is dealt with elsewhere, but just from the physical aftermath, I don't really know how to judge it, but it certainly seems somewhat suspicious at the very least.
Bottom line, me, I give it:
Discussion
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People's Court
Quotes
"I thought it was a bomb...I was there and I never saw a plane or even debris from a plane. I figure the plane story is there to brainwash people."-- April Gallop, Pentagon employee who crawled through the blast rubble on her way out the hole following the attack.
"If a 757 were placed on the ground on its engine nacelles (I.e., gear retracted as in flight profile), its nose would be almost 20 above the ground! Ergo, for the aircraft to impact the ground floor of the Pentagon, Hanjour would have needed to have flown in with the engines buried 10-feet deep in the Pentagon lawn. Some pilot. At any rate, why is such ultra-low-level flight aerodynamically impossible? Because the reactive force of the hugely powerful downwash sheet, coupled with the compressibility effects of the tip vortices, simply will not allow the aircraft to get any lower to the ground than approximately one half the distance of its wingspan until speed is drastically reduced, which, of course, is what happens during normal landings. In other words, if this were a Boeing 757 as reported, the plane could not have been flown below about 60 feet above ground at 400 MPH. [And if it were that low] the 100,000-lb jetblast alone would have blown whole semi-trucks off the roads."
-- Nila Sagadevan, aeronautical engineer and qualified pilot of heavy aircraft
Currently showing comments 1 through 2 of 2 total comments.
1. tnt 11 Jan 2008 06:10:05 PM
I say no way Jose.
2. john 11 Jan 2008 09:44:25 PM
Yeah, I tend to agree. It's fishy, man, fishy!