E-Rant: The Improbable “Airplane”

Hi Nunz, so true about mass murder; would be physically impossible for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. to single handedly execute millions of people so they found plenty of psychos willing to do their dirty work. Stir up some old resentments and jealousies among the peasants and let them steal their victims stuff after they kill them. Worked great for Mao in the “cultural revolution”. Don’t like your teacher, he’s a hardass? Well just cut his throat and toss him in the river, that’ll fix things. I read a great essay by Bill Bonner a few years back saying we owe Mao a debt of gratitude for keeping China backward for as long as he did since now that they’ve got their mojo back they’re whipping everyone economically.

When we ABSOLUTELY should have! As you say, these are densely populated tourist destinations. IK cameras weren’t as ubiquitous then as now, but still… the whole thing reeks. Does not compute.

….and not to even mention that even a professional airline pilot with 30 years experience probably couldn’t pull off such a feat of getting a plane THAT low, and making the necessary turns, and then hitting the target- all while maintaining enough speed to stay aloft. Totally impossible!

And the “coincidences” of the audits of the missing trillions……at both locations. If it were truly an act of foreign terrorism, then the terrorists sure did the criminals in our government a HUGE favor by hitting those particular targets at THAt particular date and time!

That alone is such a wild coincidence, that all but the worst idiot would rule it out immeejittely.

Certainly the aluminum skin and structural members of the aircraft will burn quite readily (in fact, a special class of extinguisher meant to put out fires fueled by metals such as Aluminum and Magnesium, type “D” or “TMB” (Trimethoxyboroxine) is needed to combat aircraft fires. The wings would have likely folded up and followed the fuselage in; however, the fuselage itself, in this head-on collision with the wall (itself, to get the 757 to hit in nearly level flight “on the deck”, a remarkable feat of flying for a trainee who perform poorly in his aircraft simulation training), would most likely crumple up, accordion-style, so that the hole in the outer Pentagon ring is made, due to the sheer mass of metal,fuel, crew and passengers,and cargo is believable. But even then, there are several things that are puzzling:

(1) Where is the Vertical Stabilizer (ie. “rudder”)? In most cases where an aircraft impacts, even head-on, enough of the tail section survives the impact and is not consumed by the fire, if the wreckage burns. Typically the tail section breaks loose and is stopped on the ground as the rest of the wreckage continues by sheer momentum.

(2) The two Rolls-Royce RB-211 engines placement on each wing, with an attitude of near-normal to the wall (the “yaw’ of the plane, relative to the wall is less than 5 degrees), would be well OUTSIDE the hole made in the wall. Of course, could, as the plane disintegrated, the engines have followed, along with the remainder of the wing, into the hole? Possible, but highly UNLIKELY, more than likely, as the plane impacted, assuming that the engines hadn’t already contacted the ground on the way in, leaving quite the “skid mark” or trenches, they’d tear loose of their mounts and tumble on through. As the engines are made largely of steel and titanium, they’d be akin to a bowling ball gone mad as they tore through the walls. We see that sort of phenomenon with the Flight 175 impacting the South Tower, where on of its engines, carried through on momentum, ended up three blocks away. But we don’t see any engine-sized holes aside the main one at all, not on the outer wall, and no path that these engines, now shorn from the aircraft, would continue on their own momentum. However, in most cases, the engines survive fairly intact, and some engines have even been salvaged from lesser wrecks and put back into service! That these engines both disintegrated, apparently, is a mystery.

(3) How the pilot, such a novice that he nearly washed out of the flight school, managed to bring a 757, an aircraft that he had NO experience with, let alone ANY airliner or multi-engine plane, ON THE DECK, a maneuver that would challenge even Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (who pancaked in a 737 safely into the Hudson River in 2009). Please consider that the height of the 757 is 44’6″ (standing on the ground) and the height of the Pentagon rings is 79 feet, so how the maniacal pilot managed to bring this bird in, level flight, on the deck, and not apparently “pancake” the aircraft, nor strike at a high attitude of approach, and impact just barely above the walls, but the engines never apparently contacted the ground, is yet another ‘mystery’.

(4) Also, the aircraft has to, in order to land or even fly “on the deck”, be slowed considerably, to near stall speed, else it experiences turbulence from ground effect which causes it to bounce and become uncontrollable. This is an issue which plagued the F-111 ‘Aardvark” with its early terrain-following radar, several were lost until some bugs in the automatic controls were fixed and the Air Force limited the speed of the bird when flying “on the deck”. Certainly there was nothing in the simulator to train for that! Yet the hijacker pulled it off. But let’s assume that the 757 had slowed down, to say, 240 kts (IDK what the reported speed of Flight 77 was as it impacted the Pentagon, nor if anyone knows). We have the purported video of the crash, which shows an explosion, but we don’t actually SEE the aircraft itself. So, if, as I theorize, the aircraft had to be going not too much above normal landing speed in order to be controllable at all, it might have been going about 350 feet per second. The length of the Boeing 757-200 is about 155 feet…SOOOO…assuming a normal NTSC frame rate of 30 frames/second in the video posted on Wikipedia, from initial contact to the tail would take about 9 frames at the speed I suggest is the most likely for approach. If the aircraft is for some odd reason managing to be controllable on the deck at near CRUISING speed (highly implausible), it still would be visible for about 4-5 frames. So, why in the hell hasn’t anyone posted a frame-by-frame view of the impact? I mean, even ten year earlier, with VHS, for pity’s sake, horny nerds were doing that to get a glimpse of Sharon Stone’s “sweet spot” from “Basic Instinct”! Yet another ‘mystery’!

(5) I’ve also seen a picture of a supposed landing gear wheel found in the corridor between the Pentagon “rings” Again, that’s possible, though, unless and until the rather large aircraft tire that’s mounted on it burns away, but as airliner wheels are made of MAGNESIUM (best strength-weight ratio, a critical factor in material selection for most aircraft parts), any fire that burns away the tire would likely consume the wheel as well, or at least MELT it down! Another puzzle..

Look, IDK that the “missile” theory is any better, unless you want to tell me that someone got a hold of a Tomahawk cruise missile and managed to put on it a low-yield nuclear warhead (akin to the “Davy Crockett”)…to cause damage like what we saw happened to the Pentagon, you need either a large amount of explosives OR a massive warhead, and the 757 did have mass. OTOH, the factors I’ve described do cast doubt that a 757 was used at all, let alone Flight 77, but I can’t explain what then happened to the aircraft and its passengers. Naturally, we won’t see the grisly, charred and well-cremated remains of the passengers and/or unfortunate Pentagon workers, but that alone would tend to refute many of these ‘conspiracy’ theories.

Yet just what I know already sets off my “bullshit” detector…I just don’t have a reasonable explanation for what actually happened, as there’s been too much “obstrufucation” to get at the truth…which is likely what those that purport to be our “betters” have had in mind all along.

Hi Doug,

As Brent says, we’ll never know – probably – what actually happened. But we can see what probably didn’t. I’ve watched the video of the whatever-it-was striking the Pentagon as well as the government’s own reconstruction of the flight path. Whatever-it-was came in straight and level. And so fast that no cameras were able – apparently – to get a clear image. Neither seems plausible to me.

Techie accuses me of “tin foil” speculation but I still haven’t heard a believable explanation for the absence of any video or still photography of the “757.” The key thing here, in my mind, is that everyone knew planes had already struck the WTC towers before the “757” struck the Pentagon. Therefore, everyone in DC was on the lookout for airplanes. I can attest to this as I was there, just like Techie says he was. I recall standing outside with my friends looking skyward for anything as we kept glued to the latest news.

It is simply not credible to me that no one in the vicinity of the Pentagon, in the supposed flight path of the “757” (there are numerous residential buildings in the area near the Pentagon) took a pic or video of the “757” as it made its approach. A “757” isn’t supersonic; it is not invisible to the eye. Watch the numerous videos of the two planes that hit the towers in NY. There are in both cases several seconds of pre-impact video. No “technical” difficulties recording them.

There should have been at least a few videos of the “757” that supposedly flew into the Pentagon. That there are not is extremely suspicious.

Also suspicious is the risible idea that a jerkoff who had a few flight lessons in a Cessna could pilot a heavy jet at several hundred knots airspeed just a few feet off the deck in a horizontal suicide run. As I mentioned earlier, my friend who is an ex-Navy pilot isn’t buying it. That carries weight with me.

Ken,

You’ve lost me.

“Ground effect alone would not have allowed the flying that close to the ground at the speed they say.”

With a wingspan of 125ft, ground effect would keep the plane from stalling if it was less than 12 stories above the ground.

Right?

If it was going much faster than stall speed, wouldn’t ground effect tend to make it very difficult to fly into the first storey of a building?