Reply #162: I have an earwitness perspective on what was going on at DCA.

[sofa king]

Normally I don't participate in these threads, but I thought you'd like my firsthand perspective of what was going on by the time I returned to my home on September 16, 2001. I was out of town the week that things went down.

At the time I lived in the bottom lefthand corner of this picture, in Rosslyn.



The Pentagon is clearly visible on the far center right, and that grassy strip of land just above the Pentagon (on the Virginia side of the river, not Hayne's Point) is the overshot section of one of the main DCA runways. The flight path of aircraft is straight up and down the river, or effectively straight over my home.

Rosslyn is a weird town in that while it has a huge daytime population which includes Air Force workers and KBR, almost nobody actually lives there. By dark the place shuts down, and except for the constant roar of planes approaching DCA every 90 seconds until about 2am (they supposedly can't take off after like 11pm, but they do anyway), there's not much traffic and little else in the way of city noise.

It was very hot in my apartment because it had no air conditioning. I slept with the windows open all the time.

It was eerie as hell, because for the first time since I lived there, it was quiet. No jets.

But plainly audible was the constant whine of a very, very small piston aircraft engine unlike any I'd ever heard before or since, which circled constantly. I went outside to look, but I never saw what it was. They were only audible at night, and they were constantly audible nightly for what now seems like weeks. I can't remember how long the airport was closed.

Occasionally you could hear them following the river at a much lower altitude, along the same flight path the passenger planes normally take off and land.

I assume the aircraft were taking off and landing from DCA.

(Yes, DCA is the airport formerly known as Washington National Airport. It actually suits the other President it is now after. It's loud, dirty, polluting, and considered far more important to some people in Congress than it is to the rest of us.)

Aside from the obvious reasons for closing down the airport--that the air traffic was routed only a few thousand yards at most from the CIA, the Defense Mapping Agency, the Vice President's home, the State Department, the Treasury Building, the White House, Federal Triangle, and the Pentagon, and half a dozen shady double-secret buildings in Arlington alone, for example--I think that DC was being observed at night by Predator-type drones which were operating out of DCA.

So that might be one more reason apart from the very obvious ones why the airport was closed until someone felt they had a clue what to do about kamikaze hijackers. Of course, you'll have to take my word for it about the drone-things.
______________________

And let me say something else, since I'm thinking about it. Saturday night I went out with a good friend of mine to see a band. I asked her where her boyfriend was. Turns out that he was riding to work with a friend one Tuesday on I-395 when an airplane crossed the highway about two hundred yards in front of him, knocked over several telephone poles, and smashed into the Pentagon. He wasn't in any mood to go out on Saturday, September 11th.

So for my friend Brian, who is still obviously traumatized by the event you claim didn't happen, here's a big "fuck you." Just like our President, you are helping charlatans profit from the deaths of innocent people, and by discussing these utterly impossible theories as if they had a chance of being based in fact.

The whole reason why we need to get these buttholes out of office here in DC is because they have no regard whatsoever for the difference between a fact and a belief, and that ignorance is gutting this nation. Some of you, unfortunately, have succumbed to the exact same disease.

But hey, that's just like, my opinion, man.