911 Pentagon, wild theories aside, how do ya'll explain this...?

[NJ_Lib]

How this young, inexperienced and modestly trained pilot, managed to pull off this extraordinary manuver? To fly a 757 almost at ground level, just twenty or thirty feet off the ground, going 525mph until he reached the Pentagon...? Please help me understand how this is possible... "Conspiracy theories" aside and assuming it happened as they think, I am struggling for answers these scenarios... While I don't think it was a "missile", I think we're missing part of the story here...

Since I hate conspiracy theories, please play "devil's advicate"...

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Get These Planes on the Ground’, Air Traffic Controllers Recall Sept. 11

"The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane," says O'Brien. "You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe."

"And it went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three, and all of a sudden the plane turned away. In the room, it was almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second," says O'Brien.
But the plane continued to turn right until it had made a 360-degree maneuver." - ABC (10/24/01)

"New radar evidence obtained by CBS News strongly suggests that the hijacked jetliner which crashed into the Pentagon hit its intended target."
"But the jet, flying at more than 400 mph, was too fast and too high when it neared the Pentagon at 9:35. The hijacker-pilots were then forced to execute a difficult high-speed descending turn."
"Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes."
"The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it's clear there was no fight for control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed." -CBS (9/21/01)

"To pull off the coordinated aerial attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Tuesday, the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators, a flight expert said.
By seizing four planes, diverting them from scheduled flight paths and managing to crash two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon, they must have had plenty of skill and training.
It was not known how the hijackers slipped through airport security checkpoints with their weapons.
There are no indications that any of the airline crews activated a four-digit code alerting ground controllers that a hijacking was in progress." -CNN (9/12/01)

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

"Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot.
"I'm still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon," the former employee said. "He could not fly at all." -New York Times (5/04/02)

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

FAA Was Alerted To Sept. 11 Hijacker

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2002

(CBS) Months before Hani Hanjour is believed to have flown an American Airlines jet into the Pentagon, managers at an Arizona flight school reported him at least five times to the FAA, reports CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/10/attack/main508656.shtml

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

During three months of instruction in late 1996, Duncan K.M. Hastie, CRM's owner, found Hanjour a "weak student" who "was wasting our resources."

"The impression I got is he came and, like a lot of guys, got overwhelmed with the instruments." He used the simulator perhaps three or four more times, Fults said, then "disappeared like a fog."
Instructors once again questioned his competence. After three sessions in a single-engine plane, the school decided Hanjour was not ready to rent a plane by himself." -Cape Cod Times (10/21/02)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Friday, 17 May, 2002, 14:11 GMT 15:11 UK

Terror warnings: Who knew what when?

February 2001

Instructors at a flying school in Phoenix, Arizona express concern to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials about the poor English and limited flying skills of one of their students, Hani Hanjour.


Hani Hanjour aroused suspicion at flying school


They believe his pilot's licence may be fraudulent.

The FAA finds it is genuine - but school administrators tell Mr Hanjour he will not qualify for an advanced certificate.

Mr Hanjour allegedly flew a hijacked plane into the Pentagon on 11 September.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1992852.stm
_________________________________________________________________________________________________


"Among the human remains painstakingly sorted from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crash sites of Sept. 11 are those of nine of the hijackers.
The FBI has held them for months, and no one seems to know what should be done with them. It's a politically and emotionally charged question for the government, which eventually must decide how to dispose of some of the most despised men in American history.
In contrast, the remains of all 40 victims in the Pennsylvania crash and all but five of the 184 victims at the Pentagon site were identified months ago." -CBS/AP (08/17/02)


Wait just a minute here, I was under the impression that there was nothing left of the plane in the Pa crash, but yet 40 souls were identified? Human remains survived but not a shred of the airplane?
________________________________________________________________________________________________

"A few miles out of Washington, on Route 1 to Baltimore, lies an inconspicuous military installation called Fort Meade.
And yet it contains the largest mass of secrets in the world.
It is home to the National Security Agency (NSA), the least visible but most powerful spy agency in America's armoury.
The NSA's job is to eavesdrop on the world's phone calls and emails, but do not try to phone them.
The NSA website does not list a phone number. You do not contact them. They listen to you.
Though invisible on the map, 38,000 people work at the agency every day, more than the CIA and FBI put together - every one of them sworn to a lifetime of secrecy.
When Osama bin Laden first moved to Afghanistan, the NSA listened in to every phone call he made on his satellite phone.
In fact, one of the most bizarre ironies of all this is that five of the hijackers lived in a motel right outside the gates of the NSA.
Early on the morning of 11 September, when Hani Hanjour and his four accomplices left the Valencia Motel on US route 1 on their way to Washington's Dulles airport, they joined the stream of NSA employees heading to work.
Three hours later, they had turned flight 77 around and slammed it into the Pentagon." -BBC (6/08/02)


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/2033791.stm

____________________________________________________________________________________________

FAA: Nine hijackers singled out for screenings

"Transportation authorities singled out nine of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks for special security screenings before they boarded their flights that morning, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said Saturday.
Under the enhanced precautions, airport security screened the hijackers' checked bags for weapons and explosives -- a measure that was not mandated for most passengers last fall.
At the time of the attacks, the box-cutting knives the hijackers used to take control of the planes would have been allowed to be taken onto the aircraft.
According to the Washington Post, which first reported the story Saturday, a computerized screening system chose six of the hijackers for the tightened security measures.
Two others were selected because of irregularities in their identification documents, U.S. officials told the Post.
The ninth hijacker was listed in travel documents as traveling with one of the men singled out because of his identification, the Post reported.
Law enforcement and aviation officials refused to discuss other aspects of the screening, including which hijackers were selected, whether they were interrogated or whether the knives were discovered at security checkpoints, according to the Post." -CNN (3/02/02)

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/03/02/gen.attack.hijackers/

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Why is Hani Hanjour the only terrorist listed to not have a passenger number or seat assignment number, if he didn't have a ticket how was he able to get on the plane, and why did the first reports on the Flight 77 hijacker names list a "Mosear Caned" instead of Hanjour?

"His name was not on the American Airlines manifest for the flight because he may not have had a ticket." -Washington Post ("Four Planes, Four Coordinated Teams")

"American Airlines flight number 77. Cammid Al-Madar, and Mosear Caned (ph), Majar Mokhed (ph), Nawar Al Hazni (ph) and Salem Al Hazni (ph)." -CNN (09/14/01)

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

"QUESTION: What can you tell us about flight training that any of the hijackers had received? Did they receive any training here in the United States?

ASHCROFT: It is our belief and the evidence indicates that flight training was received in the United States and that their capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial.
It's very clear that these orchestrated coordinated assaults on our country were well-conducted and conducted in a technically proficient way. It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case." - Global Security (9/14/01)

___________________________________________________________________________________________________


http://killtown.911review.org/flight77/hijackers.html#fighter%20pilot

[RandomKoolzip]

1. I dunno. If it WASN'T a plane, what happened to all those people on board?

I believe there was some MIHOP involved, but there's one thing the conspiracy mavens have never been able to provide an answer for...I always thought that the "Missle Into Pentagon" subplot was the weakest link in the MIHOP chain anyways.

[walkon]

3. The people on board

are dead. No plane hit the pentagon. Not mutually exclusive. Evil is bad.

[RandomKoolzip]

That's barely an answer.

So what happened to those aboard flight 77?

[NJ_Lib]

10. I don't know... Maybe they were killed on the plane but...

... there's more to this story...? Maybe the government is lying about who piloted this plane? I don't know but something ain't right here...

[RandomKoolzip]

16. No, you're right....there's unfilled blanks galore to the official story.

But that doesn't mean we can just write an alternative "official" story with finger paint and crayola.

Maybe they're lying. Well, DUH! They're the government. Of course they lie. But would they really kill everyone on board a plane to cover up for the fact that they actually fired a missile into the pentagon, then tell everyone that the plane (on which everyone was killed using other methods) was the object that crashed into the Pentagon? Wouldn't be a hell of a lot easier to just crash the damn plane into the Pentagon in the first place? It's too circuitous, too Ian Fleming-esque.

Plus, I feel the media is distracting us by talking about what happened in DC that morning; the more stranger stuff happened in NY and Pennsylvania, stuff that can't be so easily dismissed by just bandying the word "conspiracy" about, derogatorily....

[savemefromdumbya]

71. did flight 77 take off?

if it did then they lost it - maybe over the Atlantic ocean

[Rabrrrrrr]

4. Here's one out of control theory I read a long time ago:

That all four planes that were hijacked were actually flown to Maine, where all the passnegers were rounded up and put on the plane that was later shot down over Pennsylvania. Two of the planes were outfitted with remote control flying devices by the Army, which then flew them into the WTC. The Pentagon was hit by a missile fired by an American military jet.

I don't remember for sure how they explained what happened to the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon, but I think their explanation was that that plane simply never left Maine; though it might have been that they used that plane to fly around the guys using the remote control. I wish i could remember for sure.

Total fucking nutcase idea, but, hey, every asshole has the right to make up their own bullshit.

[beingthere]

8. Every asshole has the right to make up their own bullshit, as the

administration reminds us every day, by example

[mirandapriestly]

41. Everyone has this anger toward those of us who question

the 9-11 story, but none against the gov who lied about it. I don't get it.

[Grateful for Hope]

42. I don't get it either n/t

[bmcatt]

44. Cognitive dissonance perhaps?

People have invested much of themselves in *needing* to believe the official story that they're unable to even ask the questions, much less suffer them to be asked by someone else.

I'd even go so far as to suggest that the vehemence with which some people attack anyone who questions the official story is a strong indication that they, deep down, know that the story they're supporting has holes you could... er... drive multiple planes through.

[Grateful for Hope]

46. So, perhaps the questions are "hitting nerves"

that denial is trying to bury.

This does make some sense.

Thanks!

[bmcatt]

47. Yup, when they fight back like this

it's generally because they think they may be wrong.

I'm not the originator of this idea, btw. I direct you to one of my favorite discussions on this topic, an essay by Paul Graham, What You Can't Say. He approaches it from a different perspective, but the end result is, I believe, the same.

[Grateful for Hope]

51. Thank you for the link!

I am going to read it tonight.

:hi:

[Rabrrrrrr]

50. I'm not angry at people who question it - I question it myself,

and I am convinced that our government let it happen. I think it ended up being far worse than they expected, though, leaving them with far more of a problem than they expected.

What I get angry at are the people who ask necessary questions, but then provide their own ignorant and nonsensical answers. I also get angry at the people who ask asinine questions, pretending to be profound, and then have to provide their own science fiction answers, and then pass it all off as "fact". I also get angry at people who obviously don't know shit about physics or engineering pretending that they do, providing totally implausible "scientific" reasons for why their fiction is "scientific". I also get angry at the people who use "common sense" as a scientific methodology in defiance of the truth of actual science (e.g., "My 'common sense' tells me that buildings don't fall down that way!").

[bmcatt]

53. Regarding steel skyscrapers falling due to fire

Please find *any* other incidence where this has happened. To the best of my knowledge, there have only been two times when a steel skyscraper collapsed (totally) due to fire - both of them happened on 9/11/01. It hadn't happened before and it hasn't happened since.

There *are* valid reasons to question why buildings would collapse in the manner that they did. Especially when you factor in that the second impact caused that giant fireball out the side of the building... Y'know what was in that fireball? Most of the fuel from the aircraft. Where'd the giant fire come from that caused that building to collapse *FIRST*?

Please, enlighten me.

[Rabrrrrrr]

54. So because it never happened before or since,

then the explanation must therefore be false?

See, that's the kind of "thinking" that makes me angry. It's not the asking of questions that makes me angry - asking questions is important - but the "my guts tells me otherwise" or "never happened before" or "I've never seen it happen that way, so it can't have" attitudes piss me off.

Probably it didn't even happen because no one ever flew planes into buildings before, and there are no buildings on that site now. Clearly, because at any constuction site I've worked on some little bits of wood and shingle are always left in the yard no matter how careful we are in cleaning up, the WTC "site" must never actually have had buildings on it, or we'd see some evidence of them having been there.

The entire construction and later "destruction" has just been one long worldwide conspiracy between photographers, governments, corporations, and millions of people who were given money to go back to their homes and lie that they "toured" the "World trade center", so as to perpetuate the fiction of its existence.

[bmcatt]

57. Why do counter arguments always try to use the extreme case?

I present a simple question which states, as its premise, that fire has, with, supposedly, two exceptions, never been sufficient to cause the structural failure of a steel skyscraper. Rather than attempting to rebut that question or the premise, you instead attempt to intepret my statement by use of an extreme position. How is this rational debate?

And, also for the record - I worked in lower Manhattan for a lot of years. I travelled through the WTC via the PATH twice a day, every day, for all of those years. I worked either down the block from WTC 7 or across the street from the south tower for the entire time that I worked in downtown Manhattan. Please spare me the false hysteria.

[Rabrrrrrr]

58. And I worked in WFC 3, and also went through the north tower

every day, including about 20 minutes before the plane hit it... woo ha, who cares? That makes no scientific difference in judgment.

I guess I went extreme because you aren't looking at this very scientifically - you act like the falling of the towers because of fire (though more accurately, a result of impact, fire, the way they were built, the time of burn, the poor asbestos covering, the contents of the buildings, the amount of fuel on the planes, the speed of the planes, etc.) is SOOOOOOOOO rare it is to be disbelieved.

I call bullshit on that because, in the realm of human history, the number of skyscrapers that have had major fires is so insanely small that's a purely irrelevant statistical sampling, AND the number of buildings that were constructed in the unique way the the two towers were, that had gigantic planes fly into them quite solidly at nearly 600 mph loaded with fuel near their tops, that have caught fire is.... drum roll please........ absolutely nil. Except, obviously, the Twin Towers.

So your argument, based on statistics, is entirely ridiculous. ENTIRELY.

You have NO statistical background on which to base your claim which is: "No skyscraper on fire has ever fallen this way, thus and therefore, EVERYONE IS LYING AS PART OF A CONSPIRACY who says that's how the Twin Towers fell."

So my example is not any more extreme than yours: I say that "Since no one every constructed buildings like that before, they must thus and therefore have not existed". How is that different than your argument? It isn't.

[bmcatt]

59. You're still assuming an extreme position

at least regarding what I stated.

I most definitely did not say "No skyscraper on fire has ever fallen this way, thus and therefore, EVERYONE IS LYING AS PART OF A CONSPIRACY who says that's how the Twin Towers fell." and I'd challenge you to find where I said that. I never even suggested that "everyone is lying" as part of a conspiracy.

Rather, I suggested that the official explanation of "impact and fire being sufficient to cause two of the tallest buildings to collapse into their own footprints" is at best far-fetched. Especially when you factor in that the building that collapsed first had far less burning jet fuel in the interior and the angle of the impact was clearly off-center (thus causing the diagonal explosion of jet fuel immediately after impact).

[DemInDistress]

61. Probably it didn't even happen because no one ever flew planes into buildi

The Empire State Building Plane Crash

B-25 Bomber Hits 78th Floor, July 28, 1945!!

[NJ_Lib]

9. See, that's the problem with having a corrupt government....

... Who the hell knows what to believe...?

As I tell my kid, if you lie to me, I'll never know if you're telling the truth again, so it is not so crazy for us to want answers to these very legitimate questions, or to believe our government is lying to us...

[RandomKoolzip]

12. Yeah, see, there's the problem.

I think there's a LOT of hanky-panky involved in the official 9/11 story. Too many missing details, too many anomalous events, too many unanswered questions. It's when those possessed of inferior intellect but superior imagination start filling in the blanks using figments of their own politicized interior lives that my bullshit detector starts going off.

I mean, Christ; there were a LOT of people on board that flight...where'd they all go?

[LifeDuringWartime]

30. people need to start asking these questions...

on the floor of congress, at the daily press briefings, and on TV and radio. either force the government to fill in the gaps or look ridiculous ignoring it.

[Rabrrrrrr]

49. On the nosey!

Yes, far too many holes, and too many people filling them up with 'easy' answers that make no sense to logical people.

Why believe a simple answer ("our government is incompetent, and our president especially so") when it's easier to believe that a grand totally secret conspiracy involving four branches of the military, a thousand or so people all over the country, hundreds of construction workers, the CIA, the FBI, a few corporations, a couple other countries, a few more thousand people, and the ability of everyone to be told to keep a secret as they're planting explosives, ignoring attacks, or bombing their own facilities, as well as getting every major news media to quietly and willingly destroy all footage and evidence they have that something other than the official government record happened?

:shrug:

[Jazz2006]

63. Indeed.

That pretty much sums up the situation as well as the view/approach/tactics (take your pick) of conspiracy theorists here.

After all, why engage in critical thinking, why entertain logic, facts, or evidence, and why ask the right questions about governmental incompetence, corruption, bribery, failures and such when it is, apparently, much more inviting/fun/compelling (take your pick) for the CTers to dream up all manner of outrageous conspiracies and pretend that they're asking hard hitting questions about important and burning issues when they are doing no such thing, but are serving only to keep the real questions buried in a landslide of crap of their own making.

By that, I mean that the CTers, by embracing and promoting every ridiculous conspiracy notion ever asserted and by not criticizing even the most bizarre and outrageous theories advanced by their fellow travellers, have created the situation that they now bemoan - i.e. not being taken seriously by the vast majority of the population with at least two arcing brain cells.

Had they been more selective and more discerning, they might have avoided the dubious distinction of being thought of as "tinhatters" but ... they weren't and they didn't.

GWB should probably thank them for their assistance.

And that's what pisses me off.

[rman]

68. If it's an inside job then why would disposing of passengers be a problem?

What most likely "happened" to the passengers is that they died, one way or another.

[rman]

77. redundant

[longship]

2. Simple. He was on a suicide mission.

He didn't give a f*ck how he flew the plane.
He didn't care if the wings fell off.
His sole task was to fly the thing into the building, which he apparently did.

How do we know?

Simple, the hundreds of eyewitnesses on the three major highways near the Pentagon, who were stuck in rush hour traffic, witnessed it all.

[ShortnFiery]

5. So this pilot was the sleeper "Olympian" skilled among novices?

:wtf: over? Never-mind it makes people really scared to even consider alternative solutions. That's still understood.

[NJ_Lib]

13. I think if more people realized the skill it would take to...

... pull this off, they too would question the probability of this scenario... Talk to some pilots, ask them if a new pilot could pull off something like this...

[kenny blankenship]

27. He was a crappy pilot as evidenced by the fact that he flew by his target

or up to it to the east, realized when he saw the river or the airport that he'd gone too far and had too much altitude, then essentially had to make a U-turn to come around and hit the Pentagon.
A competent pilot would have lined up correctly from far out so he wouldn't have needed to make a violent manouver thus risking the failure of his mission.

What he did wasn't "Olympian" it was amateur hour. It looks "military" to a radar operator because no one who wants to keep their job would ever fly a commercial jet in that manner. It's not that a passenger can't do such manouvers it's just that throwing passengers around like that endangers their safety and ensures that they'll never fly with you again, hence you would never see anything but a military craft move like that.

Get yourself a free flight simulator and you'll quickly see what I mean. Wild-ass, swooping, last second/minute corrections are the sign of fucking up, not expert control.

[Ezlivin]

37. Are you a pilot?

Then shut up about using a flight simulator.

Come back to this forum when you've done several take-offs and landings in a real aircraft in real weather.

Then tell us how easy it is to pick a spot on the runway and not over- or undershoot.

[Name removed]

43. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bmcatt]

45. You're showing your ignorance

Sad to say... But it actually takes *trained skill* to have a plane go where you want it to. It's not as simple as "point the nose and that's where it goes". The idea that untrained pilots could execute high-difficulty, pinpoint maneuvers strains credulity.

Go out and spend the 40+ hours of in-flight instruction required to get even a private pilot's license and then come back and explain carefully why those of us *who are pilots* shouldn't questions.

This is not meant as an ad hominiem attack. Rather, it is an invitation to actually go out and gain the skills that are necessary to understand the subject matter (flying a plane) and then come back and discuss your own experiences.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is an extremely poor substitute for real time in the air.

[kenny blankenship]

48. What exactly are you trying to argue for?

I like to know things like that when people start popping off and calling me ignorant.

Are you arguing that it wasn't a plane-that it was a missile? Or just that someone like you did a great thing with a plane?

[bmcatt]

52. No, but an untrained pilot couldn't do those things

I wouldn't even presume to think that I'm a good enough pilot to do the maneuvers that have been ascribed to a plane that purportedly impacted the pentagon and I've got a couple hundred hours as a private pilot. I'm not even talking about the high speed looping descent, mind you... I'm saying the high-speed "approach" to a perfect impact (low) on a wall of the pentagon is difficult enough that I don't believe it was done by someone who was judged, by a CFI, to be incompetent to solo a plane.

I'm not saying it was a missile. I'm saying it's highly unlikely that it was a commercial airliner flown by an untrained pilot.

It is, indeed, possible to say both, "I know it *wasn't* X" as well as "I'm pretty sure it wasn't *Y*" without needing to also say, "But I'm sure it was Z". In this case, I don't know what impacted the pentagon. But I'm pretty damn sure that it wasn't a 757 flown by someone without a pilot's license.

You have expressed the opinion that a plane *could* be flown by an untrained pilot through all of the conditions (that I listed further down) and impact the pentagon. I'm suggesting that you take some flight training and discover, for yourself, exactly how difficult that prospect is.

[NJ_Lib]

55. That was my only point in this thread... Not yell about missles...

... just question how Hani Hanjour could pull off such a flawless stunt, and I mean STUNT, with the poor training and inexperience he had... By all accounts, he was a shitty pilot, and that was in a single-engine... How did he go from that status, to flying a 757 at 525mph, thirty feet off the ground...?

That's all I want to know... And the most difficult part of all, how did he hold this position, virtually parallel to the ground, until he met his target? You can tell yourselves he got lucky, but any trained and experienced pilots will tell you, ain't no luck like that... Nothing short of flying talent and years of training could accomplish such a mission... Sorry, just as I'm not buying the missle theory, I'm also not buying that "he got lucky"... He just didn't have the flying chops to pull this off...


It's like saying that I took a few gymnastics classes a few years back and even though I totally sucked at it, yesterday, I got real lucky... I did three forward double-flips, followed by two backward-flips, followed by a triple-axle into a split, finishing with seven cartwheels across a mat... Hey, it could happen, right? I got lucky...

[longship]

22. Special pleading!!

This is rubbish special pleading, one of the more common illogical argument methods of the tin foil hat crowd.

You cannot ignore the eyewitnesses. There were hundreds of them.

What are you saying really happened? That hundreds of people were delusional who saw an airliner fly into the Pentagon? That somebody pointed a "warp reality ray" at all those people to make them *think* that they saw something which was not there?

You *cannot* wave your hands, jump up-and-down, and screech about pilots when so many people on the ground witnessed the airliner do precisely what you claim it cannot. The witnesses saw the airplane crash into the building. There were hundreds of them.

But, I know, I know. Those hundreds of people are delusional and you, who was nowhere near the Pentagon on 9/11, have a monopoly on the truth.

NOT!

[JackRiddler]

64. "You cannot ignore the eyewitnesses"

Stop beating the strawman, look up: Are you saying they saw Hanjour in the pilot's seat?

[NJ_Lib]

6. There weren't "hundreds" of eye...

... witnesses... There were a few dozen outside the Pentagon who witnessed the actual plane...

Look, I'm not saying it wasn't a plane, as I said before, I hate conspiracy theories, but you really do have to ask yourself how the Chimp's version of events is possible...


At the least, I don't think the Hani guy was the pilot... I'm pretty sure he didn't have the flying chops to pull this off... So why say he was?

[longship]

24. Nope!!! Hundreds

It was fucking rush hour. There are three major highways within a mile of the Pentagon. There were ****hundreds**** of eyewitnesses.

Two were editors at USA Today, one the Sr. Editor of the USA Today Web site.

One was Paul Begala.

One was Gary Bauer.

There were politicians, pilots, military people, journalists, government staffers, and just ordinary people like you and me. The newspapers were *full* of accounts by the people on those freeways.

Your claim that there weren't is a fucking lie.

Here's some of the accounts which you cannot explain away with your special pleading.

[NJ_Lib]

26. Ok, but the thing is about eye witnesses is...

... there are "all-kinds"...

Here's some:

"I was convinced it was a missile. It came in so fast it sounded nothing like an airplane," said Lou Rains -Space News

http://www.space.com/news/rains_september11-1.html

"It just was amazingly precise," Daryl Donley, another commuter, said of the plane's impact. "It completely disappeared into the Pentagon." -News Journal (9/12/01)

http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2001/09/12terrorspreadsto.html

''The plane came in at an incredibly steep angle with incredibly high speed,'' said Rick Renzi. -Pittsburg 11 News (Photo source: boeing.com)

http://www.pittsburgh.com/partners/wpxi/news/pentagonattack.html




Please read my post once again... I'm not saying that a plane didn't hit the building, I'm only saying I don't think Hani Hanjour was the pilot, that's all... And if he wasn't, why is my government lying to me?

[longship]

Cherry picking!!

Another illogical method of the tin foil mad hatters.

In order to form a valid chain of evidence you cannot cherry pick. You have to look at the entire body of evidence and deduce what happened from that. There were many, many eyewitness reports on that day. The tin foil mad hatters ignore *all* the people who clearly saw an airliner and pick out those people who don't know what they saw, if they saw anything. This is what happens when a large group of people report on an event. People can be mistaken. People say things in the heat of the moment that are not precise. That's why you can't throw out any of the reports until you find out what the concensus is.

The vast majority of the witnesses, and all the ones who had a clear view of things, report the same thing, an airliner making crazy maneuvers and flying into the Pentagon. Many of these people were "trained" observers, like journalists (two USA Today editors, Paul Begala, and some others), pilots (Tim Timmermann, among others), military people, etc. These people's accounts make clear what happened.

A large airliner flew into the Pentagon on 9/11.

No amount of tin foil mad hatter illogic is going to change that fact.

[NJ_Lib]

31. I guess you just like to argue with yourself then...

... because I said fifteen fucking times in fifteen fucking posts, "DUDE, I DID NOT SAY A PLANE DID NOT HIT THE BUILDING"...

I'm a patient person who likes to debate but for the love of God, don't put words in my mouth please....

[longship]

32. Here's where I'm at on this 9/11 stuff.

I apologize, but there is so much rubbish going around about 9/11 that I get a bit peeved when people make claims like "a missile hit the Pentagon" or "WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition" and other crap. I presumed, and that was wrong. My bad.

I have a very high respect for valid investigative methods. I see so many illogical arguments surrounding 9/11 that I no longer wonder how the Chimp got into the White House, twice!!

I guess I wouldn't get so hot about this stuff if the people advocating these conspiracies weren't sometimes such a PITA. I've been called names, accused of being an administration appologist, etc. All I want is the truth behind the facts. One cannot get that by straw man arguments, special pleading, cherry picking, and other illogical methods.

None of the tin foil hat stuff helps our case. We need to be asking important questions about 9/11. There are many problems surrounding the official record that are very worrisome, like ChimpCo totally ignoring all the warnings, the connections between people involved with PNAC and the flight school which trained some of the pilots, and other stuff like that.

But we'll *never* get to the truth as long as the lunatic fringe is screeching about missiles hitting the Pentagon, controlled demolition at the WTC, disappearing airliners, and other totally debunked rubbish. All the tin foil hat stuff does is make it easy for those who don't want any investigation to say that we're all a bunch of loonies.

Well, I'm no loonie. I want to get to the truth as much as anybody. It's just that I want to go about it using reason, logic, and the chain of evidence. The tin foil mad hatters seemingly want to jump to any ridiculous conclusion that comes to their mind. That makes our job much, much more difficult.

This is why I sometimes get my shorts in a bunch about this stuff.

[NJ_Lib]

38. I know what you're saying, believe me...

... A few years ago, my SO and I would have WARS over this stuff... I would get so mad at him for saying stuff like: "You know Chimp and his crew deliberately helped in the 911 attacks" and "It would be impossible to orchestrate this without inside help... He would tell me that everything I do is being watched, listened to and recorded and I would joke back that sure, that new refrigerator I just bought probably has a Chimp-cam built right in... He would present to me the Pentagon "missile not a plane" theory and that would be the straw that broke my back... I would get really mad at him, call him a radical and not speak to him for a couple of hours... I have since apologized for my foolishness and have learned to always expect the unexpected and above all, you must always keep an open mind... You live and learn...

PS - I usually don't "bite" either, please accept my apologies for the above outburst... :)



Edited: Spelling

[longship]

65. No problem.

One of the problems of "on-line" is that it is difficult to discern people's attitudes, demeanors, etc. from what is entered. I guess that's what all those smileys are for. ;-)

[Name removed]

62. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[theSaiGirl]

73. Some common sense about mythical "hijackers"

Good Bad and the most ugly Americans
by Tony Cosmo Monday, Nov. 28, 2005 at 6:29 AM
you go to a ATM machine and videoed from the head to toe down. At the USA airports-same thing is done. Now how is it that NO FKN ARAB WAS CAUGHT ON VIDEO OR LISTED ON THE DOOMED FLIGHTS. & to 9 are ALIVE. How about the airport geek,who scattered and trashed all the evidence---seems he worked for Marvin Bush. How about Jiffy Bush and the hords of State troopers,who raided the flight school and planted or I say took all the computor files away--without a FKN warrent.
Anyone that can't see--MADE IN USA-is a dolt!
==================
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/11/1784820.php

[DS1]

7. When you're flying to die, you don't so much worry about whether

something is "safe" or not, or if your landing speed or angle is too high. Know what I mean, Vern?

[Rabrrrrrr]

11. Oh, you only say that because it makes sense.

Sheesh, get with the program. :eyes:

[NJ_Lib]

15. Taking risks is one thing, having the "skills" is a whole...

...other bowl of cherries, my friend...

If I was intent on dying, I still couldn't do a backward flip, no matter how suicidal I felt... Rough analogy but it works...

[Jack from Charlotte]

20. Vern. LOL! Vern is apt, IMO. (nt)

*

[Ezlivin]

35. Your "daring" pilot still has to contend with the physics of flight

Maneuvering an aircraft (particularly a "heavy") near the ground is very tricky.

In General Aviation the leading cause of fatal accidents is low-level maneuvering flight.

My CFI (Certified Flight Instructor) told me that the number one cause of accidents was caused by "get-home-itis", or the fact that the pilot just wanted to get on the ground. My CFI also told me that you "fly it all the way into the hanger", meaning that the flight is not over just because you've touched down.

If you are not a pilot and have only flown simulators, you have no idea what it feels like to maneuver an aircraft when you don't have a lot of altitude. If you make one simple mistake the aircraft will literally fall from the sky. The pilot of Flight 77 had to keep up his airspeed while in the turn (or perhaps even add speed depending upon how tight the turn was) to keep from stalling the inner wing.

The pilot of Flight 77 missed a very easy descending strike on the Pentagon and chose to do acrobatics with a large heavy aircraft. Either he was a skilled pilot or he was Hani Hanjour.

[NJ_Lib]

56. And if he was Hani Hanjour...?

... Then what? He just "got lucky"...? Please see my above "Gymnastics" argument why I do not think this is a possibility... I am not a pilot, but someone I love very much is and I trust him when he tells me there's no two ways about it here, either this plane was handled by someone trained and experienced for this specific mission, or it wasn't a 757... He seems to think it's that simple and I think agree...

[applegrove]

14. Pentagon be the largest building in the Woyld! For more on what real

pilots can do in a crisis... see Gimli, Manitoba. That there real pilot ran out of gas in a 767.. nowhere near the airport. And he landed safely - after glinding for a bit

http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/flying/gliding_into_infamy.htm

[NJ_Lib]

17. Here's the difference...

... "The pilot, Captain Pearson, was an experienced glider pilot (he co-owned a Blanik L-13 sailplane). First Officer Maurice Quintal had once been stationed at the Royal Canadian Air Force base at Gimli, 225 kilometres away, and was familiar with the landing strips"

[applegrove]

23. Yup. And they glided a jumbo jet. Pentagon, I repeat, & WTTowers,

the biggest buildings in the world. Coincidence? They didn't crash into 14 Maple Blvd. They crashed into buildings the size of small principalities.

Real pilots can think outside of the box like any professional. Al Qaeda didn't have to. They just had to have enough speed (keep speed up, don't slow down) which is an simple thing. And point. That is all. Two things had to be going through their minds.. Oh - and allah. They only had to think three things.

[NJ_Lib]

66. I hope you're kidding when you say...

... they "glided" this jet...? At 525mph...? And that's not what the government is claiming... They're saying they came in at a few dozen feet, parallel to the ground, NOT touching ground until the very end, right before impact... With an inexperienced pilot at the yolk? Ummm, I don't think so... And by the way, the Pentagon is not one of the biggest buildings in the world and only it's height would be relevent in our argument, not it's size...

[Ian David]

18. You ever watch me play Microsoft Flight Simulator?

That's the ONLY way I can fly the damn thing.

And with similar results.

[bluemarkers]

19. the 5 hijackers

worked together? Plus, they didn't care what happened. If they somersaulted all over DC it didn't matter.

[NJ_Lib]

21. Ok, let's say they worked together and didn't care about...

... anything...

Only ONE pilot can control the yolk at one time, and control he will need in order to make this kind of rapid descent and then level off at twenty or thirty feet off the ground, going 525 miles per hour, all the while avoiding obstacles... Only one guy can pull something like this off, with incredible control, concentration and precision...

Ummm, no, Sorry... It just didn't happen this way... Not with this pilot and especially with anyone else distracting him...

[GOTV]

29. You assume that he intended to hit where he did...

... The pentagon is a huge building. I think it would not be difficult to hit the building. But I agree that it would be difficult to hit a specific window on the building.

The guy meant to hit a huge building and he did. I don't know that he cared where he hit it.

On edit, I thought of another example.

I don't play darts but I can hit a dart board. If I did hit the dartboard and you believed I aiming at the exact square I hit for some reason, you would have a false assumption of my skill.

[Bushwick Bill]

25. Pilot geeks, please advise.

Especially on the first article. Also, the Omission Commission says the Boeing was doing 530 mph when it hit the building. Is it possible to fly a bird that fast a few feet off of the ground?
http://www.physics911.net/sagadevan.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0603/S00431.htm

[NJ_Lib]

28. That is all I want to know...

Is that too much to ask?

[bmcatt]

34. Possible, but probably difficult

I'm in the process of building a tinfoil hat myself. Unlike any who stand by the "official" theory, I don't claim to know the answers. I do have some troubling questions.

Background - I'm the possessor of a PP-ASEL license, without an instrument endorsement. That means I have a pilot's license (PP = Private Pilot) and I'm allowed to fly light piston-single airplanes that takeoff and land on a hard runway (vs. water) (ASEL = airplane, single-engine, land). No instrument rating means that, when I fly, I must rely entirely on what I can see through the windscreen. For comparison, the sorts of planes that I've flown are things like Cessna 172s, the planes that, so it's reported, the alleged hijackers were incapable of flying solo.

Things that, for me as a pilot, make me go "hmmm...":

1) It's *incredibly* easy to get lost in the air. There's no roads, nor signs in the sky. Even presuming there were navigation systems (GPS, inertial guidance, etc) in the cockpits of the airliners, they're rather non-trivial to operate and I'm pretty sure that "pentagon" isn't a selectable waypoint.

Q1) How did the hijacked plane (which supposedly impacted the pentagon) get from where it was hijacked to the Pentagon?

1a) Even if you know where you are, you need to use aviation charts, not road maps, to orient yourself in the air. Again, a non-trivial operation, even for an experienced "real" pilot, much less someone who hasn't even passed a checkride and received their license.

Q1a) How did the hijackers know even in which direction to point the nose other than "generally east"?

2) The sheer workload involved in flying a light plane can be overwhelming, even more so as you get closer to the ground (and there are more things to go wrong). Somehow I doubt these guys trained in CRM (Crew/Cockpit Resource Management) to know how to divide the work.

Q2) Presuming they *wanted* to impact the pentagon, how did they manage to do so without missing either short or long?

3) As a plane gets very close to the ground (less than a wing-span from the ground), something called "ground effect" comes into play. Basically, because you're generating lift so close to the ground, you get an additional "bounce" from the air cushion that happens beneath the wings. Real pilots know about this and have to accomodate for it when landing in order to get the wheels to touch down within hundreds of feet of where they want the plane to be. Otherwise, you hit hard first or float over your intended landing point.

Q3) Ok, so they were *flying* a plane at extremely low altitude into the side of a building... How'd they manage to actually *hit* the side of the building without either becoming a lawn-dart or bouncing over and landing further into the building? Simply keeping the nose pointed at the target is *NOT* sufficient.

4) Getting past all of the above... there's still a *LOT* of debris that's missing from a plane impacting *anything*. This is, theoretically, explained by saying that the fire destroyed aluminum, steel, etc.

Q4) How was there *any* DNA evidence found in the remains of a fire that was enough to incinerate / vaporize aluminum?


As I've heard some others try hard to espouse - a "conspiracy theory" requires super-human (/ supra-normal) activities to account for it. By that measure, I'd claim that the official theory matches that, not questions about how something that seems impossible happened.

Oh, as as for any questions regarding "But where'd the people go?" - I'm not saying that people didn't die. I'm not even saying that there weren't remains identified. Where's a chain of custody that proves that those remains came from the wreckage at the pentagon?

[Ezlivin]

39. As a private pilot I agree with what you've said

Anyone who has tried to flare on landing and found that their airspeed was too high knows what ground effect means.

Since ground effect occurs (generally) within ½ the wingspan and the wingspan of a 757 is 124 ft 10 in, ground effect would occur when the aircraft was within 62 feet of the ground.

As it says over at AV Web, "Be ready for the decreased drag encountered when descending into ground effect on landing by controlling your speed on final and maintaining the recommended speeds. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by those "extra few knots" that will cause you to float an amazing distance down the runway."

So how many "extra few knots" did the pilot of Flight 77 have?

[bmcatt]

40. A lot of extra knots if they vaporized

After all, the 757 had to carry enough speed to vaporize on impact (leaving the DNA miraculously untouched).

By the speed that they were supposedly carrying "over the threshold", I'm surprised they didn't crash a couple of miles beyond the pentagon.

The other "realistic" (to me at least) alternative would be an unskilled pilot panicing and forcing the yoke forward, thereby turning into a lawn-dart or flipping end-over-end as the nose buries itself in something hard but the tail wants to keep moving... In any event, though, the idea of a 757 disappearing into a hole the size of its own fuselage (and, btw, the wings folding back and vaporizing in the impact) seems improbable at best.

But it's a good thing that we're the nutters here, thinking that this is all just wild speculation and that the official theory is the best explanation of the facts, huh?

[Bolo Boffin]

33. He didn't fly that far above the ground for that long.

No real feat.

[Pacifist Patriot]

36. I'm still trying to figure out how they positively identified which...

of the hijackers was piloting the plane. Did they find DNA on a steering wheel? His profile was the only one with piloting capability, however meager? Come to think of it, how did they positively ID the hijackers? Passenger manifests can have false names, passports can be planted (if they even survive the crash). Did they raid his apartment and grab a hairbrush for comparison?

Seriouly, how certain is anyone with the identities of any of the hijackers let alone which one was piloting?

[FogerRox]

60. They were not the pilots, think Ex Saudi Air Force Pilots

Blue Angels caliber.

[Pacifist Patriot]

67. Well yes, I'm inclined to agree.

The speed of identification is suspicious to me. I have been speculating for years that military pilots were involved.

[rman]

69. Not only flying at ground level, but doing so immediately after

a tight, rapidly descending almost 360 degree turn - all at unusually high velocity.

Not the kind of maneuver that even the best passenger plane pilots are trained for. Not the kind of maneuver that passengers planes are designed for - not to say a passenger plane would break up during such a maneuver, but it is certainly outside normal operation and probably outside the flight-envelope.

[The Straight Story]

70. He WAS a bad Pilot and MISSED his target

The center of the pentagon. He was not able to pull it off. Damage would have been greater there then hitting the outside ring first.

[bmcatt]

75. But the plane was under power

There was no reason for him to "miss" his target... If he was skilled enough to fly the plane as he did, he could've gone around and lined up for a better bulls-eye shot.

I'm going to put myself in the mindset of a suicidal hijacker for a moment... I've got 72 virgins waiting for me if I can pull this off. All I need to do, at this point, regardless of what my original target might have been, is to get the tin can I'm flying to cause maximal damage to the pentagon.

For whatever reason, I've overflown the ideal descent point to nose down and plant this plane in the bulls-eye at the pentagon. Ok, no sweat - I do the looping descent, picking up speed on the way down. I'm now low and fast, but I'm still in firm control of the aircraft. I'm hitting light poles, but the engines are still running... aaaand... I'm heading for the outer wall...

Screw that for a lark - I don't want an outer wall, I want maximal damage... I'm going to start pulling back on the yoke, because I want to clear the pentagon. There's no way I'm interested in *stabilizing* this approach to the wall, because the wall's not what I want to hit.

Now... what happens next depends on how quickly I was reacting.

1) I catch it early enough - I go full throttle while I pull the yoke back and fly, full-speed or on the way up to it, over the pentagon to come back for another pass.

2) I catch it a little too late - I don't quite pull up in time and scrape parts of the airframe against the top of the outer wall of the pentagon, leaving gouges, possibly ripping parts of the cargo portion of the fuselage open, possibly even damaging the engines.

3) I catch it very late - I pull up late and hit the wall in the beginning of an *ascent*, not on a stabilized approach.

In any of the above cases, though, I don't just let the plane keep going to smash into the wall.

[theSaiGirl]

72. But why wasn't the mythic Flight 77 on the BTS database ?

Did the flight even exist ?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x26095#26113
http://www.nineeleven.co.uk/archive/dialoguewithholmgren.htm

[FogerRox]

74. Just watched Loose change II, they covered that. Not scheduled to

fly.

[Sinti]

76. It is entirely possible that these young men had more flight training

than is stated in the OCT. Where they got it is in question, but they may very well have had it. Perhaps in Pakistan, or another Wahabi-friendly nation with an Air Force.

Perhaps they even got it here:
http://www.wanttoknow.info/010915newsweek

As far as the remains go, they combed the crash sites with tweezers to find the remains, I'm sure.

I don't personally believe they didn't notify/give codes that they were hijacked, that seems highly implausible to me. That may be government CYA.