Re: pandora's black box flight 77 -- pilots show the truth
:bank:
00:12:55
"Hani Hanjour [one of the hijackers of Flight 77] allegedly executes a 330-degree turn at 530 miles per hour, descending 7000 feet in two and a half minutes to crash... into the ground floor of the Pentagon." The documentary cites a pilot named Russ Wittenberg who claims that a Boeing 757 "could not possibly have flown at those speeds... without going into a high speed stall... The airplane won't go that fast when you start pulling those high G maneuvers".
The maneuvers described are well within the capabilities of a Boeing 757, which is rated for much higher G-forces than such a turn would produce (see
here; be aware that this site claims the plane was remotely controlled, a conspiracy hypothesis to which I do not subscribe).
00:15:15
The film quotes Danielle O'Brien, an air traffic controller on duty on 9/11, who says of Flight 77, "The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought... that it was a military plane."
Although other factual errors in the film can be explained as simple mistakes or oversights, this is the first one that cannot be. This is an example of the flatly dishonest tactic called "quote-mining", often employed by creationists, in which a person's words are made to seem to be saying something other than they are by removing relevant context. As the
full quote shows, the air traffic controllers thought Flight 77 was a military plane not because it displayed any unusual speed or maneuverability, but because it was flying in a fashion that would have been highly dangerous for any commercial airliner. Obviously, the hijackers were not concerned about the safety of the passengers.
00:15:25
The film discusses the damage to light poles near the Pentagon, which were ripped out of the ground by collisions with Flight 77's wings as the hijacked plane made its final approach. "Flight 77 managed to tear five light poles completely out of the ground without damaging either the wings or the light poles themselves."
At first glance, this might seem like an anomaly. But as previously mentioned, the filmmakers' proposed explanation is that the Pentagon was damaged by a cruise missile. The Tomahawk cruise missile, which they mention specifically, has a wingspan that is
all of eight feet. How could such a missile possibly have knocked down the light poles? This is a question the filmmakers ignore.
This is yet another example of the conspiracy tactic which I call "the unexplained sinister assertion": some apparently anomalous piece of evidence which the filmmakers state in deeply sinister tones, implying that it is an insurmountable problem for the ordinary explanation. But then they never explain how their conspiracy hypothesis accounts for it any better. In fact, in some cases (such as this one), the ordinary explanation accounts for it much better than the conspiracy hypothesis.
Why assume, in any case, that this impact did not damage the plane's wings? They might well have been disintegrating already by the time the plane impacted the building. Significant amounts of debris were found on the Pentagon's lawn (
photos). Additionally, the claim that the knocked-down light poles were undamaged is false. In reality, they were severely bent and even sheared off at the top by the force of the impact. See photos
here and
here.
00:16:25
"Why is there absolutely no trace of Flight 77? ... The official explanation is that the intense heat from the jet fuel vaporized the entire plane."
I would very much like to know who proposed this "official explanation", because it is plainly ludicrous. I suspect it is a straw man of the filmmakers' invention. To my knowledge, no one has ever suggested that Flight 77 was entirely vaporized by the heat of the explosion; rather, Flight 77 disintegrated because it was crashed at 350 mph into a nine-foot-thick wall of reinforced concrete and steel. (The filmmakers' comparisons to other plane crashes which left significantly more debris are irrelevant, since the cases they cite concern planes that crashed into the ground, a considerably softer medium.) Such a catastrophic impact would not be expected to leave large pieces of the plane intact. However, that fact notwithstanding, a significant amount of recognizable debris
was found - including body parts and even bodies of passengers still strapped into their seats (
source, and additional photos; see also
here). Additionally, Flight 77's black box and cockpit voice recorder were both also found (
source).
00:18:35
Among the debris found at the Pentagon was a piece of a single turbojet engine, approximately 3 feet in diameter, which some have claimed was part of the plane's auxiliary power unit (APU). The film quotes spokespeople from Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce, the two companies that manufacture 757 engines, both of which claimed it was not a part from their company's engines.
The claim about this component being part of an APU is apparently untrue, and seems to be a red herring cited by the filmmakers. In reality, experts who have studied the photos have concluded that it was probably part of a compressor or turbine disk from the Rolls-Royce RB211-535 turbofan engine, which American Airlines 757s are equipped with (
source).
The Rolls-Royce spokesperson may simply have been mistaken; alternatively, this may be another instance of deliberate quote-mining by the filmmakers. The quote they briefly show says that the spokesperson claimed this was not a part of a Rolls-Royce AE 3007H engine, a
different model than that of a 757. The AE 3007H engine is installed on, among other things, the unmanned Global Hawk surveillance craft. Some conspiracy theories, although not
LC, claim a Global Hawk struck the Pentagon. This claim therefore refutes, not supports, conspiracy ideas. Confusingly,
LC also implies that the part may have come from a U.S. A-3 Skywarrior fighter plane, which would contradict the film's own explanation if it were true. Consistency does not seem to be a great concern of the filmmakers.
00:21:00
"...Employees at the Pentagon were seen carrying away a large box, shrouded in a blue tarp. Why the mystery?"
The filmmakers have debunked their own claim here, as acknowledged in
this post from
LC's official forum.
00:21:40
"Why is the damage to the Pentagon completely inconsistent with a Boeing 757? ...The only damage to the outer wall is a single hole, no more than 16 feet in diameter." The film claims that a 155-foot-long 757 should have caused more damage, and asks why there is no visible hole from where the wings and engines slammed into the building.
To begin with, the real world is not a Warner Brothers cartoon. A plane crashed at high speed into a solid object will not leave a hole that is an exact silhouette of itself. This is especially true if, as eyewitness reports indicate, the plane crashed and skidded along the ground before striking the Pentagon; in such case, its wings would already have been disintegrating before impacting the building. Nevertheless, there
is extensive damage to the Pentagon consistent with the impact of a jumbo jet. See
here for a large picture (warning: 2.3 MB image), and
here for a gallery of somewhat smaller photos. Clearly, although the plane's wings did not punch cartoon-like holes into the Pentagon, they did inflict extensive damage to its facade. (As multiple sites have pointed out, airplane wings are designed to be as light as possible, and would have shredded upon impact with the building's heavily reinforced load-bearing columns.) See
here and
here for detailed analyses.
The film asks (00:17:55) what happened to the plane's massive, six-ton main engines, and the answer is that they did indeed punch into the Pentagon. An Army report on the cleanup two weeks after 9/11 (
source) says: "On the inside wall of the second ring of the Pentagon, a nearly circular hole, about 12-feet wide, allows light to pour into the building from an internal service alley. An aircraft engine punched the hole out on its last flight after being broken loose from its moorings on the plane."
00:28:30
"...Why did people keep reporting a second explosion at the Pentagon [after the plane had crashed]?" [The film plays several clips of live news reports from 9/11 citing reports of secondary explosions.]
This is another example of the unexplained sinister assertion. Why would we expect secondary explosions from the impact of a cruise missile but not from the crash of a jumbo jet?
00:29:00
"Surveillance cameras from a gas station, Sheraton hotel, and the Virginia Department of Transportation captured the entire thing. [The film shows vantage points from these places overlooking the Pentagon.] However, the FBI was there within minutes to confiscate the tapes... If the government wishes to prove once and for all that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, all they would have to do is release one of those tapes."
I too would encourage the public release of these tapes, assuming these claims are accurate. However, when evidence does exist contradicting the preferred conspiracy hypothesis - recordings of phone calls made by passengers on the hijacked planes, which will be discussed later - the filmmakers simply appeal, without a shred of embarrassment, to secret government technology that can allegedly be used to imitate people's voices. If these tapes were produced, what would prevent the conspiracists from claiming they too were forgeries?
00:29:45
"...Why do satellite photos taken four days before 9/11 show a white marking on the front lawn [shows satellite photo of an 'H'-shaped mark on the ground outside the building], marking almost the exact trajectory of whatever hit the Pentagon four days later?"
This is yet another example of the unexplained sinister assertion. Why would a cruise missile need a white mark on the ground to guide it to its target?
In fact, the entire Pentagon conspiracy hypothesis is an example of the unexplained sinister assertion on a grand scale. Assuming that the U.S. government wanted to stage an attack on the Pentagon and went to all the trouble of making a commercial jumbo jet and all its passengers disappear to make it seem as if it had been used as the weapon, why would they not just
actually crash the plane into the Pentagon? What on earth would be the point of using a cruise missile instead? This is a massive logical gap which this movie never even attempts to answer.
Many conspiracy theories suffer from this defect, which I call the fallacy of unnecessary complexity. Given the sinister nature of the average conspiracy theory, why would the plotters choose a scheme involving a byzantine, sometimes Rube Goldbergian, amount of superfluous complication - vastly increasing both the risk of failure and the risk of discovery - when a much simpler plan would have achieved their goals just as well? To name one example, if the assassination of President Kennedy was a conspiracy, why would the conspirators adopt the insanely risky scheme of shooting him in broad daylight with thousands of people watching, when they could have poisoned him in some surreptitious manner and attributed his death to a stroke or heart attack?
There is one more problem for 9/11 conspiracy theorists - a big one. Unlike the crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the impact on the Pentagon took place in a heavily populated area. As the film itself notes (00:13:25), "[Flight 77's] final approach took it directly across Interstate 395." Given this fact, one would expect there to be a great number of people who witnessed the crash, and indeed this is the case. The problem for the conspiracists is that these people, virtually without exception, reported seeing a Boeing 757 - and
not a cruise missile - hit the Pentagon. (Read testimonies of eyewitnesses
here,
here,
here and
here.)
LC veers away from this devastating evidence, creating an illusion of equivalence by stating only that "some" people saw a commercial airliner while others saw "a small, 8-to-20-passenger commuter plane" (00:24:25). However, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of witnesses saw a jumbo jet crash into the Pentagon; the scattered accounts of a smaller plane can easily be explained as mistakes, considering the brief time people had to witness such a shocking event. By contrast,
no one has reported seeing a missile. Even the filmmakers' star witness, a woman named April Gallop who was injured in the attack and claims she was pressured by mysterious government agents while in the hospital (00:24:55), never claims to have seen a missile. The filmmakers imply that this wild story is sufficient justification to reject the eyewitness accounts. Even if it is true, which seems doubtful, are we to believe that these sinister men in black tracked down every single witness to the impact - all the hundreds of people who were in the Pentagon, in buildings that overlooked the Pentagon, or driving down the road by the Pentagon - before any had a chance to talk to the media, and successfully coerced or blackmailed every single one into lying about what they had seen? This shows clearly what a ludicrously vast scope a putative 9/11 conspiracy would have to have to be successful.
Any scientific theory worth its salt is supported by not just one, but multiple lines of evidence all independently converging on the same conclusion. That is exactly the case here. We have a commercial plane, American Airlines Flight 77, missing along with all of its passengers (and what exactly do conspiracists suppose happened to those people?); we have numerous eyewitness reports of a jumbo jet striking the Pentagon; we have debris consistent with the crash of a Boeing 757, including the black box and cockpit data recorder; we have evidence of phone calls made by passengers on the hijacked flight, including Barbara Olson, the wife of U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson (
source); and last but not least, we have
forensic data identifying all 64 people aboard the plane through DNA and dental records. (See
here for a flight manifest.) There is only one conclusion to be drawn from the weight of this combined evidence, and that is that the hijacked Flight 77, and not a missile, crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. Assertions to the contrary are without grounding in logic or common sense.
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