Paul Boutin

by Paul Boutin and Patrick
Di Justo

[UPDATE: Agence France-Presse story is here. Patrick and I were also on Toronto's
International Connection radio show earlier.]

Paul Boutin
is a freelance technology
writer and former engineer in San Francisco.
Patrick Di Justo is an
astrophysics educator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
City who writes for Wired magazine and Wired News.

—
To be clear: We believe that American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon on 9/11/2001 because we know far too many friends and colleagues in Washington who saw the plane come in over the freeway - some right over their heads - and felt the earth shake as it disappeared into the Pentagon. And we think people who believe they can uncover the truth about anything by surfing the Web are deceiving themselves in a dangerous way.

But we couldn’t help taking up the challenge anyway.

As lifelong propellerheads who
firmly believe in asking questions, we found
Hunt the
Boeing an engaging puzzle, despite its tragic subject matter, but one full of obvious errors and misleading questions. Since many of our
friends continue to ask us if we’ve seen the site, we decided to document our answers to it, which we wrote separately. As might be expected, Patrick
focused on the math and science (you may remember his widely circulated
napkin math on the WTC attack),
while Paul picked apart the wording of the questions.

See the
original
site for photos that accompany the questions.

Question N^o
1

The first satellite image shows
the section of the building that was hit by the Boeing. In the image below, the
second ring of the building is also visible. It is clear that the aircraft only
hit the first ring. The four interior rings remain intact. They were only
fire-damaged after the initial explosion. Can you explain how a Boeing 757-200, weighing nearly 100 tons and
travelling at a minimum speed of 250 miles an hour* only damaged the outside of
the Pentagon?

Paul: The question and photos are misleading: Parts of the plane
penetrated the ground floors of the second and third rings of the building.
These photos show only their intact roofs. Eyewitnesses and news reporters
have talked about the
twelve-foot
hole punched through the inside wall of the second ring by one of the
planeís engines.

More importantly, the question
focuses on the planeís size and weight, making it sound extraordinarily heavy,
but leaves out the size and weight of the Pentagon ñ Americaís
largest office
building with three times the floor space of the Empire State Building - as
well as the difference in relative stiffness and energy absorption between a
building and an airplane. Each side of the Pentagon contains
over
100,000 tons of Potomac sand mixed into the steel-reinforced concrete under
its limestome facade. There are nearly 10,000 concrete piles anchoring
each side of the building. And in the wake of bombings in Oklahoma City and
Saudi Arabia, that portion of the Pentagon had just been
reinforced
with a computationally modeled lattice of steel tubes designed to prevent
it from collapsing after an explosion.

By contrast, the plane is only 100
tons of custom alloys stretched thin enough to fly. Itís not like a giant
bullet; more like a giant racing bike. Even so, the plane knocked down 10,000
tons of building material - 100 times its own weight - in the crash and
subsequent collapse. Another 57,000 tons of the Pentagon were damaged badly
enough to be torn down. The Brobdingnagian scale of the Pentagon makes the
total
area of damage seem small, but it would hold several Silicon Valley office
buildings, or an airport terminal.

Patrick: Watch the videotapes of the planes hitting the World Trade
Center. They were traveling at approximately 400 mph, and they hit an aluminum
and glass building. An entire plane went in, and hardly anything came out the
other side, 208 feet away.

Here we have a plane traveling at
nearly 250 mph (just over 1/2 the velocity of the WTC planes, meaning just over 1/4 of their kinetic energy), hitting the ground
(which would absorb much of that energy), and only then sliding at a much slower
speed into a steel-and-kevlar-reinforced concrete and brick building.
Obviously, it’s not going to go very far. Still, parts of the plane penetrated
into the C ring.

Question N^o
2

The two photographs in question
2 show the building just after the attack. We may observe that the aircraft
only hit the ground floor. The four upper floors collapsed towards 10.10 am.
The building is 26 yards high. Can you explain how a Boeing 14.9
yards high, 51.7 yards long, with a wingspan of 41.6 yards and a cockpit 3.8
yards high, could crash into just the ground floor of this building?

Paul: Again the question contains incorrect facts in its setup: As
reported
in the New York Times, the plane struck between the first and second floors
of the building. The high-res version of the photo shows a two story high hole
in side of the building. Don’t look where the fire truck is directing its
water, but towards the center of the photo ñ two floors out of four are knocked
out of the outside wall.

Patrick: The plane hit the ground first, then slid into the
building. If the landing wheels were not down and locked, the full height of
the plane would extend upwards into the second floor of the building, which is
what happened.

Question N^o
3

The photograph above shows the
lawn in front of the damaged building. You’ll remember that the
aircraft only hit the ground floor of the Pentagon’s first ring. Can you find
debris of a Boeing 757-200 in this photograph?

Paul: : Yet another leading question (”you’ll remember…”), but one looking in the wrong place anyway. At 250 mph, the plane did not stop at the
outside of the building.
Security
camera photos and eyewitness accounts from many credible people, including
AP reporter Dave Winslow, agree that the plane completely disappeared into the
building. If youíve seen photos of airline crashes after the fire is out, they
often look more like landfill sites than anything recognizable as having been an
airplane.

But since the question more literally asks for a photo showing airliner debris on the lawn,
here’s one. Here’s another.

Patrick: The Pentagon burned (or at least smoldered) for several
days. Was this photograph taken on September 11? Or was it taken after the
wreckage was moved away?

Question N^o
4

The photograph in question 4
shows a truck pouring sand over the lawn of the Pentagon. Behind it a bulldozer
is seen spreading gravel over the turf. Can you explain why the
Defence Secretary deemed it necessary to sand over the lawn, which was
otherwise undamaged after the attack?

Patrick: My father was a construction engineer. He would only put
a crane onto a grass lawn in an extreme emergency, and only after getting
indemnified against damages. No, the first thing he would do is to lay down a
pathway of steel plates, then cover them with gravel, to prevent his equipment
from getting bogged down in the soft earth. When you see in that picture is
a roadway being built to bring the heavy equipment across the lawn.

Paul: You donít have to be a construction worker to recognize a
road being built over the lawn, to support the vehicles dismantling the damaged
building and hauling away debris. I canít find any news reports (or people who
remember any) about Donald Rumsfeld personally ordering this work done. I
suspect the statement is false, and was added to make the activity seem more
suspicious.

Question N^o
5

The photographs in Question 5
show representations of a Boeing 757-200 superimposed on the section of the
building that was hit. Can you explain what happened to the wings
of the aircraft and why they caused no damage?

Patrick: I’m not certain the models are to scale, and they’re
certainly not in the correct orientation. Since the plane hit the ground and
skidded into the building, enough energy was lost by the initial impact and
friction with the ground that the engines probably did not penetrate the
building.

Paul: If youíre going to doctor evidence, do it right: Eyewitness
accounts say the plane hit from 45 degrees to the side. Adjust the silhouettes properly, and fix the parallax effect in the second photo. The plane fits the impact
area pretty well: Don’t look at the collapsed upper floors, but at the wider swatch knocked out of the ground floor. I would expect the wings, being weaker than the building, to collapse on the way in. But with no previous crashes of the sort to guide us, we can’t possibly predict what should have happened. If there’s anything we learned that day, it’s that we are poor judges of what is and isn’t possible.

Question N^o
6

The quotations in Question 6 correspond to statements
made by Arlington County Fire Chief, Ed Plaugher, at a press conference held by
Assistant Defence Secretary, Victoria Clarke, on 12 September 2001, at the
Pentagon.

When asked by a journalist: "Is there anything left
of the aircraft at all?"

"First of all, the
question about the aircraft, there are some small pieces of aircraft visible
from the interior during this fire-fighting operation I’m talking about, but
not large sections. In other words, there’s no fuselage sections and that sort
of thing."

"You know, I’d rather not comment on that. We have a
lot of eyewitnesses that can give you better information about
what actually
happened with the aircraft as it approached. So we don’t know.
I don’t
know."

When asked by a journalist: "Where is the jet
fuel?"

"We have what we believe is a puddle right there
that the — what we believe is to be the nose of the aircraft. So -"

Can you explain why the County Fire Chief could not tell
reporters where the aircraft was?

Paul: Quoting people verbatim to make them sound like they are
dissembling is an old journalistsí trick, as any Doonesbury reader knows. I think Chief Plaugher answered the question
pretty well: Thereís a puddle (of melted metal, not jet fuel ñ heís not
directly answering the reporterís idiotic question) that was the nose, and a
few small pieces visible, but no large sections.

Patrick: Are any government officials telling any journalists anything these days?

Question N^o
7

The two photographs in question
7 were taken just after the attack. They show the precise spot on the outer
ring where the Boeing struck. Can you find the aircraft’s point
of impact?

Paul: The answer is front and center in the photo, maybe to make us
think it canít be that obvious: The two-story high impact hole (also seen in
the photo for Question N^o 2) is immediately to the right of the
fireman, partly hidden by the spray of water from the fire truck. Look at the
second high-res photo and you can’t miss it. Are we supposed to think itís a
two-story archway of some sort? See pre-crash photos or the surviving sides
for comparison.

Patrick: In enlargement #1, the impact hole fits in the
rectangle formed from pixel(1232,1088) to pixel(1492, 1545).

After that, I didnít bother to look at enlargement #2.