The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [51]
Here is what the ASCE team’s Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, believes happened to the Boeing that smashed into the Pentagon:
Think of the external shell of the plane as a sausage skin, and the function of the structural frame as being mainly to contain the internal pressure at altitude. The plane’s structure doesn’t have much strength. What creates the power generated on impact is what we call its “mass and velocity.” And much of the mass in the case of a Boeing 757–200 is in the fuel-filled wings.
On September 11, the Boeing was reported to have approached the Pentagon flying very low, just a few feet off the ground, at some 530 mph. Eyewitnesses said the right engine hit a portable generator on the ground outside, the left engine a steam vault. Then the nose cone hit the limestone facade, and the facade’s columns cut into the fuselage. The right wingtip, which hit next, would have been cut by the columns. But when parts of the fuel-filled wing close to the fuselage impacted—given the speed at which it was traveling and its greater mass—it was the columns that would have been destroyed or badly damaged. The same series of events would have happened when the left wing impacted (though in reverse order because of the angle at which the plane hit the building). That is why the gash in the facade of the building was not as wide as the wingspan of the airplane.
By the time the aircraft’s mass had penetrated the building—by about its own length—it had been transformed into a violent flow of small and large projectiles of solid and fluid that ricocheted off the internal parts of the building. The ensuing fire, we concluded, devoured the flammable part of the airplane’s debris inside the building. The Boeing’s tall tail and rudder assembly would have been shattered when it impacted with the edges of building slabs on the upper levels.
That may seem a compelling, credible explanation of what befell Flight 77. The skeptics, however, have long made much of the supposed lack of debris at the crash site. Photographs published in “Pentagon 9/11,” the account of the day’s events by the Defense Department’s Historical Office, however, do depict some debris outside the building: mangled pieces of metal, one clearly marked “AA,” for American Airlines, another evidently a part of the fuselage bearing part of the airline’s livery, and smaller material—fragments rather than chunks.
The ubiquitous Griffin has suggested that evidence may have been “planted.” Dr. Fetzer, cofounder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, went further and suggested how the planting may have been achieved. “Don’t be taken in,” he said. “Debris begins to show up on the completely clean lawn in short order, which might have been dropped from a C-130 … or placed there by men in suits who were photographed carrying debris with them.”
Preposterous. Reports, and photographs taken before removal by the FBI, reflect the finding of significant remains of the aircraft inside the building: seats, including one from the cockpit still attached to a piece of floor, cockpit circuitry, pieces of Rolls-Royce turbofan engines, landing gear, pieces of the nose gear, a wheel hub, a piece of the nose cone, a piece “the size of a refrigerator,” a tire. Some parts, reportedly, bore Boeing part numbers consistent with the airplane that crashed.
Try telling Tamara “T” Carter that the debris at the Pentagon was planted. Carter, herself an American Airlines flight attendant, went to the scene two days later as a volunteer to serve refreshments to the cleanup crews. She has recalled seeing recognizable parts of a plane, the internal American upholstery with which she was familiar—and body parts. She and family members were also shown