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"Hunt the Boeing" Answers

Thursday, March 14, 2002

"Hunt the Boeing" Answers

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 No 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
plane’s engines.

More importantly, the question focuses on the plane’s size and weight, making
it sound extraordinarily heavy, but leaves out the size and weight of the
Pentagon – America’s 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. It’s 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 No 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 – 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 No 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 you’ve 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 No 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 don’t 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 can’t 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 No 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 you’re 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 No 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 journalists’ trick, as any Doonesbury reader knows.
I think Chief Plaugher answered the question pretty well: There’s a puddle (of
melted metal, not jet fuel – he’s not directly answering the reporter’s 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 No 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 can’t be that obvious: The two-story high impact hole (also seen in the
photo for Question No 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 it’s 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 didn’t bother to look at enlargement #2.

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2002 at 1:30:55 PM
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