THE ATTACK PATH
"However, when Baxter (Sheri Baxter, flight instructor) and fellow instructor Ben Conner took the slender,
soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs during the second week of August, they found he had
trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a
federal pilot's license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight
instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons."
(Newsday)
Local copy - original removed.
As we've seen, one of the most curious elements to this event is where the aircraft struck the building.
Presumably sophisticated attackers would have researched the layout of Washington D.C. and would be familiar with the Pentagon grounds.
During the time they would have been casing the Pentagon this construction would have been obvious.
In fact, it was public knowledge, "In the July/August, 2001, issue of Structure magazine, Mike Biscotte co-authored a paper on his role in
“Retrofitting the Pentagon for Blast Resistance.” He ended the article somberly with the sentence, ”It is a design, however, that
all involved earnestly hope never is tested.”
(Virginia Tech College of Engineering)
If you look at the left photo above you will see the first view of the Pentagon the alleged hijackers would have seen as they approached after flying
directly over the unprotected White House. It is a virtual landing field without any obstructions at all.
They could have hit directly into the main offices including the Secretary of Defense. For some reason they
went 270 degrees out of the way at high speed, and performed a very sophisticated maneuver with no possible military advantage.
In the photo on the right the red line indicates where a lamp pole was struck by the aircraft.
From the first lamp pole to the impact site I estimate to be about 1500 feet. 345 mph is 506 feet per second.
This would be roughly 3 seconds of time to concentrate with lamp poles bouncing off the wings to level out and hit the
Pentagon perfectly between the first and second floors without even grazing the lawn.
So you're nervously flying a 757-200 for the first time. Years of planning have gone into
the operation. Your goal is to strike at the heart of America and inflict as much damage as possible. You have the
significant psychological/emotional pressure to succeed as a martyr in the world of radical Islam. You have no idea when interceptor jets are coming.
So you decide to pass the unobstructed front of the building, do a maneuver that a seasoned 757
pilot would find challenging, enter Reagan International air space, risk the whole mission on lamp poles, hit a containerized
generator trailer, clip a cable spool or two, demolish two construction trailers, fly through a tree and hit the only
blast resistant and least occupied wedge of your target?
