The Pentagon strike

The American Society of Civil Engineers team, which worked with the Pentagon’s renovation office, reconstructed the impact from the damage, photographs and eyewitness interviews. It found the plane, weighing about 181,520 pounds, struck at about 460 knots (780 feet a second), nearly level and at ground level, at an angle of about 42 degrees to the wall. [1]

The facade damage stretched roughly 90 feet at the entry point. The team concluded that the outer parts of both wings did not enter the building; the damage extended about 230 feet through the first floors of rings E, D and C, ending at a hole in the inner wall of Ring C. [1]

Air-traffic and radar records follow Flight 77 from Dulles through its turn and dive. [2]

The no-plane case rests on three points: early photos showing a hole that looks too small for a 757, the absence of large pieces of wreckage on the lawn, and the government’s refusal for years to release video. The film Loose Change, whose makers debated the editors of Popular Mechanics on Democracy Now! in 2006, made it famous; one of its researchers called the missing plane “our best evidence.” The film quoted CNN’s Jamie McIntyre saying there was “no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon”; the rest of his sentence was that the only crash site was the building itself. [4]

Against it: the damage on the facade was much wider than the hole people focus on, which is the exit hole in the Ring C wall; the engineers found a damage pattern matching a plane’s fuselage and inner wings. The engineers recorded an eyewitness who saw the plane strike three light poles on its way in. Items recovered from the crash site and shown at the Moussaoui trial include a partial ID card reading “ALHAZMI.” [1][3]

The two security-camera videos released in 2006 are low frame-rate and show the plane only as a white blur near the ground before the fireball. That has kept the argument alive, but it is a limit of the cameras, not evidence of a missile. [2]

The Defense Department kept the security-camera footage back until the Moussaoui sentencing trial ended, saying it was evidence. Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request in December 2004 and released the videos when the Pentagon handed them over in May 2006. [1][2]

Judicial Watch’s president, Tom Fitton, said he hoped the release would end the theories that something other than Flight 77 hit the building. It did not: people still ask why a building that heavily guarded had so few cameras covering that wall. [1]