"There is a great story in a movie, a conspiracy by a group of people in the American administration who have an agenda and who used 9/11 to further that agenda,"That quote dovetails rather nicely into this one, uttered in a recent debate between Popular Mechanics editors and "Loose Change" conspiracists, made available Monday on Hot Air:
"In the world of paranoid conspiracies....there are no coincidences."
OK, confession. I boasted yesterday on this very site that I'd stayed away from these "Bush blew the Towers" fairy tales because of their bankruptcy of logic, but can no longer stand it. My own son has seen Loose Change and asked questions.
I'll tell you upfront I'm not an engineer, pilot, mechanic or crash investigator, nor have I visited a Holiday Inn Express lately. But I have worked around aviation the bulk of my career and can offer an opinion based on published reports and experience. The latter, to my knowledge, is not something possessed by the LC guys nor did they seem anxious to seek it out by interviewing people who had it. That said, here's my take on the debate video and the issue at large, for what it's worth.
The LC boys are certainly well-spoken and effectively masked their Bushitlerhate for most of the debate. As the PM guys said, questioning things is good. Where the LC guys lose me is their stubborn refusal to consider the destructive potential a hard surface can deliver on a relatively lightweight metal or composite travelling at high rates of speed and bathed in Jet A fuel.
Their main argument is that Flight 93 (and 77) had no residual debris left and everybody knows there should have been some left because huge airplanes don't just incinerate on impact. Problem is, we have few real-world examples to compare these to. Most of the time pilots are trying valiantly to save themselves and the passengers before impact rather than fire-walling the throttles and yelling Allah Akbar. But we do have some examples of airplanes hitting hard surfaces at high rates of speed.
I checked the NTSB accident database and found some reports from right here in Tennessee. This NTSB report details the crash of a single-engine Lancair near Memphis in 2004. All that remained were small pieces and a smoldering hole
The wreckage of the airplane was located in a plowed open field 1 mile north of Feathers Chapel Road in the vicinity of Oakland, Tennessee. The crash debris line was 60 yards wide and extended 75 yards south of the initial impact on a heading of 210-degrees magnetic. The engine assembly and fuselage were embedded 8-feet 6-inches below the surface of the ground.It goes on to point out those assemblies were generally in small pieces, as was the pilot, God rest his soul. Here's another smoking hole example, also from Tennessee:
The plane plunged almost directly into the ground, killing Mr. Zbedah. It slammed into a heavily wooded area at the edge of a pasture near Paris, Tenn., about 85 miles west of Nashville. It made a crater about 15 feet deep, 40 feet long, and 23 feet wide, with a debris field about 375 feet forward and 100 feet out in other directions.Flight 93 was at 10,000 feet when it began diving into the dirt. There were two large debris fields and a big hole in the mud. There were no reports of fireballs in the air preceding the crash according to the few witnesses. All the rational evidence points to the hole in Shanksville as being produced by Flight 93.
The LC guys seem to suggest it was diverted away while debris was dropped from the air into a pre-dug hole. Other than being an insane theory with no supporting evidence, they'd be better off pursuing whether 93 might have been shot down. There was a standing order to shoot after seeing what the other three planes had done, quite appropriate for the situation. Had an Air Force jet fired a missile it likely would have disabled the plane, not incinerated it. Such could account for the separated debris field.
But remember, when airplanes fall straight down at 500 mph, inverted, they tend to surprass their design limits and break up. Happens a lot to smaller planes that wander into thunderstorms. The LC guys are smart, but it's pretty clear they suffer from what most conspiracists do--a lack of ability to account for evidence that doesn't support their claims.
In their world anyone who debunks becomes part of the conspiracy, including professors at Purdue University, professional crash investigators or even peons like myself. But hey, it's the internet, anything's possible. The fact that Oliver Stone might devote celluloid to such flimsiness is not surprising. Perhaps "World Trade Center" was just part one of a series. It will be interesting to see whether the same crowd who just started a letter-writing campaign about "Path to 9/11" will do the same when it comes to Stone. I'm taking bets.
LIES, ALL LIES 9/12/06
Popular Mechanics' James Meigs neatly sums up the Loose Change movement with just one paragraph:
Meyssan and hundreds of Web sites cite an eyewitness who said the craft that hit the Pentagon looked "like a cruise missile with wings." Here's what that witness, a Washington, D.C., broadcaster named Mike Walter, actually told CNN: "I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought, 'This doesn't add up. It's really low.' And I saw it. I mean, it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon."Ouch.
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