NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 4: LATITUDE COLOR TRACK

NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 4: LATITUDE COLOR TRACK
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
rough draft, last updated 8/29 early am

The Color Track System
The tedium of mapping out the otherwise-ignored and probably irrelevant global grid beneath the plane in the NTSB animation is finally paying off, and looking at the east-west latitude lines passed or paralleled on the screen, I’ve made some interesting discoveries.

I have identified eleven latitude lines of note that frame the flight’s north-south dimensions and run along its east-west axis. I color-coded each line individually tracing it, continuously through its flight. each line is verified at multiple points as contiguous, parallel to its neighbors, and having a steady relation to the evolving flight path/ground track – in generally far more parallel than is warranted for real-world latitude lines but a general good fit for lines oriented to magnetic north.

1-blue – northernmost, never crossed
2-violet – next line south
3-purple – the most consistently paralleled line on the outbound flight.
4-magenta
5-red
6-orange
7-yellow – actually the first line crossed at the runway
8 –green
9 – aqua – the most consistently paralleled line on the outbound flight.
10 –sky blue – southernmost line actually crossed
11 – dark blue (intermittent, never crossed)
Here are lines 4-11 as seen at 9:07:39, headed more or less east (84 magnetic at this spot). Note that here on the south side, the exact lines at or near to north half flight path are not entirely clear. Lines 2 and three are there as well but unmarked due to lack of clarity. Reading the south path from north yields similar results, but there are better views that illustrate the color continuity.

To show how I tracked them, I’m imbedding a rudimentary “animation” of several dozen frames made in Photoshop of stills from the animation with the colored lines traced on. This is version 2, with another version or two to come before I call it good enough. The music is my own, from '99.


Initially what I saw was something like this over the full flight path:
(new window for full size)
I think it's a bit wrong, arrived at by misreading the cross-points at the south turn slightly, and by copying the exact bend I had mapped out for line 3 (see below) for each line. But while this grid came close to explaining what the animation shows, there are some serious perspective issues at work, and the obvious point that there's no such bend visible in the onscreen "latitude lines." I'd guess a subtle curve would actually explain it better, but also started tinkering with some straight-line solutions. Straight lines visibly and logically make more sense, and are more likely correct. But compared to what's seen in the video, this one at least is off on significantly on several points.


Examples:
Yellow Track – Line 7

Just to start, I’ve marked the ends of the color-coded latitude lines as the flight path turns sharply south around 8:55 am, just after the takeover. Eight of the 11 lines (lines 2-9) are crossed in this ominous maneuver roughly as mapped out below. Note where line 7 (yellow) crosses at the west end of the path, during the turn at about 8:58. Keep this location in mind as we shift attention to the other end(s) of the flight path.

The yellow line continues down the middle of the space between the outbound and return flights. At the other end of the bent, elongated horseshoe flight path, the line still runs and is visible in both directions. Just after takeoff - 8:22 am the plane is paralleling line 7, line 8 visible to the left just north of the return flight ground track (and line 9 – aqua – is also there but not clear enough to mark), and 6 to the right. Perspective here is fierce, and the picture gets clearer as the plane gets higher.

Here it is an hour later as it neared the same point; this is the bottleneck of the flight, where we can see an easier point for referencing the other side and establishing continuity. There are about 2.5 parcels marked out by three lines running between the two paths, and the angle is clear to see. If these are east-west lines, why is the plane angling to the right in both directions when it was supposed to be southwest then northeast, and should slant to the left?

Purple Track - Line 3
In the video above, watch from frames 12:34:48 to the south turn.The red line down the center is number 5, the magenta number 4, and purple is number 3, which is interesting to follow. It first passes under flight path at about 8:36, during northward turn. Line 2 (violet) is also barely passed a minute or so later and then paralleled, though the plane remains south of line 1 (blue) the whole time. Follow the track ahead a few frames, and notice that as the plane corrects back to the south it passes near line 3, but the ground track never again touches or crosses it until the south turn at the end there.
In order for this single line to both cross during the north sweep and again as it turns south, at least as I’ve plotted those points, it could not be east-west in relation to the official flight path. The most logical conclusion is that it has a slant, shown here as the straight purple line. However, the ground track does not cross over or touch this line again in the animation between these two points, as it would at 8:47 if a straight slant. In fact it almost seems to bow around that point from slanted to true east-west. This may sound strange, but compare the straight slant to the bowed line with what’s seen in the animation and tell me if this doesn’t fit better. Or is the roughness of my graphics, like the placement of 8:47 plot, enough to throw this off and insinuate a bend?
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Aqua/Sky Blue Track – lines 9 and 10
Line 9, coded aqua, is the one most closely paralleled on the return flight. The third southernmost line, it’s first intersected by the ground track around9:01. Line 10 (sky blue) is to its right (south), of course also closely paralelled. Together they frame its return flight. 9:00:39 - just after the south turn but straightening out to head east - lines 3-10 shown here – line 9 (aqua) is just south of the ground track here, but the plane soon crosses so it’s to the north, and then evens out and parallels right over for a while. The cross-point for line 9 is further out than it seems, and is clearly not parallel here (as I said in the video - above - will be fixed in version 3).
Despite 20 minutes travel and a recorded northward turn, line 9 is still running parallel and near the ground track, which is only slowly approaching line 10 (sky blue). Now – heading slightly northeast (mag heading 90, 80 real) – should it be trending slightly south between “latitude lines?”

And finally tracing the lines through the final approach loop, we see that aqua line 9 is the one that crosses the Pentagon overlay map. I'm not able to match this with my path here without a final curve, but again, the red path is less than perfect (I had similar troubles matching up line 7 after takeoff). Either way, this rough intersection gives us an end point to draw a more precise track of lines 9 and 10.
Looking for traight line solution, none seemed to work for all points. But I was able to soften the curve greatly and found the best fit, much better than my bent model above. On the whole it’s effectively straight, so I’m thinking now the lines are most likely straight but clearly slanted from reality. I keep seeing a curve if not a bend, but it's subtler than I thought,and possibly an illusion from my flight path graphics' imprecision (I have below corrected at least one small spot, placing 9:15 a few minutes further north to match the csv, which helps the straight lines fit). This graphic shows a curved version that works quite well along with the closest fit straight solution (lines slanted at about 83 degrees, seven degrees counter-clockwise from reality). Note the marginal difference.
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To come: the final map of all lines that works best at all points then I am done with this stupid subject.
Then final grid analysis and overlay map rotation issues relative to that and then I'm really done.

BARBARA HONEGGER

THE PSYCHIC MUNCHKIN BEHIND THE HOLY GRAIL
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/The Frustrating Fraud
December 15 2006

Perhaps the oddest case in the small but fertile world of government functionary-9/11 Truth crossover is that of Barbara Honegger, a dedicated but elusive and little seen 9/11 warrior with murky roots (apparently military and intelligence). She was allegedly into weird parapsychic stuff, channeling voices of supercomputers from the future and whatnot, [1] before she went to work in the late 1970s for a rising star named Martin Anderson at the Hoover Institute (where he remains as a Senior Fellow). She then followed Anderson to the White House as an assistant to join the Reagan-Bush transition team in 1980. Anderson advised Reagan on everything from foreign intelligence to education, finance, and arms control, probably worked for Bush sr., and during the Clinton Years focused on teaching classes at Stanford (home of the Hoover Institute and where Condi Rice was briefly provost). Anderson was later an advisor to George W. Bush in his 2000 presidential campaign, [2] and eventually became a member of Rumsfeld’s influential Defense Policy Board in 2001. [3]

Muchkin Honegger smiling with Reagan and Bush in the White House.

Honegger herself had split off from her Republican benefactors early; she only served the Reagan White House as a researcher and policy analyst until she resigned in 1983 under unclear circumstances – either over sexual discrimination or something else. In May 1985 Newsweek ran a piece on Honegger titled “The Munchkin's Musical” that stated “White House aides began whispering that Honegger was a believer in ESP who claimed she'd ridden on Halley's comet.” [4]

At the time she was also among the first to have leaked details of the “October Surprise” scandal, much of which was later verified by numerous involved parties. The deal was allegedly made by George Bush and William Casey to delay the release of the hostages in Iran - a delay that cost Carter the White House and gained it for Reagan and Bush. [5] Her charges culminated with the 1989 book “October Surprise,” predating Gary Sick’s work of the same name (which does not mention her) by two years. In the end, the scandal cost Reagan nothing, covered up by an investigation headed by a certain Lee Hamilton, who would go on later to 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group fame. Honegger later left a small mark on the Iran-Contra scandal, carried out as it was by largely the same networks responsible for the October Surprise, continuing to weave a picture of Bush-centered intrigue.

Despite all this, she not only remained alive but went on to tie Bush's son and former Defense Secretary in with carrying out 9/11, her works on which carry the disclaimer "all of Honegger’s research and publications on September 11 are solely in her capacity as a concerned private citizen and do not imply official endorsement." This is because in 1995 she was given a cushy job as Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School, which she holds till the present, writing about such things as a cyber-defense exercise in 2002: “all the National Security Agency’s Trojan horses and Air Force and Army’s info-warriors couldn’t break through the cyber walls erected by the Naval Postgraduate School’s ace “Blue” Team,” she wrote. [6] How ironic then that what some suspect of being NSA Trojan horse 9/11 arguments should have eventually broken through her psychic shields and into her research.

Honegger’s role in the 9/11 Truth movement is huge and will perhaps go down as her crowning achievement, for good or ill. Her legacy here is centered on revealing to Mike Ruppert inside info on the War Games of 9/11 which scrambled the defense and were probably co-ordinated by a Maestro working for Dick Cheney. These revelations formed what Ruppert called “in my opinion – the holy grail of 9/11 research,” and a key point for the smarter edge of the movement at large. [7] Her credentials thus seem solid, but her later works I’ve seen are sloppy and full of holes and leaps. In October 2004 she reportedly told a forum in Los Angeles that “shoe bomber” Richard Reid was really Osama bin Laden, who apparently dyed his hair, trimmed his beard, removed a few wrinkles and turned himself in as it were by trying to ignite his shoes on a trans-Atlantic flight. [8]

Honegger’s later works include "The Pentagon Attack Papers," published as an appendix in Jim Marrs’ “The Terror Conspiracy,” 2006, taking her squarely into this blog's turf. In her Pentagon analysis, she argued against a big plane and for a traditional bombing. This, she's certain, happened at 9:32, with anything happening at the official time of 9:37 being some sort of cover – possibly the impact of “an airborne object significantly smaller than […] a Boeing 757.” She cites a mixed bag of evidence, from hard fact like a stopped clock to repeated government “slips” to irrelevant coincidences, and has cited war games at the Pentagon that morning, which are unverifiable but likely incorrect. [9] (I will post on this theory in more detail sometime soon).

She has also tied the alleged original pilot of Flight 77 before it was hijacked, Captain Charles Burlingame, to “a Task Force that drafted the Pentagon's emergency response plan on what to do in case a plane hit the building.” She appears to be the source of the similar charge laid out in Loose Change, second edition’s opening segment. It’s an intriguing possibility, but it doesn’t help her tentative case that she then finds it “extremely likely, if not certain - that this 'task force' that […] Burlingame was part of was the Cheney counterterrorism preparedness task force, and that the Pentagon plane pilot, therefore, directly knew and even worked with/for Cheney.” [10] Maybe that parapsychic training is helping her to fill in the gaps with right-brain impulses or insights from the future that make it all make sense…

No more promising is her citation of “the already legion evidence that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon:" “the small hole in the west side of the Pentagon being not nearly large enough for the plane’s fuselage, let alone wing width," "no damage to the lawn where Flight 77 allegedly struck and skidded before hitting the building," "wrecked plane parts at the site identified as being from an A-3 Sky Warrior, a far smaller plane than that of Flight 77, a Boeing 757.” [11] Of course my debunkings are legion as well, or getting there. "The small hole" - the unmarked lawn - the plane parts - The A3 Sky Warrior Theory.

While her reputation in the movement is generally sterling and I don’t know enough to cast large stones, these aspects of Honegger’s works – her unexplained leaps, need to tie Cheney in personally, and especially disagreeing with me over the Pentagon evidence - are deeply flawed. Whatever her intentions, she has served as a useful and strangely credible-seeming source, and also a comet-riding psychic moonbat in the employ of the US military pushing among the worst 9/11 theories. That doesn't prove anything but it's worth considering.

Sources:
[1] http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/mindnet/mn202b.htm
[2] “2001: Mr. Hoover Goes to Washington?” Myszewski, David. Stanford Review. Volume XXV, Issue 6: January 2001
http://www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XXVII/Issue_7/2001/
[3] Martin Anderson: Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior Fellow. http://www.hoover.org/bios/anderson
[4] Source lost... I'll check at the library and get back...
[5] http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhonegger.htm
[6] Honegger, Barbara. “NPS Aces Second Annual DoD Cyber Defense Exercise.” http://www.nps.navy.mil/PAO/Internal/Cyber_Defense.htm
[7] Ruppert, page 336.
[8] Propaganda Patterns: Official Stories, Limited Hang Outs, Best Evidence, Distracting Disinformation
a political map of political collapse and possibilities. http://www.oilempire.us/propaganda.html
[9] Honegger, Barbara. “THE PENTAGON ATTACK PAPERS: Seven Hours in September: The Clock that Broke the Lie”
Appendix to THE TERROR CONSPIRACY by Jim Marrs. Publication date, Sept. 6, 2006 http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id206.html
[10] "War Games" by the US military on 9/11: paralysis of air defenses that ensured the success of the attacks? who coordinated these efforts?” http://www.oilempire.us/wargames.html
[11] See [9].

CSV / ANIMATION / OFFICIAL FLIGHT PATH AGREEMENT

CSV / ANIMATION / OFFICIAL FLIGHT PATH AGREEMENT
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
August 24 2007

A small post to tide my swarming readers over until I finish my animation geography analysis; I recently found, for what it’s worth, both the animation and the csv file seem to agree with the official story [ed - on this issue - the general flight path]. This is nothing new, of course, but barring minor variations of whatever significance, and looking at the 320-mile long swathe of land flown over by Flight 77, it’s all a remarkable fit.

Earthtools tells me the furthest point west in the official path is about 82° 44' 56” W, while the csv file records 83°06’ as the largest west number. These two numbers are off by about 21-22 minutes (no seconds recorded in the csv so exact margin cannot be determined), or about the margin they’re off by for the whole flight (explained here). So the official story and the csv file (corrected) match on lat/long readings at the furthest point west, and they also match at Dulles and the Pentagon; by being about 22 degrees apart across the board, they verify the board. As for the animation, I ignored its apparent lat/long grid appearing consistently off, and just used it to place the plane roughly at given times on its flight path (for example, just before a left turn at 8:39).

I made this map by stretching the 9/11 Commission’s flight path map w/state borders to fit a larger map of those borders. I then recreated the path (a bit rough in the curves) for greater clarity. I set the lat/long grid lines beneath it with Earthtools. Along the flight path, I marked 19 timed locations at key times. These were first plotted visually according to the animation, and then fine-tuned with the csv file (west corrected).

Note the remarkable, if not exact, correlation of all these data sets. The plots are off by a few minutes here and there, but on the scale of this 320-mile long swathe it all generally lines up. This is not surprising of course, as the Commission’s map and the official story in general have always relied on the flight path first downloaded we’re told within days of the attack. Just take this as another verification that the official data all lines up on the big picture flight path issue, and another excuse for me to publish a cool new graphic.

NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 3: GRID CLUES: ORIENTATION AND PROPORTIONS

NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 3: GRID CLUES: ORIENTATION AND PROPORTIONS
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
August 21 2007
last updated 8/22, 1:00 pm

I had promised a piece on the grid's "latitudelines," but that one will take a little more work and could use some foreshadowing, and so here are four clues to what I'm starting to decide on...

Regarding the background grid of the NTSB's Flight 77 animation, the questions of rectangular parcel proportions and overall northern orientation are closely related. Wondering how it’s oriented may seem silly; one would presume the Safety Board’s experts, if not the FDR itself, would correct what the compass knows and show the plane on a true east-west north-south grid, with the magnetic headings showing up off from these (to almost exactly ten degrees) as they would have in real life. This does not seem to be the case.

Four clues:
1) Mini-master map:
the full flight path is reproduced in the small window at the lower left of the animation screen and offers clues to both proportions and slope. Here is a screen cap with enhanced lines vs. official flight and real lat-long lines crossed. The animation seems to stretch the flight path over almost three squares. Undertow pointed this out to me, though I’d noticed it before, and it’s definitely a possible clue. If these mark some amalgamation of the onscreen rectangles, they should have the same proportions as those smaller parcels. That is, if a block of say 60 minutes by 60 minutes is square, a one-by-one minute unit should also be square. There is also, obviously, an angular slope evident between the two; the lower portion, again, shows the true east-west orientation of the official path, while the grid lines around the animation’s mini-map are rotated about 8-9 degrees counter-clockwise, just about consistent with magnetic north (declination 10.08 degrees).

2) lines at 270°
At 8:22 am the plane has a heading (nosecone orientation) of 270 degrees - due west from magnetic north, just southwest of west in true terms. It's just about parallel with the nearest latitude-looking line, and perpedicular to the longitude lines ahead. As for parcel proportions, they look fairly square here. However, perspective at this fairly low altitude of 5137 feet is fierce and makes it unclear and inconclusive.

3) Lines at 180°
As the plane nears the mid-point of its southward turn, at 8:57, the longitude line under it shows exactly vertical, and latitudes ahead of it exactly horizontal. The heading dia shows 180, or due south. This would make perfect sense if the grid were oriented to magnetic north. These rectangles also look remarkably square seen from an elevation of over 35,000 feet, as opposed to the roughly 5:7 proportions of latitude/longitude intersections there in the real world.

4) Lines at 70°
I wanted to analyze the final trajectory shown in the animation in relation to the global map, but found that harder than due west and south. To start with, here is a frame with grid lines, Pentagon location, and track (flight path along the ground) highlighted. The magnetic dial hovers right around 70° from north on this final track.

At right is another view from just before the grand loop show just where on that parcel’s west edge the ground track crosses. I figured If I marked this and de-skewed the parcel I could masure its angle of incidence.



To measure this angle for sure, I’d need to know the proportions of the rectangles, something made difficult by the foreshortened perspective. Again this looks fairly square to me, so just on a hunch I ignored real-world lines and tried de-skewing the grid there into a square. This is all a bit approximate, so don’t expect precision to more than a degree or two.

Interestingly enough, we get almost exactly 70 degrees, which is what the FDR says on that path (both in the CSV file and the animation’s heading dial). Subtracting 10 degrees for magnetic declination, we have the official trajectory of 60 that matches the physical damage.

On all four points above, the flight path reads correct in angles relative to its own internal geography, but not to real-world lines, in either placement or slope. From this, my best guess at the moment is that the animation program is pointing its longitude lines to magnetic north, and its latitudes perpendicular to that, throwing the whole grid off by a rotation of approximately ten degrees. And on top of that, it's generating a square grid map, unlike real-world lines, in which latitude lines are further apart than longitudes. This equilateral proportion indicates the flight path may've been rendered at some default equator on this globe rather than at the proper latitude. If the lines even represent latitudes and longitudes at all and not some other type of grid.

To see whether this is confirmed or denied by the latitude lines involved, I will be posting a detailed piece soon and even a short "video." In fact this is already up on Youtube and viewable at this link. Sorry for the low resolution and the choppiness of my frames. I hope it works - compare to the original animation if that helps.

PUNCH-OUT PAGE {Masterlist}

PUNCH-OUT PAGE {Masterlist}
Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Last updated July 16 2007

It’s long past time I worked out a study of the much-discussed but little-explained “punch-out” hole at the end of the plane’s trajectory through the Pentagon. The official story maintains that the disintegrating 757 plowed in a northeasterly direction clear through the E, D, and C rings of the building, the furthest-reaching elements from the fuselage coming to rest just outside the inside wall of the final ring, and into the open, ground-level service roadway past that – the A-E Drive that runs around the building between C and B rings. Burning debris was ejected with enough force to leave marks on the outer B ring wall, but otherwise stopped in the drive.
Russell Pickering of Pentagonresearch.com, who has studied the issue more than perhaps anyone else, aptly describes this exist wound as “one of the most anomalous features of the Pentagon attack […] absolutely inexplicable in terms of the composite nose of a Boeing 757-200 "punching out" through it," given "curiously little" of any plane parts outside of it. [1] It’s a perfect hole implying strong, evenly applies force and yet no ready sign of just what part of the plane made this and then - apparently - vanished before hitting the next wall.
Here is the earliest photo Pickering could locate of the hole, before any marking were spray-painted and before the debris inside was pulled forward. Note the ground is strewn with scattered bricks and flooded with water from firefighting efforts. [2] Compare this with with the damage to ring B's wall across from it [below], separated only by fifty feet of air; not a brick removed. [3]
Only a few photos of the exit hole have been released, many had seen it, and none have explained it with any useful precision. It has proven a magnet for mystery-mongers and skeptics from across the credibility spectrum.

How exactly the plane's trajectory wound up giving us what we’ve seen is left a bit vague in the official record.
- official "explanations:" confusion/silence over the exact cause of the hole.

- Analysis of the plane debris at and near the site.

- Carlson's backhoe punch-out theory assessed for errors

- Possibility of a purposeful, explosive punch-in

Personally I cannot venture a solid guess as to what happened here. The hole was either cut out with explosives for some reason or somehow caused by the barreling 757, perhaps via debris that was removed before the pictures we’ve seen were taken. I’m certainly open to suggestions. But I have to agree that IF there is a physical crime – an inside job element to the Pentagon attack that can be shown with evidence - this is the most likely spot to look.
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Sources:
[1] Pickering, Russell. “Exit Hole” Pentagon Research. http://www.pentagonresearch.com/exit.html
[2]. [3] Photo Source: Pentagon Research. Exit Hole Chronology. http://www.pentagonresearch.com/062.html

CSV/ANIMATION ALTITUDE DISCREPANCY

CSV/ANIMATION INITIAL ALTITUDE DISCREPANCY
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
August 16 2007
last updated 8/21

Note: Pilots for Truth senior member “Undertow,” who I admit has far more knowledge in this area than I, commented on the following piece “You can not possibly be this moronic about this. Please for the love of god stop confusing everyone.” (see comments below)

I read this as his seeing too many mistakes to be accidental, and so it’s probably an attempt to confuse, a feeling I'm familiar enough with. No, in fact, I can be, and was, this moronic. I am off on a lotta spots here, numbers and otherwise. Sorry, I was tired and inspired at the same time. The general gist is still right, but numerous minor alterations and further notes are to come… (in red) Apologies for any remaining confusion and please don’t take this as a final word on anything without consulting a non-obfuscationist expert first. In fact I'm not even saying much at all here.

But as “mod” says below “CL is going in the right direction IMHO. What does the Video say vs. the CSV file, in terms of pure numbers? 99% should match.” I also feel I’m onto something here or I wouldn’t’ve posted it… I just don’t know what yet. Maybe it’s nothing. But UT’s vehemence has inspired me: “Jesus, please stop and really think about this before posting anymore absolute nonsense.” Have done, and I got lots of red here now. Jesus. I'm done.

For more in-depth, piloty, and udeful analysis of pressure altitude readings, please see the lively and enlightened Pilots for Truth discussion thread at this link. Hopefully you're a member, or perhaps they'll provide me with a better link to help explain what I'm missing here. Otherwise do your own research or just hang tight to see what I come up with.
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Where I was Wrong
Aha! I feel stupid but not really. I had previously concluded that the original, takeoff altitude for Flight 77 in the csv fille matched the same in the NTSB animation. It turns out I was incorrect. It was a mistake on my part but kind of odd how easily it lent itself to misreading.

1) The actual altitude at Dulles is about 300 ft msl as I’d heard. I verified this with Earthtools; runway 30 is on an slight uphill slope from about 285-295 feet MSL. I’ll call it 290.

2) The NTSB animation shows precisely 300 feet in the altitude dial on the ground. It’s not quite right, but close enough to be accurate. It also happens to match almost exactly the magnetic heading on that runway of 300 degrees from magnetic north, also displayed as 302 with the plane at rest.

The csv agrees on mag heading and lists it as 302 for the long runway pause, which is where I got mixed up. When I first dug in for altitudes, I saw it was luckily only the fifth of several hundred settings so would be easy enough to find. I had heard takeoff altitudes matched, so looked first for an altitude of about 300, I counted over five, six, whatever values and saw 302. Not realizing it was actually the mag heading, I took it as a verification of the animation’s rough accuracy. The reason I missed the actual pressure altitude is that it’s unusually different from the display alt at that point, while the mag heading is still much closer, if it were altitude in feet. And they’re listed right next to each other so I got mixed up.

In fact the beginning altitude listed in the csv is 40 feet, 250 feet too low to be accurate. This is a point of disagreement I haven’t heard anyone mention yet, though Undertow tells me I’m “covering ground which we plowed last summer.”

Tho it didn't come across as I noted a discrepancy, I do also understand the csv and animation attitudes should not exactly match – as UT usefully points out “The FDR produces a Pressure Alt and Baro column in the CSV. Together they create what the pilot would see on the Actual Alitmeter. Which is what is supposed to be shown in the Animation.” That is, the pressure alt reading “+” barometer correction = real altitude. The exact relation and expected differences I’m not totally clear on but getting there [another post]. What I'm really noting here is a massive difference I hadn't noticed before, apparently the mirror image of the 300-foot part of John Doe X's correction.

Tracking Back
I stumbled on this error while looking into another, related anomaly, a search that involved lots of backtracking. I saw that the final altitudes at 9:37:44 are near identical – 180 for the animation’s dial and 173 for the csv (of course they aren’t supposed to be, because of the omitted barometer reset). This final altitude is however misleading, and seems to be from a frame of data that didn’t play out and would have left the animation considerably lower. In the four seconds before that, the two reading carried a rapidly decreasing difference of 50 feet to 28 feet, with the animation lower. I didn’t bother tracking this discrepancy, but noted that they match up closer back around 9:24 (animation about 15-20 feet lower than the csv), both before and after the mysterious FL180 reset recorded in the csv that had no effect on the animation readout.

So clearly the altitude difference between the two is all across the board, but nothing in the difference range of hundreds of feet. Tracing back further, they also match roughly after the initial FL180 reset on ascent (at 8:28) with difference of 20-30 feet but with the animation higher this time. Since it reads lower near the end, there is a roughly 75-foot fudge room, at least, between the two, that comes in somewhere between 8:28 and 9:24. I don’t feel like tracking this down, especially since I had been looking for something else.

An Inexplicable 240-foot Gap
At the initial FL180 reset, on ascent, at 8:28, Pandora’s Black Box shows an altitude drop from 18273 to 18058, a difference of 215 feet. Despite having matched the csv before that (I thought) and after being only about 27 feet off. There is 242 feet of total discrepancy here, most of which is lost at 8:28 leaving a near-match after, which means the animation must’ve been set much higher than the csv before the change. Another error of the cartoon, no doubt.

I’d never noted it before, but lo and behold, the altitudes do not match before that onscreen drop. The difference is in fact about 280 feet, animation high. Since I “knew” they matched on the runway at 8:20, I traced it back over the intervening eight minutes to see where the discrepancy crept in. Actually I started at the beginning and made the same mistake of identifying 300 and then watched for the up-tick to match the animation after it started rising at 8:20:16. I suspected the csv would be slower, but it remained at about 300 all-down the 300-oriented runway second after second as the animated plane rose. Then I realized I was looking at the wrong column, that the discrepancy runs back to the first frames and the csv file’s original altitude is wrong – to the tune of 250 feet underground, the same discrepancy nearly erased with the onscreen altitude change (leaving as the remainder the smaller discrepancy).

Here is a table of data at the relevant points: "baro cor" is the setting re-set at 18,000 feet both ways, once apparently by Capt. Burlingame, once by capt. Hanjour. + differences mean animation high, - means csv higher than animation.
time |baro cor | anim alt | csv alt | diff.
8:20:15 | -- | 300 | 59 |+241
8:20:16 | 30.20 | 304 | 52 |+252
8:20:17 | -- | 311 | 49 | +262
8:20:18 | 30.21 | 323 | 53 | +270
8:20:19 | -- | 339 | 61 | +278
8:20:20 | 30.20 | 363 | 83 | +280
8:20:21 | -- | 392 | 111 | +281
8:20:22 | 30.21 | 420 | 144 | +276
8:20:23 | -- | 456 180 +276
8:20:24 30.20 494 210 +284
8:20:25 -- 530 248 +231
8:20:26 30.21 568 290 +278
8:20:27 -- 614 330 +284
8:20:28 30.20 662 372 +290
8:20:29 -- 704 417 +287
8:20:30 | 30.21 | 755 | 469 |+ 286
…
8:27:54 | 30.21 | 18081 | 17785 |+296
8:27:55 | -- | 18129 | 17823 |+306
8:27:56 29.91 18140 17861 +279
8:27:57 -- 18179 17899 +280
8:27:58 30.21 18219 17938 +280
8:27:59 -- 18252 17976 +276
8:28:00 29.91 18166 18015 +151
2:28:01 -- 18083 18056 +27
8:28:02 30.21 18118 18093 +25
8:28:04 29.91 18198 18170 +29
8:28:06 | 29.94 | 18278 | 18247 | +30
… …
9:24:10 | 29.92 | 18264 | 18285 | -21
9:24:11 --- 18222 18245 -23
9:24:12 29.91 18185 18205 -20
9:24:13 -- 18151 18168 -17
9:24:14 29.92 18106 18126 -20
9:24:15 -- 18071 18088 -17
9:24:16 30.23 18030 18049 -19
9:24:17 -- 17993 18011 -18
9:24:18 | 30.01 | 17956 | 17972 | -16
… ... ...
9:37:40 | 30.23 | 445 | 496 | -51
9:37:41 --- 351 399 -48
9:37:42 30.24 279 307 -28
9:37:43 --- 211 239 -28
9:37:44 | 30.23 | 180 | 173 | +7
---
Here is the graph of five seconds at each of the four key spots. One can see how a roughly 300-foot jump in the animation altitude (red) would be expected at the second re-set. I'm not sure what exactly to make of this, this is just to illustrate. (view in new window to see it full-size)

Clearly, there is a massive discrepancy only for the first eight minutes of flight and back on the runway. So this piece stands as two points:

1) I correct myself on a silly mistake – the initial csv altitude I had previously worked with was grossly wrong
2) Whether or not they should, the animation dispaly and csv pressure altitudes roughly match all through the flight, as I have previously noted, except for these first eight minutes.

And since I just now figured this out I don’t want to say what it means – if the JDX correction is boosted by this or if this reveals something else. That's in the math I'll do a bit later. But it cleary raises questions about the data itself, if not about what physically happened.

NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 2

NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 2:
LONGITUDE LINES
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
July 12 2007
Updated Sept 3

As a primarily west-then-eastbound flight, 77 would have crossed more n-s running longitude lines than it would latitude lines. So in mapping what the NTSB animation shows in comparison to reality, let’s start with this more tedious operation with a larger room for error before the more delicate reading required for the latitude lines.

This map is based on the official path in the 9/11 Commission Report, with real-world latitude and longitude lines mapped behind it. I’ve marked longitude lines (vertical, running to the geographic north pole) at the degree and 30-minute marks, and the latitudes at intervals of 15 minutes, with the exception of the westernmost and southernmost lines, which are where they are.
right-click, new window, for full-size

Full proportions of the flight:
Flight 77’s takeoff coordinates, which I’ve taken as the end of runway 30 at Dulles, are 38 degrees, 56 minutes, 40 seconds north of the equator (38° 56' 40" N) and 77 degrees, 30 minutes, 11 seconds west of Greenwich. (77° 30' 11" W).

furthest point west: 82° 44' 56" W (83°06 by the NTSB's csv file, which is 22 degrees off)
furthest point east - 77°03’30” (again, 77°25' by the csv)

Total distance traveled west from Dulles:
82° 44' 77° 30' = 5° 15'
5.25 degrees, about 295 miles, 315 minutes, 18,900 seconds.
Lateral return distance to the Pentagon: 320 miles from furthest point west, just under 5.75 degrees, 345 minutes, 20,700 seconds.

So one thing to note here is that the official story's east-west-locations match the plots recorded in the csv; that is, by being about 22 degrees apart across the board, they verify the board. Now that we’ve parceled up reality with a multiple corroborated map, let’s see what the animation shows for longitude lines crossed. If the rendering program were marking at degree lines (77, 78, 79...), we’d see only five of them crossed on the way out. If they were marked at the 30-minute points as I’ve done here, we’d see 11 of them, and 314 if split up at the minute level. If they were marked wherever else…

Looking at the animation, the first longitude line crossed comes soon after leaving the runway. This line passes off-screen at about 12:21:15, or 8:21 am, by the animation’s time code. The second line is crossed around 12:22:10, and so on every minute or so thereafter.
For example, line 23 is passed around 8:34:15, after which the animation shows the plane turning north, with line 24 and the next passing off-screen around 34:40, 35:15, 35:50, etc.

The last lines are hard to read, as the plane turns south to head back. The plane turns sharply to the left after 8:54, just after the hijacking commenced, making the ground track hard to follow. The final lines were crossed more slowly; line 61 would have been crossed around 8:54, and the final mark passed obliquely around 8:55:30, nearing but never crossing the next longitude marker as it turned to a south bearing of 180 at about 8:57, and kept turning to point east and return.
So I may be off by one or two lines, but this is a large enough sample that I’ll say close enough. Sixty-two perpendiculars passed means 63 marked longitude zones traversed on the initial westbound flight, and one would presume a few more on the return flight that overshot the origin by a 20 miles. On the map below, I marked 62 vertical lines, evenly spaced (to a pixel or two), and stretched it over the flight path from just after the origin point ay 77° 30'. It lines up roughly with an interval of five minutes real, there being an average of six divisions to each 30’ interval.
right-click, new window, for full-size

Mathematically, it also happens that 5 times 63 gives us 315, the number of minutes I figure were passed. So whether by design or not, the global map is marking intervals of about five minutes on its east-west axis. This would mean 12 markers per degree, which seems an odd but logical enough system. It does simplify the reading of it; no way would I have tried to count 314 passing blurry lines.

Or it could be a coincidence that my imprecise reading closely matches such a possible system. Either way, it carries over into the final stretch before impact. Presuming the same 62 lines crossed until the plane passed south of Dulles, It seems the return flight tops it by another six. The origin zone is entered at about 9:29:30 in the animation, the first line east of there crossed soon after, and then five more. The sixth line is the only one crossed twice; at 9:34 as it starts the 330 southward loop, and again as it straightens out from this and dives to its terminus, nearing but not passing the seventh longitude line east of Dulles. The proportions that described the westbound flight apply here as well, with the zone from 77:30-77:00 looking to be marked into about six parcels of five minutes each.

It’s possible that these lines do not in fact run due north, but are offset due to the grid being oriented to magnetic north. Trying to compare and calculate their verticality based on the visuals in the animation seems daunting. More precision is possible with the much fewer latitude lines. These seem to run near-parallel to most of the flight, giving us readable slants over certain distances. To determine both the possible slope of an offset grid, and to look at the proportions of the marked parcels, we’ll need to look at these presumably east-west lines, which it seems will require yet another separate post. This analysis will be far more interesting and its graphics more colorful; I’m seeing patterns that bring into question the global grid’s orientation and even internal consistency. Maybe. I’m still looking.

NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 1

NTSB ANIMATION INTERNAL GEOGRAPHY, PART 1
GROUND OBJECTS
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
August 8 2007
last updated 8/17/07

Real-World Lines?
I asked Rob Balsamo/John Doe X, co-founder of Pilots for 9/11 Truth “do the lines on the background map in the animation represent latitude and longitude lines?” I already had a good idea of the "right" answer I was hoping for, which he didn’t supply.

“It sure looks that way when analyzed vs. google earth.”

In a sense, the lines do mimic real-world ones by running north-south and east-west (roughly anyway - I haven’t ruled out a magnetic-as-real north discrepancy yet) and intersect at what seems right angles. Extreme perspective and (in my case) low resolution make these things hard to determine. But below I will show, at the very least, the markers laid down under the runway and final map either represent illogical marking points on real geography or, more likely, have no bearing whatsoever on the plane’s real location or the FDR data.
The first thing I saw that made me scratch my head was the latitude line that intersects the runway at takeoff, as seen above. Runway 30, at the south end of Dulles airport, points slightly north of west, for a compass bearing of 290 degrees real, and about the right angle to intersect a latitude line as seen on the rendered runway. But below is a map I made that shows the nearest major latitude lines: 38 degrees, 57 minutes, zero seconds (38° 57’ 00”) North, which does not intersect even this massively long runway, and 38° 56’ 00”, which runs just south of its base. The intersector could be 38° 57’ 30”, though it seems a bit odd to map this mid-point when the minutes are so close already.

While not conclusive in itself, this linear oddity makes sense in the context of this anonymous comment left at my blog using “we” when referring to the NTSB:

“The ground representation below NTSB animation of Flight 77 is not connected to the aircraft data that makes the plane move. The data from the FDR was used to make the aircraft animation, but there is no actual correlation to the ground. The NTSB animation is only a working copy and we never finished it to be accurate to actual ground objects.”

There was an effort to show ground objects, of course, with the rendered runway and the Pentagon overlay map relative to the pane at start and finish. With only these two points, the grid in between the two, and the plane’s movements to go on, I’m attempting to see how closely the animations global grid compares with real world lines.

One thing about the grid map we should also see is the longitudinal separations being narrower than latitude. At the equator, the rectangles formed where lines intersect are square (the sides are “equated”). Latitude lines (east-west) remain parallel and equidistant, and are often called “parallels.” But Longitude lines (north-south) run closer together nearer the poles and in fact merge there. The net effect of this is that the parcels become narrower rectangles as we move north or south.

The Grid at the Pentagon
In the upper 38th parallel, the location of the Pentagon, the rectangles formed are at a proportion of about 5:7. In the map below, I also subdivided the latitude measurements showing the halfway markers at 30 seconds (30”). These are the dotted lines, and would probably not be mapped in an animation. The Pentagon lies between 38° 52’ and 38° 52’30” north, and 77°03’ and 77°04’ west, with point of impact at near dead center of that rectangle that would, by definition, be the rough area of the animation overlay map. Note that none of these lines crosses or touches the Pentagon itself.

If the animation’s map were set to real-world lines, its proportions around the Pentagon should look something like the graphic I did at left (dotted lines included for reference). Instead what get is the situation below, a slightly enhanced screen cap with Pentagon circled in red.








Did the Safety Board's experts shrink and shift the Pentagon here, so rather than dominating a third of the rectangle it’s a speck at its northeast corner? Looking closer at the overlay map, this latitude line actually crosses the northern third of the Pentagon, which is not what the real lines do.
These clearly are not latitude and longitude lines at the minute marks. While too big by far for that, they are far too small of course to be degree markers. Do these represent any real groupings of real-world lines (say every five minutes)? Or is this Perhaps this just some mappish looking grid meaning nothing at all just etched on to show “hey, this is some kinda globe.” Perhaps this is one of the shortcomings of the “working copy” they ironed out later in the process.

Three other questions remain under investigation: the proportions of the rectangles shown, the overall orientation of the grid lines (based on true north or magnetic?), and whether the final map is rotated relative to the program’s internal geography. These will take some more analysis, although in the last case it seems there's clearly some kind of rotation.

THE OUTER WALL: HOW MANY INCHES OF WHAT?

THE OUTER WALL: HOW MANY INCHES OF WHAT?
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Updated August 5 2007

Many questions have been raised about whether a Boeing 757 could have breached the imposing “steel-reinforced,” and just-upgraded, walls of the Pentagon. As 911 In Plane Site and others have explained, each wall of the five-floor, five-side bunker of five nested rings was 18” of solid steel-reinforced concrete, giving 9 feet total the plane would’ve had to pierce to plow through three rings as alleged. Of course this is ridiculous, but in fact, besides the inner C ring wall where the small and odd punch-out hole occurred, a majority of the plane only passed through one major external wall, on the outer E ring where the plane entered through a gaping 90-foot-wide hole. So I set to figuring out how that wall was constructed - how many inches of what?

Wedge one, the southwest fifth of the building, had just been renovated against terrorist attack, with work one day away from completion when Flight 77 plowed into the ground floor of the strengthened zone. This curious fact has attracted much attention among skeptics, but the ASCE’s Pentagon Building Performance Report notes “structurally the renovation was not major,” and makes little mention of the changes other than to note “the exterior walls and windows were upgraded to provide a measure of resistance to extreme lateral pressures.” [1] There was also the addition of a new fire suppressing sprinkler system, which did little good; [separate link], new windows (to which we’ll return), and several less noteworthy upgrades. But the main issue here is the outer wall of the massive office-bunker that was breached.

According to the Performance Report, “the original structural system, including the roof, was entirely cast-in-place reinforced concrete using normal-weight aggregate." [2] This frame is comprised of columns supporting beams, girders, and floor slabs. The report illustrated "the typical members" in the impact area (left). The reinforcements in these columns are vertical bars, typically six, wrapped with a welded rebar that spirals from top to bottom. This cage is filled and covered with concrete, all told measuring 21” square. [3]

Spanning between these sturdy columns, the impacted exterior wall of the E ring was “mostly non-load-bearing masonry infilled in a concrete frame.” This consisted of “5 in. thick limestone […] backed by 8 in. unreinforced brick.” [4] Apparently most of the surface area encountered was only masonry, just over a foot of it. This is not too imposing. But just after noting the weakness of the outer walls, the report mentions that “in some areas the backing is a cast-in-place concrete wall.” [5] I had been looking at a photograph that looked like that to me, and became confused as to how much concrete structure there really was in the wall that the 757 slammed into. I’m now in agreement with Russell Pickering, who decided:

“The exterior columns were 21 inch square steel reinforced concrete covered with 6 inches of limestone facade. In panels with windows it had the 6 inch limestone facade and 8 inches of brick backed with Kevlar mesh. In panels without windows it was 8 inches of brick and 10 inches of concrete.” [6]

This sounds good, and I see evidence for this distinction. As an article passed on by Jim Hoffman noted:

“The idea of supporting the brick infill walls with a reinforced concrete wall "backing" was rejected as a "typical" approach because of the Pentagon's extensive fenestration (although this design was accepted for "blank" wall panels with no window openings).” [7]

The one place I was seeing concrete backing was a damaged non-window panel on the second floor, thought to be the impact point for part of the right wing. Note what seems a third layer of brick is actually stained on the concrete, which fades to gray at the bottom where the backing was smashed to cobble exposing the 2-layer rebar.

I felt like making a model of the solid slab as seen above. I’m going with the Performance Report’s limestone width of 5,” making the sturdy non-window panel 23” thick. 10” of concrete backing 13” of masonry.

[right click - open in new window to enlarge]






In general, however, this is not the type of wall the 757 impacted. “In panels with windows it had the 6 inch limestone facade and 8 inches of brick backed with Kevlar mesh.” Another part of the renovation was the Kevlar cloth, the material in bullet-proof vests, stretched between the columns along the back side of the unreinforced spans of outer wall. This sturdy netting didn’t add any real strength, and was in fact an admission of the very weakness of this panel type; Architecture Week reported the idea as being “holding together building materials so they wouldn't become deadly projectiles in an explosion.” [8] The Kevlar did little good, however, when the bricks were followed in by an exploding, full speed, Boeing 757 that took out the very columns the mesh was anchored to.

As a side note and because I numbered it in my graphic below (area 1), here is a portion of the unrenovated first floor just north of impact, with the old windows and no Kevlar backing. These panels are missing the window panes and limestone facade from the sills up, exposing the frame and unreinforced brick infill. (note the numbering – Columns 7, 6, and 5.)

Straddling the renovation line, the damage would have presented an excellent before-and-after comparison for future study, but for the collapse, twenty mintes after impact, of the upgraded half of the picture. The majority of façade damage as the worst of the structural impairment was in the renovated section, from column line 11 south. Right on that dividing line, briefly, one of the more interesting aspects of the renovation was made visible. One article explained how the window frames actually added structural integrity, according to a renovation plan for “erecting structural reinforcements around the windows, anchoring at the top and bottom to structural concrete floor slabs [which] accepts blast forces from the walls themselves and transfers both window and wall loads into the horizontal slab diaphragms.” [9] Here are two panels exposed on the second floor, between columns 11 and 13, directly over the northern half of the worst of the airliner damage. Facade, brick, and presumably Kevlar seem to be removed, while the columns, window truss framing, and even the glass panes are intact. (the number 2 refers to placement on the graphic at bottom of page)
At the risk of dropping free advertising to the makers of these windows, all sides seem in agreement over how well they held up after the attack. Architecture Week noted “the blast-resistant windows […] remain remarkably intact and in place adjacent the point of impact. Some were popped out of their frames by the force of the exploding jet fuel, but they fell without breaking or splintering.” [10] Ralph Omholt noted “the general good condition of the windows,” correctly deducing “this wasn’t a major impact zone of a B-757.” [11] The "major impact zone" is in fact just beneath that, where there are no windows at all or wall panels for over 100 feet.

Here is a graphic I just finished showing what was encountered and destroyed. For the most part, it seems quite plausible for a 757 with its massive, bullet-shaped fuselage and dense, speeding engines, and hardy wing roots to have done all this. Weaker window panel removal accounts for most of the missing outer wall, while intervening column removal was more uniform, in my analysis, than widely believed. Notably on columns 15-17, I’m in disagreement with the ASCE who listed these as present but impaired.
The big “X” panels were the strongest – backed with 10” of concrete - and yet were removed, despite being hit by neither fuselage nor engines. This is one of the things that I’d classify as counter-intuitive about the Pentagon evidence. Take the one on left; a non-window panel – not renovated, so perhaps not 23 inches of material, totally destroyed by one of the weakest parts of the plane – its outer wing. And to its immediate left, a much weaker panel totally intact but for its lost facing and windowpane.

The X on the right is even stranger. The question mark to the right of this mystery spot seems to be one of three doorway, somehow enlarged, and above that, a final weak window panel removed. But the “X” marks the mystery I can’t answer yet. It’s immediately beneath my highlighted area 3, and presumably the same panel type as analyzed above – again, totally missing. What hit this panel, concrete backed, and removed the whole thing? The wing itself hit higher it seems, looking at that line of second floor damage. The under-hanging engine was a ways to the left, and yet this first floor panel was apparently removed completely by nothing in particular.

It might help to recall the wings hitting objects like light poles and a large generator on the way in. Some accounts imply that the wings were possibly exploding even before impact, with parts flying in on the blast cloud only approximating a plane’s profile. Maybe a major wing element impacted here at just the wrong angle and took out the masonry and all its reinforced concrete backing, uniformly.

In summary, let me revisit an old question raised by Dave Von Kleist in 911 IPS and passed on in Loose Change and elsewhere; “Question – Could a 757 have pierced 9 feet of steel reinforced concrete, and left a 14 to 16 foot hole, and no wreckage?" The answer is that it didn’t need to. Most of the “bunker” surface it pierced was 13 inches of brick reinforced limestone, explaining the 110-foot span of eliminated panels (and 90 feet of removed columns) it created and into which the vast majority of wreckage “disappeared” on its own inertia. But I guess the answer he was looking for was more like “of course not – only a missile could do that.”

sources:
[1] Mlakar, Paul F., Donald O. Dusenberry, James R. Harris, Gerald Haynes, Long T. Phan, and Mete Sozen. “The Pentagon Building Performance Report.” American Society of Civil Engineers. January 2003. ISBN 0-7844-0638-3. PDF download link. pp 3.
[2], [3] Ibid. Text pp 5, graphic pp 6.
[4], [5] Ibid. pp 11.
[6] Russell Pickering. "Exit Hole." Pentagon Research. http://www.pentagonresearch.com/exit.html
[7], [9] Biscotte, Michael N., P.E., and Keith A. Almoney “Retrofitting the Pentagon for Blast Resistance.” Structure magazine. July/August, 2001. http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/pentagon/pentagon-retrofit.htm
[8], [10] Novitski, B. J. "Pentagon Battered but Firm." Architecture Week. Undated. http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/1003/news_1-2.html
[11] Omholt, Ralph. “9-11 and the IMPOSSIBLE: The Pentagon. Part One of An Online Journal of 9-11.” Physics 911. Undated. http://physics911.net/omholt

PUNCH-OUT HOLE “EXPLAINED” BY OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS

PUNCH-OUT HOLE “EXPLAINED” BY OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
July 22 2007
Last updated/edited July 25

Official Dodginess:
How exactly Flight 77's trajectory through the building wound up giving us the exit hole we’ve seen is left a bit vague in the official record. The American Society of Civil Engineers' Pentagon Building Performance Report shows a photo of the hole but gives no adequate explanation. Its terse summary: "there was a hole in the east wall of Ring C, emerging into AE Drive, between column lines 5 and 7 in Wedge 2. The wall failure was approximately 310 ft from where the fuselage of the aircraft entered the west wall of the building," [1] The Arlington County After Action Report noted “the damage extended all the way through the inner wall of the C Ring, a distance of approximately 285 feet,” and showed a photo of the hole captioned “penetration through the inner wall of the Pentagon’s C Ring.” [2] An account of FEMA Urban Search and Rescue shoring/bracing of the building is the most detailed of these three reports. It explains that "a nine foot diameter exit hole was created in the wall of C ring and the remainder of the debris from the impact ended up in the alley between C ring and B ring known as A & E Drive," and elsewhere shows a photo of the "'exit wound' where the plane debris exited the C ring." [3]

These three reports, a few early press conferences, published eyewitness accounts, and a handful of photos constitutes the body of evidence on this hole. While it’s been widely seen and commented on, it has not yet been explained with any useful precision, and contradictory theories dominate to an unsettling degree.

Impact Energy Waves?
In October 2004, the National Geographic Channel program Seconds from Disaster proposed a novel theory by which shockwave pressure from the impact cause the punch-out hole. By this model, plane debris and heavy, exploding jet fuel, perhaps along with explosions of things in the building, gave off shockwaves that reverberated and crossed through the building’s first floor. Having no other exit point, these somehow directed themselves and whatever was in front of them to focus on that precise spot, punching the neat 9x11’ hole we’ve seen. [4] While this explains both the improvised exit and the lack of any major evident airplane parts, the official story has generally maintained it was physically caused by the plane, or some part of it, though which part has been widely contested.

Engine?
Military District of Washington’s news service reported two weeks after the attack, mentioning that “an aircraft engine punched the hole out […] on the inside wall of the second ring of the Pentagon." [5] Though the quote has been widely republished, no other official sources support this claim. No debris seen there looks like engine debris.The piece’s author got the “second ring” part wrong (whether one counts A-E or E-A, C is the third ring), so maybe identifying an engine was an error as well.

Fuselage/Nosecone?
As widely noted, Pentagon renovation spokesman Lee Evey explained implausibly during a September 15 press conference “the nose of the plane just barely broke through the inside of the C ring, so it was extending into A-E Drive a little bit. So that's the extent of penetration of the aircraft." [6] As Killtown wondered “how could the fragile nose of Flight 77 penetrate all the way through 3 reinforced concrete/steel hardened rings and punched out a hole through the inside wall of Ring C and leave no evidence of itself outside the punch-out hole?” [7] This seems unlikely, even given that the “hardened” walls from impact to exit really totaled only 22” of unreinforced brick and limestone [link forthcoming], but spanned between by about fifty damaged support columns and only one plane fuselage to absorb the other end of these blows.

What survived this was not precisely the nose cone, but more likely some element(s) of the nosecone assembly – landing gear, landing gear door, cockpit panel or cargo door – some tattered portion of the forward fuselage. As Jim Hoffman explained, in such an impact, “only the parts of the aircraft with the greatest density and total mass, such as the lower third of the fuselage, could be expected to penetrate far into the building. That part also has a small frontal profile - approximately the size of the punch-out hole.” [8] Of course there is no piece of debris anywhere near the size of the hole seen in any of the available photos, but the illustration is helpful. The fuselage had a lot of mass, tens of tons, and though it was under great stress, it didn’t simply disappear on impact.

Landing Gear?
It stands to reason that as the plane disintegrated, the densest parts of aircraft wound up at the deepest point of penetration. For example, the flight data recorder from the tail end of the plane was reportedly found just inside the punch-out hole. [9] The heavier elements from the front end would also come to rest around this point. The book Debunking 9/11 Myths identified the landing gear. The book cited Paul F. Mlakar, ASCE team leader and lead author of the Performance Report, who “saw the landing gear with his own eyes” during his early onsite inspections, for its explanation that:

“The hole was not made by an engine or the nose of Flight 77 pushing through the building’s interior - or a missile - but by the crashing jet’s landing gear, which was ejected beyond the bulk of the wreckage. […] As one of the heaviest and most dense parts of the plane, the landing gear flew farther than any other item in the wreckage and was responsible for puncturing the wall in Ring C.” [10]

Other photos and accounts seem to back this up by recalling or even showing a wheel, a tire, and even a massive landing gear strut, near the hole. But there are some serious problems with this theory as well, like the ASCE’s own Performance Report not identifying this alleged hole-puncher as such, which noted that "the landing gear" (all three sets?) were in fact found inside the building, hardly the best place to be after exiting through the hole into the AE Drive. [13] These questions will be summarized more fully in a [separate post].

ASCE and FBI Secrecy
Mlakar's ASCE study team “went to great lengths of detail down to individual columns” in the plane’s path, Russell Pickering noted, providing their own photos and personal damage assessment of nearly all of them. Yet they danced around the cause of the punch-out, as Pickering wrote, offering “not a single explanation for the exit hole.” [14] The three columns nearest the breeched wall - 1N-North, 3N-North, and 5N-North - remained un-photographed and listed in the report as “damaged per FBI.” [15] Pickering suspects falsification of the status of these three columns to hide inexplicably severe impairment. [16]

He speculated that “the building team […] weren't allowed back at the exit hole for some reason," and noted how "they indicated in the report why they didn't have photos of those columns and who gave them the damage report on the columns - the FBI.” The one photo they published of the exit hole itself was not one of their own, but also credited to the FBI, further indicating this area had special investigative significance to the bureau, although this could have many possible reasons. [17]photo of the hole used by the ASCE, credited to the FBI (lower right, very small print.) [18]
---
Sources: forthcoming
[1] Mlakar, Paul F., Donald O. Dusenberry, James R. Harris, Gerald Haynes, Long T. Phan, and Mete Sozen. “The Pentagon Building Performance Report.” American Society of Civil Engineers. January 2003. ISBN 0-7844-0638-3. Page 28. PDF download link
[2] Arlington County After-Action Report. on the Response to the September 11 Terrorist Attack on the Pentagon. PDF downloaded from http://www.arlingtonva.us/Departments/Fire/edu/about/FireEduAboutAfterReport.aspx. The report bears no publisher or copyright info – it was compiled by Arlington County and Titan Systems Corporation, and released July 2002 according to this story: Weiger, Pam. “Pentagon report: After-action.” NFPA Journal. Nov/Dec 2002. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3737/is_200211/ai_n9114927/pg_1
[3] Titus, Leo J. Jr., P.E./Virginia Task Force One Urban Search & Rescue Team. “A Review of the Temporary Shoring Used to Stabilize the Pentagon After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11th, 2001.” May 3, 2002. Pages 9, 12. PDF download link: http://www.aesvn.org/resources/Pentagon-Shoring.pdf
[4] Seconds From Disaster – season one episode 12 “Pentagon 9-11.” National Geographic Channel. First Aired October 26 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seconds_From_Disaster
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/seconds/episodes.html
[5] Military District of Washington. Press Release. (9/26/01) original url: http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/Commentary-Remembering_the_honored_dead.html. Accessed at: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.htm
[6]

THE CSV FILE

THE CSV FILE
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
August 4 2007
rough draft

Released by the NTSB via FOIA request to Pilots for 9/11 Truth member Undertow in August 2006, the “csv file” is one of the more widely-cited sources of Flight 77 FDR information. It’s a huge file – offered by the Pilots for download:

The CSV file, AAL77_tabular.csv (zipped): dowload link

A text list of the parameters plotted: dowload link

It’s a bitch to read. I had initially only been able to open the file as simple text file, with well over 300 values (I stopped counting) each represented in packed clusters for each second of the hour-and-a-half doomed flight, a total of nearly 4,700 frames. A single frame looks like this (highlighted in red is the data for the first frame at 8:19:00 am - the last frame is 9:37:44, ending as the animation does one second early):


Opening it in Excel, once I figured that out, helped little, as it doesn’t really organize the data into readable columns.


Each comma separates one of the myriad values from the next (hence the file type CSV, or “comma separated value”). Many many of them, where there are commas in a row, are blank or inoperative; the NTSB’s SFRI noted that even though “the recorder operated normally,” that report, and the CSV as well, included “only validated parameters.” The blank values, including the radio altimeter, “either were not recorded properly or were not confirmed to have been recorded properly.”

Most remain readable, but with so many values presented this way, the only way I can find anything is to have a good guess of the value I’m looking for (29.92, latitude, etc.) and do a search ‘till I find it. Out of this mess and my relative ignorance (and sporadic, stumbling tenacity), I’ve been able to verify a few oddities proposed by Undertow and his cohorts at P49T: the pressure altitude reset said to place the plane too high for impact, and the 20-mile longitudinal offset, which seems odd but irrelevant.
- I had misread the initial pressure altitude recorded and concluded the csv and animation altitudes in fact matched at the beginning, which they don't. Initial altitude reading: 40 ft msl, 250 feet underground at Dulles, 260 below the animation readout. A mess of a post... and a graph
- The numbers in the tabular csv file match the official story's flight path in latitude/longitude plots (once corrected) and timeline. Nothing new but another verification and a nifty new graphic.
- There seems to be a slight north offset as well, depending on if I'm reading this right. At any rate, the graphing of the csv final plots that helped me see this is interesting for its own reasons.

20 MINUTES AND 20 MILES FROM TRUE

20 MINUTES AND 20 MILES FROM TRUE
CSV LONGITUDE READINGS
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
August 4 2007

A recent anonymous comment left under my post Pentagon NTSB Animation is Wrong! said:

“Funny stuff watching a bunch of half witted pilots and so called experts run around making up ideas on something they do not understand but have been told about. Take a look at the FDR data please. Now tell me where is Flight 77 at takeoff, and at the last data point. Come on experts like Snowy, tell me where Flight 77 is. Any point in time will do. Bet you can not place it better than 1000 to 3000 feet. Too bad we did not have GPS to knock that down to 100 to 300 feet. Sad thing is, after reading the posts around the internet, the FDR was found in the Pentagon as were all the bodies from77. The people who make up stuff about Flight 77 are sick people.” [1]

I remembered some comments from the “experts” at Pilots for 9/11 Truth about positional problems in this data, so I took the challenge and found – ironically enough – the debunker had pointed to an interesting anomaly that it seems places the plane’s final resting place twenty miles west of the Pentagon. I duly note the irony that this gives me something to agree with the Pilots over, as core member Undertow had just alerted me of “the CSV Lat/Lon data screw up,” wherein “it is off by 20 Minutes.” [2]

It’s somewhat daunting to look into the CSV file, but this time it only took a few minutes to ascertain the final recorded position: N38°52',W077°25'. There are no seconds reading to pinpoint (60 seconds make a minute, 60 minutes a degree), but it appears about right for north placement, but far off for the longitudinal (east-west) placement. It should read 77°3’30” Indeed, it’s off by 21.5 minutes, in this case a discrepancy of roughly 20 miles, or directly over Chantilly.

Where does this discrepancy enter the picture? I feared it would take a while to track it back, but again, no problem. Location at takeoff (from frame 08:21:27: N38°56',W077°53' The map I looked at places the end of the runway at 38° 56' 40" N, 77° 30' 11" W. Again the same northern position, but 23 minutes to the west. The discrepancy is there the whole time. The slight difference is probably due to the lack of seconds data that would tell just where in each zone it was for sure, introducing a small fudge factor of inevitable imprecision.
Pilots ally John Farmer has analyzed the data closely and found it "unreliable," and now I see clearly what means when he says the csv file "has the plane taking off from a field west of Dulles and crashing somewhere well west of the Pentagon (look at the coordinates stupid).” [3] In fact, as seen in the map above, its data ended just south of Dulles where it was supposed to have begun. The data set gets curiouser and curiouser. But why? And to what net effect?

The difference runs across the board and so is almost as easy to correct as the animation's four-hour-ahead time stamp. Simply add about 21-23 minutes to the west readings. That and realize there’s no real precision possible with the csv’s numbers other than that it took off just as Flight 77 departed Dulles, and ended just about 20 miles east of this origin just at nearly the second that Flight 77 is said to have hit the Pentagon 20 miles east of it's origin. I can’t say for sure but this FDR anomaly seems massive, inexplicable, and totally irrelevant.

Sources:
[1] http://frustratingfraud.blogspot.com/2007/05/ntsb-animation-is-flat-wrong.html - comment left 7/27/07, 7:56 pm
[2] Undertow. Posted July 26 2007, 9:36 am. Above Top Secret.com -> 9/11 Conspiracies -> "Pentagon NTSB animation – three Cds."
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread291782/pg1#pid3383439
[3] Farmer, John. "There is Always a Skeptic." 911files.info. June 5 2007. http://911files.info/blog/?p=230