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