A MIRAGE OF PLAUSIBILITY

A MIRAGE OF PLAUSIBILITY
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
June 23 2008

Since I melted down there a while back, I am not allowed to post at the Above Top Secret.com 9/11 forum, even anonymously. This is clearly what I wanted at the time, and generally now as well, but I do feel compelled to comment on an argument posted there by CIT ally Mirage of Deceit (MoD). The point of his post was “regarding the MATH,” which the critics there have been demanding, as per Reheat’s challenge and CIT’s inability to provide a single possible flight path to accommodate all their official-deception-proving claims. While others simply deflected as if aerodynamic realities don’t matter, Mirage had the balls to step up and offer one single arc to fit the witness accounts in question, and showed the math he claims makes it a possible one.

Well the dude has some knowledge of piloting and the dynamics of flight, I’ve always handed him that, and he did put some thought into this. Plenty of others can question or verify his mathematical methodology, but I haven’t the patience. In fact I’m inclined to give MoD the benefit of the doubt on numbers, since they seem to make sense and, like Reheat but better, what MoD has done here is a brilliant job of again illustrating how – well, impossible - the over-Navy-Annex, north-of-Citgo, Pentagon-flyover scenario really is.

Like Reheat but with perhaps less awareness of the witness account details, Mirage took some set of variables into account [including “the guy stood by the Navy Annex (SW corner)”] and came up with a path (reproduced below) quite different from CIT’s original famous impossible estimate. He offered these numbers based on his “beizer curve”:

”Distance from Pentagon: 0.6169687 nm
Approx. required heading change: 30°
Assuming an airspeed of 350 kts:
Time to pentagon: 0.0017 hrs (or 6.3 secs)
Performing a rate one turn, in 6.3 seconds the aircraft could turn: 18.9°
Bank angle required for this turn at this speed: 42°”

First off, speed - the witnesses nearly all describe the plane vaguely as being quite fast, but there’s quite a spread now. Officially by FDR it was at 530 mph, or 460 kts, while Morin’s updated account, according to Ranke, supports a speed between 117-163 mph. (MoD cites “approx. 130-160 kts” as the applicable stall speed, where it falls out of the air). Most witnesses give airspeeds in the range of 250-450 kts [Arabesque compilation]. Lagasse estimated a reasonable “400 miles an hour,” or 347 kts, which is about what MoD used and found, oddly enough “at that speed, the turn STILL isn't possible.”

He was not deterred though, since “according to eye-witnesses though, it was [possible],” and with speed being “the only factor we have to play with,” he tried presuming the barely supportable and “more leisurely 250 kts,” or 288 mph, which yields these better numbers and conclusion:

”Time to pentagon: 0.0024 hrs (or 8.8 secs)
Performing a rate one turn, in 8.8 seconds the aircraft could turn: 26.4°
Bank angle required for this turn at this speed: ~32°
[…] allowing for possible errors in my calculations (specifically on heading change), the second scenario, flying slower at 250 kts, is possible.”

Ooh! A single flight path that’s possible if it were flying less that 288mph, or 72% of what Lagasse thought he saw, and 54% of the speed suggested by the FDR and the Citgo video shadow/impact interval.

Aside from the low speeds needed for his path, the most important shortfall of the proposal is the opposite of what MoD claimed: The flight path he proposes “is also more in line with the eye-witness accounts of what they saw from their various vantage points.” More explicitly:

“After watching the videos from CIT, it is clear the witnesses draw very similar flight paths on the photos. Given that the aircraft needed to fly over the Navy Annex in order for the witness there to see and describe what he saw, we can reasonably conclude the flight path was NOT as described at the start of this thread, but was in fact a VERY plausible, gentle curve.”
This is it. For those familiar with the scene, the ridiculousness of this graphic will be readily visible. It should be noted his graphic was posted as an external link so readers had the option of not seeing it at all, and his line is so thin and faint one can even miss it if they click the link. That’s good for MoD, because it’s the worst effort I’ve seen yet to explain the north path witnesses.

I brightened the line below, and measured the gap between his ‘plausible’ overflight point and impact (fireball) center, which all witnesses traced their paths to (roughly at least). The distance here ≈ 420 feet. Nearly all witnesses had Flight 77 flying low into the bottom part of the impact fireball just before it happened, not 400 feet-plus to the left of the top of it just after it blew up. I also included CIT-cited witnesses to consider, as used by Reheat - Paik, Morin, Turcios, Brooks, and Lagasse – with best direct readings here sketched roughly in blue. So what has been illustrated here, and I tend to agree with it, is that something like CIT’s proposal is aerodynamically impossible if it flew at half the official speed, on a path different from what the witnesses describe, to a spot 420 feet to the left of the flyover-hiding fireball. People rip on Reheat, including myself, for misrepresenting CIT’s findingsto prove them impossible, but this proposal takes the cake for off-baseness for the opposite reason. It’s only remotely similar to something that would really fit, more distorted than Reheat’s, but it’s the best he can came up with for aeronautical plausibility and it can’t possibly the way it happened. If this is the best it gets, or anywhere near it, then Mirage of Deceit has helped us all see that CIT will never be providing a plausible flight path and we can all stop asking. I only hope MoD will own up to the implications of his achievement rather than pretending this helps his “investigator” friends.

He did ask for a challenge, in his closing line: “Debunkers?” Yes, reporting, and I do have an answer, and some questions. I challenge him to come here and defend it. Comments are open (meaning will be allowed), and I’m all ears. My first 11 questions are these:

1) Morin - is this at all parallel to the south edge of the FoB as he describes? Is any of it ahead of him visible on his line-of –sight?
2) Paik – does this match his drawings, any of them, at all? Does it come anywhere near his earlier gestures verifying Morin’s account of it passing south of the FoB and down Columbia Pike?
3) Turcios – Does it come north of the station anything like he describes? Does it correspond with his path from there to the same spot at the Pentagon?
4) Lagasse – It’s northiness is about right, but does this match his flight path from there on or the light poles he felt were downed?
5) Brooks - same as above.
6) Which witnesses describe anything like the severe 32 or 42-degree right bank this would require? Lagasse: “There was no steep bank, but a shallow bank with a heavy uncoordinated left rudder turn...” CIT on Paik: “he specifically said in our first interview how he did not notice a wing tilt.” Others support a slight left bank between the Annex and Pentagon, but effectively level.
7) What happened to CIT’s recently proved over the Annex path? This one, like the original impossible path, is almost entirely north of it.
8) The most common cited time for near-impact witnesses seeing it from around the Citgo to impact for around 2-3 seconds (Lagasse and Turcios among them), the same time testified by the Citgo video shadow/light time span (app 2.2 sec), and about half the time required for this cited speed. How do you explain so many sources halving the time?
9) What happens when we try to include the Driving Range-area witnesses, and the imagined north path no one saw connecting that to this arc at it start? How does that affect its subsequent maneuvers?
10) What if we include witnesses AT Arlington Nat’l Cemetery who report the plane as “over” them, and which CIT has also taken at face value? Including these does what for the flight path?
11) What happens when we factor is the post-flyover maneuvers now attributed to R Roberts and J Sucherman 3—5 seconds after impact? Roberts is said to have it flying away, as he says over the ‘lane one area,’ so off to the southwest, just as Sucherman sees the plane coming back for a second attack FROM the west, before turning away?

Update: From ATS link above:
ThroatYogurt: “Your flightpath shows flight 77 too far away from the impact area to support CIT's claim that it was a military deception. In order for it to be pulled off, the plane would have to be VERY close if not directly above the impact zone.”

MoD: “Please scrutinize the drawing a little more - you're missing the point where I drew the line with a beizer curve that is far from uniform in radius. If it was drawn properly, it would actually pass over the alleged impact point. […]the line isn't as accurately drawn as I'd like. It's most correct around the Citgo area, but straightens out again after that point.”

“If it was drawn properly?” Who screwed it up? Is it possible to draw it again but right, and let us know how those numbers come out?

update 6/25: I've been trying to get messages through at ATS, where I'm still a non-posting member, but it's been telling me for a couple days that the "U2U System Is Temporarily Disabled." Can anyone else still on good terms there verify this?
7/2: System went back up right after that, message in to MoD, no response yet. I don't care if he tries to defend or drop this proposal, just thought I should let him know myself that he'd been challenged.
Update 7/8: Forgot to mention it, but he did respond, in comments below.