FLIGHT 77'S HOME STRETCH

HOW LONG TO CROSS THE LAST YARDS?
And an analysis of "Zebra's" alleged missing frames
last updated 3/6/07

I've been looking at the two Pentagon CCTV security cameras that captured the "white blur" crossing the West lawn before exploding into the building. Both videos show a portion of the blur in exactly one frame, and the next is the explosion. Here I attempt to break down how this lines up with the camera's frame rate. For simplicity, we are here going to ignore possibilities like different craft or speed range, different distance from the camera or approach angle, and the possibility of manipulated footage. Those all open an infinite number of variables that makes it impossible to verify anything.

First, Flight 77's speed: reports vary but include:
FEMA: 532 mph
ASCE: 479 mph
9/11 Comm: 530
Russell Pickering: more than 400
Flight Data Recorder, NTSB study: about 550-575 mph
others have cited figures like "at least 250" and "at least 300 mph." The high end speeds would seem less likely, as the higher the speed the harder the handling at extremely low altitudes. Yet the Flight data recorder shows a final rate pushing the plane’s top speed of about 600 mph. So I settled on a range of sample speeds; 350mph (0.097 mps), 420mph (0.117 mps), 460mph (0.1333 mps), 530mph (0.1472 mps), 575 (0.159 mps).

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in their 2002 Pentagon Building Performance Report, calculated the distance to the building from nosecone in the 2002 stills (camera two) as 320 feet. My same distance based on my camera field of view analysis and generally accepted flight path is 350 feet. Close enough, I’ll go with their numbers for now.

Time needed to cover remaining distance to the building (320 feet / 0.05 miles):
@ 350mph = 0.58 sec
@ 420mph = 0.48 sec
@ 480mph = 0.42 sec
@ 530mph = 0.38 sec
@ 575mph = 0.31 sec

So I can only offer a liberal range of times needed to cross that last distance, from 0.31-0.58 seconds, give or take for exact distance, all well under the one-second frame rate. From Camera one’s view, the plane is further back - the frames captured by it seem to have been a split-second ahead and caught the nosecone just crossing the threshold of peripheral vision – distance to building then, by my estimates, is about 450 feet (.08 miles), increasing the time needed to cross – then the span is more like .5 to .8 seconds – nearing the frame rate expectation of a second glimpse, but still falling short.
Left: camera two. Right: camera one. (click to enlarge)

Presuming neither video is missing any frames, this gives us 0.4-0.6 seconds for the impact fireball to erupt before the next frame was taken by camera two. With camera one we have about 0.2-0.5 seconds for the same phenomenon, explaining the overelming brightness of the younger burst recorded there. In short, at that frame rate and those speeds, we should expect exactly one frame of the plane from each camera’s view, no more and no less.
The explosion: what's the time lag in these corresponding frames?
Now to the analysis presented by a fellow member at Above Top Secret (screen name“Zebra”) whose well made website alleges that one frame is missing from each camera’s record just as the plane enters. Seeing the plane nosing into cam 1 and fully present in cam 2, he saw two different frames and wondered why there weren’t corresponding frames for the nosing-in phase on cam 2 or the fully-present phase in cam 1. After the analysis above, it’s clear however that if such frames did exist and were excised, this means the plane flew about 130-feet between the frames, given the ASCE’s numbers, which roughly jive with my own.

At one second apart, that gives it a speed of 72 mph between the two stages. To cover the remaining distance from the fully-present stage to the building’s wall (320 feet) at that rate would take it three seconds, necessitating another three frames missing from each camera’s record. In fact, I'm pretty sure airliners stop flying altogether when they get down to 72 mph.

So what else could account for the positional difference in the two frames we’ve seen? As Zebra summed up the possibilities, “either the speed of the flying object is tremendous or another incident with the camera generated a frame totally out of synchronization or those two frames are in fact 1 second apart and have each a corresponding frame missing in the other video.” My money’s going on the speed one. At even the slowest sample speed of 350 mph, that 130 foot difference would be covered in .2 seconds, and the higher speeds would in fact lessen the time difference needed. So 0.2 is the high end. and Zebra himself admits a delay of "no more than 0.1 second" (I'm not sure where he got this exact difference). At any rate, a difference of .2 seconds falls closer to the small time lag between the two cameras than it does to the frame interval within either camera. Judging from the differences in other correlary frames compared to frame-frame differences within a camera, I'd guess the time lage between them at noticeable but well under 0.5 seconds - anywhere from 0.1 to 0.3 and a perfect fit for the differences in the white blur frames.

Updates: Now here's where I went wrong the first time. The frames before the plane, as Zebra lays them out, seem to line up with a slight delay, camera one ahead. After the plane, they line up about the same, even with the three blank spaces inserted. (except at row 27, frames 0864 and 2719, where camera two seems to be slightly ahead judging by the projectiles at the top, though this is probably a trick of perspective I can't explain right now). Anyway, the point is even if we ignore the two "missing" frames that give the plane a ridiculous speed and that cancel each other out, one camera must be missing a frame for these to line up both before and after.

But I'm also seeing other problems with the anlysis I'd glossed over before. Zebra's identification of the plane is off, in my opinion. In cam 2, he sees nosecone, right wing and right engine. At almost no angle but near-head on would we be ale to see even the tip of the right wing out ahead of the nosecone. They are set too far back for that. and in cam 2, he's been tricked by the dark tailfin, seeing the same white that was just plane now as smoke behind it, and seeing the plane itself suddenly black. This makes the possibility of the frames being off seem more likely, giving us a greater positional difference of about 475 as compared to 105, giving us a semi-plausible speed of 320 mph. But this is still far slower than most reported speeds, and of course relies on that baing the tailfin, which I'm pretty sure it isn't.

THE WHITE BLUR

OF SMOKE AND MIRRORED SURFACES
February 7 2007
Last Updated 5/23/07

despite their overall poor quality as evidence (serving better as a Rorshach test for pre-existing 9/11 theories), the surveillance video stills released in 2002 can yield some screts to the patient eye. I admit that's not normally me, but I've taken a crack at it; Prime among the features that stand out is the “white blur” which inhabits the stationary background briefly – for one frame – before it disappears into a brilliant fireball on the building’s façade in the next. Passed off by the official story as proof of a plane, it has most often been interpreted not as the plane but as the vapor or smoke trail behind the plane, which is mostly hidden behind the security box in the center.

For example, “Cat Herder” at Above Top Secret, in an otherwise sterling and pivotal mega-post “9/11: A Boeing 757 struck the Pentagon” (posted mid-2004, up to more than 4,000 responses now) took this tack, seeing an oddly black plane emitting a white vapor trail. To be fair, CH did admit: “this is entirely subjective and the image quality [...] is not good enough to form a factual opinion.”

I'm sure it was addressed somewhere in the thread, but a 757 shouldn’t have a vapor or smoke trail behind it if it crosssed the Pentalawn. The normal contrail seen behind jets in the sky is a result of high altitudes, and does not happen near ground level. I didn’t know this until I learned of it from Karl Schwarz of all people, but it seems to be true anyway. Thus the vapor trail meant a missile, which burns rocket fuel that does leave a trail at sea level (although that doesn’t seem to explain an A3 Skywarrior any better than it does a 757).

Mike Wilson’s animation of the attack helps explain and visualize the source of smoke as consistent with a 757 with engine damage, proably from ingesting a light pole "luminary." But like Cat Herder, I believe he got the plane and this smoke confused in the still analysis. Again as have most others, he identified the plane as hidden behind the security box - what they show as tailfin is the same tall part of the horizon line, and what I believe is the plane is shown as the engine smoke.

Allow me to explain: there are things we can tell from these stills if we look close. The first thing is to look not just at the first still but at all five to get asense of motion. the five frames below are closely cropped on the area in question, slightly enhanced, with the fisheye effect uncorrected. I've looked for movement and stillness, measured by changes in pixels from one frame to the next. Spots that match up in frame after frame I've taken as stationary objects/background and the few that don’t I've taken as things that are moving. The plane/missile was moving, so clearly we look for pixels that change suddenly. for the moment I'm ignoring the black tailfin to simplify this stage of the analysis, but I'll get back to it shortly.

Frame One This is the key frame that supposedly shows the vapor trail - I would note the dark pixels on underside that could well be its shadow on the lawn – if a smoke trail it's pretty dense. If a 757, recall the angle of attack, and that the alleged plane was silver, and NOT in the building’s shadow yet, so it should show up brilliant white with sun beaming right on it, and possibly affected by glare to look larger.

Second frame, one second after the first. Already we can see that where the white pixels were there is now “vapor” or more likely smoke, running evenly gray up to the building. The dark green horizon line is steady in all shots – none of the darkness there is part of the craft, unless it left some black bits of itself floating behind in mid-air, now obscured by suddenly-gray smoke that had been bright white a second earlier.



Frame three:
Again this is about one second after the previous. Note the gray smoke hasn't changed much, even as the fireball evolves, rises slowly, and darkens.







Frame Four:
No significant change in color of smoke, projectiles working their way up through the cloud and emerging.






Frame Five: Same. gray smoke,expanding and darkenin explosion. the little white "nosecone" some have seen peeking out from behind the security box is still there, attached to the box.





So then lets revisit the first frame here in simplified cartoony colors – background, forground, building and shadow, check-point, and the “blur.” Looking also at the color of “smoke” in the red sample area from the five stills, we see a sudden shift from white to gray, which stays gray for the next four seconds. Clearly the white is NOT smoke, most likely the plane itself.

Not that I can't see what people think is a tailfin, and I admit the pixel change here is significant. In fact looking again I've decided I may have been wrong in blending it into the horizon, and so I'm working on clearing this up with more analysis. I'm seeing not only a remarkably sharp vertical aberration, but also a notable blue-shift in the dark horizon area that happens to correspond exactly with it. The color enhanced inset helped reveal at least some of this is apparently in the pixels themselves, appearing over the whole image, and also present in the other frame from this camera, perhaps a digital artifact (orange lines illustrate edges of rectangular areas tinetd blue and orange, respectively). We see the white emerging from the tail end as we would if the right engine were damaged. But again, this would be amazing shadow-casting white-then-gray smoke... and if the tailfin were at that location, at least by my mapping of the scene, it would be sticking out to the left of the box, probably beyond the security box lip's ability to hide it.

I had rebelled against the "black tailfin," insisting on seeing only a slight, irrelevant extension of an already high point on the skyline, but this really does look like a tailfin. When it comes to the chassis, I'd expect sunlit silver glare to dominate, and certainly not the all-black plane Cat Herder saw. But looking on the north side and as the plane was beginning its starboard bank, the visible side would be in shadow. But again, how could the whole plane, including its massive banking right wing stay hidden in that blind spot without peeking over or to the left? Is the high point the banking right wing and engine? No - the wing would catch sunlight at almost any angle but sideways, and the engine would glint at any angle. Only the tailfin can do this darkness trick, which makes the tailfin there seem possible and makes the white again seem like smoke.

In short, I'm confused again. Nonetheless...
In May 2006 the full video the stills were taken from, along with a second video from a different camera that has no such obstruction of view, was released by Judicial Watch. In this new view, besides a horrible glare and what looks like a splat of bird crap, we see the blur alone and unobstructed, if just the tip of it at far right. In this shot at least this is clearly NOT a smoke or vapor trail unless of an invisible craft, and strangely about the same color as the possible smoke recorded by cam 2. Although less of it is visible, we also see more clearly a shape to it. It looks like it's again underpinned by a shadow. Even adjusting for light distortion, this looks much bigger than a Global Hawk or other smaller craft often cited.

But the shapes do seem to fit nicely, giving us something like this, resembling a giant ghost Albatross. I can't tell you how exactly this must be a 757, nor can I see how anything else could be readily identifiable in this ill-defined cluster of optic distortions. But it's of a good size, the largest number of eyewitnesses described an AA liner, and something like a 757 seems to have damaged the building and killed nearly 200 people there within the next couple of seconds. You do the math. My best guess still, after looking at all this, is the "tailfin" is nothing more than some kind of digital "artifact" after all. But I'm still looking at it...