PRECISION LOW-RIDER

PRECISION LOW-RIDER
THE UNLIKELY FINAL ALTITUDE
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Last updated July 21 2007

Perhaps the strongest point still worth considering in the no-plane/Pentagon overflight argument is the suicide pilot’s precise attack, a feat of piloting some have flat-out called impossible for a jetliner, which would crash or fall apart or something under the pressure of what the expoerts call ground effect. Nila Segadevan, for example, found it evident "that it is physically impossible to fly a 200,000-lb airliner 20 feet above the ground at 400 MPH," and presumably even tougher to handle one as low as five feet or less and at speeds topping out at 575, as recorded in the FDR.

The attack craft’s performance as seen by the Washington controllers immediately raised eyebrows of suspicion. As the Washington Post reported the day after the attack how “just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver. The plane circled 270 degrees to the right to approach the Pentagon from the west, whereupon Flight 77 fell below radar level, vanishing from controllers’ screens.” Danielle O'Brien, an air controller at Dulles airport, told ABC News “the speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe.”

But safety apparently wasn’t the top concern; as he closed in, Hani Hanjour (we’re told) got even more bold and decided not to simply nose-dive his missile into the upper part of the fairly squat building (77 feet high in total) but to skim the ground like a hot rod even though it meant clipping light poles as he crossed a freeway (luckily no tall trucks there). In the last couple of hundred yards, he was reportedly flying only a few feet above the crew-cut lawn, and that with the wings wobbling under a deadly combo of high speed and atmospheric pressure, before slamming into the ground floor when he had five to choose from. Coming in so low means the engines would be nearly touching the ground, and any slight banking or upward irregularity in the surface would cause an engine to hit dirt and send the whole thing cart-wheeling into the lawn. Thus in addition to excellent control, Mr. Hanjour must have spent some time studying the exact topography of the Pentagon’s lawn to be sure it wouldn’t foil his daring precision approach with any pesky hillocks.

The ASCE's Pentagon Building Performace Report, for example, reproduced the five frames of security camera footage made public in 2002, seeing in them the approaching aircraft with its top about 20 feet above ground, "so low to the ground that it reportedly clipped an antenna on a vehicle on an adjacent road and severed light posts." Indeed, five poles a few hundred feet from the building were clipped and knocked over, their placement indicating the same wingspan and trajectory reported, as well as the plane's remarkably low altitude. On its path across Pentagon’s lawn, the plane banked with its right wing higher; about 100 feet before impact, the right wing struck a construction generator and the left engine was so low it impacted a “ground-level, external vent structure,” the report notes. These may have led to a pre-impact explosion in which “portions of the wings might have been separated from the fuselage before the aircraft struck the building.”

So while the final approach may not be as perfect as widely believed, it is remrkable, and looks a bit like the work of a precision-guided missile. But after a look at the physical evidence and eyewitness accounts, it looks like a projectile the exact shape, size, weight, paint job, etc. of an American Airlines 757 or similar model. The plane may have had a long life of peaceful flights until re-rigged in its final days, and may well have been filled with the very people we were told it was. Captain Burlingame may well have been running the plane normally at takeoff as we’re told, but lost control as the plane turned around over Ohio, dropped its transponder signal, and closed communications with the outside world. This is far from provable, but well within the realm of possibility. Hani Hanjour, to put it mildly, is not the only pilot in the world who could pull all this off, and whoever or whatever was at the controls, it seems, knew the target very well.

THE PENTAGON PILOT'S PENCHANT FOR PARALLELISM

THE BURLINGAME SEAM
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
January 11 2007
edited 1/21

"One of the true ironies of this crash is that it was into the Pentagon, where he worked for many years as a naval reserve officer. The people that perished in that crash could very well have been friends and colleagues of his."
– Brad Burlingame, brother of the deceased Flight 77 pilot.

The Pentagon was not unprepared for a hijacked 757 strike – though there was no warning and thus no time to implement them, in fact a new set of procedures had apparently just been approved. This was based on the findings of a series of at least two drills. Beginning with a MASCAL in October 2000 that posited a small passenger plane crashing into the building’s courtyard, followed by a reported exercise in May based on a hijacked Boeing 757 crashing into the Pentagon as an “ersatz guided missile.” Strange but true, they prepared for the 9/11 scenario just months before it came crushingly true, at least according to two reputable Pentagon-connected news sources. But sadly due to the radar blind spot we’re told, there was never any awareness of the plane and no time to put the new plan into motion so it became useless, another part of the tragedy of un-preparedness we’d need to “set right” after the attacks.

According to numerous 9/11 Truthers, one of the prime movers in the formation of this new and failed plan was Navy Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame; Barbara Honegger specified as far back as late 2002 that Burlingame had “recently […] been part of a Task Force that drafted the Pentagon's emergency response plan on what to do in case a plane hit the building.” [1] Burlingame was also a pilot for American Airlines, who famously went on to be the very pilot assigned to Flight 77 – a Boeing 757 - before he lost control of it to the hijackers who crashed it into the Pentagon, fulfilling the terms of the second drill. If we think about this just a second, we see that this seems well beyond the realm of coincidence and “irony” as any official story that acknowledged all this would argue.

But there are problems with this construct, although it does seem more substantiated than the no-757 claims. The only “reputable” source I’ve seen indicating this is even worth considering is an early Washington Post piece stating that Burlingame had been “a Navy F-4 pilot and once worked on anti-terrorism strategies in the Pentagon.” [2] It would then be undeniably ironic – which is not always the same as relevant - that he should die in a terror attack on the Pentagon. Note that he worked in the Pentagon on countering terrorism in general, not countering or preparing for terrorist strikes against the Pentagon.

Loose Change, where I first heard of this seam, gives no source for his MASCAL involvement, but claims as evidence that Burlingame retired the Navy and went to work for American Airlines less than a year before the attack, or just after the drill. In actuality, he started flying for them in 1979, and retired from his reserve status in the Navy in 1996 to focus full-time on flying. [3] Another bitter irony! He was nearing retirement age at that job too, before his life stream was cut short one day from his 52nd birthday - September 12, 2001. (Later on and after a long battle, his special death earned him and his wife status to be buried at Arlington cemetery, normally reserved for service members who managed to live to 60.) [4]

The source Loose Change was citing seems to be Barbara Honegger, who sa Chic in on the plane preparations. It doesn’t help her tentative late 2002 case here that she then finds it “extremely likely, if not certain - that this 'task force' that Flight 77 pilot ‘Chick’ 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.” [5] That’s quite a leap, but the timing seems possible; he retired in 1996 and was allegedly involved with MASCAL in late 2000, possibly as a private-sector advisor. Cheney’s task force was created by President Bush in May 2001, to make the nation’s responses to a WMD attack “seamlessly integrated” under Cheney’s eye to “do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm.” [6] It had nothing to do with air defense, hijackings, or non-WMD terror threats as far as I've seen, but was directly headed by another recent Navy retiree and ace pilot, Admiral Steven Abbott. So Burlingame seems a likely candidate to come on board as well, but that he’d be working from the cockpit of a plane rather than an office at the White House seems a bit odd.

It’s hard to know if Burlingame was involved with this, shrouded as it is in secrecy. The effort’s staff director was in fact Col. John Fenzel III, director of Cheney’s energy task force, until then the prime model of Bush administration secrecy and apparent malevolence. But with unexplained certainty Loose Change has Burlingame in on MASCAL and Honegger has him in on Cheney's ‘effort’ with his questionable plane-into-Pentagon resumé. Though the clustering of coincidences here is stuning, especially when we factor in circumstantial cases like his only daughter dying in a suspicious apartment fire in Deember 2006, we're left with a tangled knot of unresolved mystery centered in the cockpit of a doomed airliner five years ago. If this Burlingame seam is indeed a scripted part of the master story, it would serve no practical purpose I can see in the event itself. But by making sure it was his plane that hit the Pentagon, as a follow-up psychological operation it could serve to draw attention via its oddities and suck energy into a seam that ultimately is probably irrelevant even though it seems a tempting window onto the true mechanics.

Or is this all just coincidence after all?

Sources:
[1], [5] Honegger, Barbara. "Feature: The U.S. Government, Not the Hijackers, 'Chose' the Date of the 9-11 Attacks"
Barbara Honegger. December 13 2002. http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/12-14-02/discussion.cgi.28.shtml
[2] September 11, 2001 By David Maraniss Washington Post. September 16 2001. Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15
[3] Loose Change. Second Edition. 4:07
[4] http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/cfburling3.htm
[6] Ruppert. Crossing the Rubicon. Page 412.
[9] Congressional Quarterly. April 15, 2004.Accessed August 5, 2005 at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2004/congressionalquarterly041504.html