by James Perloff, James Perloff:
This post is a sequel to my “Debunking Myself” post, in which I explain why—based upon accumulated evidence—I abandoned the “no planes” theory of 9/11 and rescinded a theory I had proposed. (A significant number of revisions have since been made to that post.)
However, many anomalies remain concerning 9/11. Although the fiercest controversy continues to swirl about the manner in which the Twin Towers were destroyed, this article will continue to confine focus on the planes and related phenomena. For that reason, this post should be considered a continuation of the previous one. While I do believe that planes were indeed used on 9/11, and that there were flights numbered American 11, United 175, American 77, and United 93, we’ll now proceed to review anomalies that persist with these flights.
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My intention here is to present facts as an attorney would in a courtroom. I wish to avoid speculation as much as possible, but where an aberration in the official story occurs, I will sometimes suggest a possible explanation.
Before proceeding, I wish to acknowledge some of the 9/11 researchers who, among many, have helped me over the years:
• With his permission, I can finally reveal the real name of loopDloop, widely acknowledged as the best analyst on the now defunct—but partially resurrected—Let’s Roll forum. His name is Simon Miles; he is from the UK, and he has a website at https://simonmmiles.com/. While the site is devoted primarily to other topics, you can find his 9/11 work by clicking on “Research,” then “Reserved.”
• Davide Cole is a real treasure, a researcher who has probably obtained more 9/11-related FOIA-requested documents than anyone in the world. Although he has preferred to remain in the background, he has been the backbone of many prominent 9/11 writers. He pushes no agenda and has always been objective in any discussion I’ve had with him.
• Art Olivier worked in the aerospace industry from 1979 to 2000, with McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. He oversaw the design and construction of all of the C-17 structural test facilities and some of the ones for the MD-11. He is the writer-producer of the 9/11 film Operation Terror, and was able to spot some mistakes in my last 9/11 article, which I amended as a result.
• Mark Conlon, who has specialized in 9/11 planes research.
• DJ Thermal Detonator (Nelson Martins), who can be found here and here, and whose work often delves into areas that other 9/11 Truthers have neglected.
• And there have been many others. Now let’s get to those anomalies.
(1) A Matter of Logic. It is still accepted by me—and broadly throughout the 9/11 movement—that the Twin Towers were destroyed by demolition, regardless of the theory ascribed to—nano-thermite, nuclear devices, Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs), or more conventional explosives.
But to demolish the Twin Towers, successful plane hits had to be guaranteed up front. If Flight 175, the second plane, had only clipped the South Tower with a wing, and crashed elsewhere in the city, the tower’s demolition would have had to be called off.
The same holds true for the first plane, “Flight 11.” If this plane had missed, not only would the North Tower’s destruction have been cancelled, but no cameras would have been focused on the Twin Towers, enabling them to capture the iconic pictures of the second plane hit, which became so embedded in worldwide consciousness.
I do not accept that 9/11’s masterminds would have gambled that Marwan al-Shehhi (alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 175) Mohamed Atta (alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 11—a cocaine-snorting psychopath) and Hani Hanjour (alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 77—by virtually all accounts, a bad pilot) would hit their targets in the way it happened, pulling off feats that experienced Boeing pilots have said they could not have achieved.
(2) Focusing on the Hijacker Pilots. Hani Hanjour was the alleged pilot of Flight 77, said to have hit the Pentagon, The New York Times profiled him as follows:
Mr. Hanjour, who investigators contend piloted the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, was reported to the [Federal] aviation agency in February 2001 after instructors at his flight school in Phoenix had found his piloting skills so shoddy and his grasp of English so inadequate that they questioned whether his pilot’s license was genuine. . . .
Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot. “I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon,” the former employee said. “He could not fly at all.”1
Newsday reported on September 23, 2001:
At Freeway Airport in Bowie, Md., 20 miles west of Washington, flight instructor Sheri Baxter instantly recognized the name of alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour when the FBI released a list of 19 suspects in the four hijackings. Hanjour, the only suspect on Flight 77 the FBI listed as a pilot, had come to the airport one month earlier seeking to rent a small plane.
However, when Baxter and fellow instructor Ben Conner took the slender, soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs during the second week of August, they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a federal pilot’s license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons.2
If Hanjour had trouble controlling a Cessna, with cruising speeds a little over 100 mph, how was he able to fly a Boeing 757, executing a perfect strike on the first floor of the Pentagon at approximately 530 mph?
Mohamed Atta, who supposedly flew Flight 11 into the first tower, was a drug-addicted psychotic. He regularly boozed it up and snorted cocaine.3 When a girl he was dating broke up with him in Florida, he went to her place, and chopped her cat and its kittens into little pieces.4 Was anyone going to trust this guy to execute a James Bond-level mission?
The pilot of the second plane to hit the Towers, Marwan al-Shehhi, was officially flying at well over 500 mph. You can fly at 500 at 30,000 feet, but at ground level, the air is three times thicker. I’m not saying a jetliner can’t surpass 500 at ground, especially after coming out of a steep dive, but the plane would be extremely difficult to control, its engines under enormous strain. On top of that, a loud distracting alarm would have been going off in the cockpit because the pilot had exceeded the plane’s speed limits. (You can hear the alarm here; it would have been even louder in the cockpit.) Passengers would have been screaming. The cockpit was presumably splattered with blood from the pilots whose throats had been cut. Yet—and you can see this in the footage—a couple of seconds before impact and his own death, al-Shehhi had the presence of mind to make a finessed adjustment, tipping the left wing to ensure the plane fully entered the building. (Perhaps best seen starting at 1:44 of the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YLm3pkAiJQ.
Here are comments from Captain Russ Wittenberg, a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot with over 100 combat missions. A retired commercial pilot, he flew for Pan Am and United Airlines for 35 years, with over 30,000 total hours flown:
I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11; the Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that’s alleged to have hit the South Tower. I don’t believe it’s possible for, like I said, for a terrorist, a so-called terrorist, to train on a [Cessna] 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding its design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns, exceeding—pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G’s. The aircraft would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn’t do it, and I’m absolutely positive they couldn’t do it.5
Next, here is a fascinating interview with Dan Govatos, who was chief pilot for Meridian Airlines. The day after 9/11, all flights were grounded. Since his pilots had nothing to do, Govatos put about ten of them on a Boeing simulator and asked them to try hitting the Twin Towers. None of them could do it unless they slowed down almost to landing speed (about 180 mph, about one-third of al-Shehhi’s speed), even though each of the pilots had thousands of hours of experience flying Boeings. Joining Govatos in the interview is Ron Balsamo of Pilots for 9/11 Truth. A nine-minute interview, but well worth a listen:
(3) Tail and Serial Numbers. Every commercial airliner is given a unique identifier called a “tail number”—just as every automobile has a unique license plate number. On 9/11 the alleged tail numbers were:
