Physical and mathematical analysis of Pentagon crash
by Gerard Holmgren

PART 10. THE HOLE IN THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL

http://www.mediacen.navy.mil/pubs/allhands/nov01/war18.jpg

This photo shows a hole punched through the Pentagon wall at the back of the damaged area.

Let's find its exact location.

In the next photo, scroll to the bottom and look approximately in the middle of the photo, at the back of the third ring, below the second set of windows to the right of the bridge between the rings, casting a large shadow You’ll see the top half of a circular hole.

http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/pentagon/images/16.jpg

 

Here’s the same scene from a different angle.You can now see all of the hole.

http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/pentagon/images/17.jpg

It appears to be at angle of something like 45 degrees from the first ring damage area. How much stone has been penetrated to make this hole? Assuming no internal walls, 6 walls. If each wall is 3 feet thick, that’s 18 ft of stone, plus or minus any inaccuracy of the guess of the thickness of the walls, perhaps plus anything that was in the way, inside the buildings. Because it's at a 45 degree angle, whatever has made it has actually had to punch out 27 ft of stone.

An explosion that digs tunnels? Not even the hard line 757 enthusiasts are suggesting that this was caused by the impossible explosion. The logical explanation is a missile. The 757 supporters claim that it was punched through the wall by one of the plane’s engines.

The engines are mounted on the wings. The wings were allegedly cremated. How did the engine not only escape disintegration, but propel itself forward two to three rings beyond where any of the rest of the plane got to? (Three rings beyond refers to some scenarios that the plane never actually penetrated the building but crashed just outside.)

There are only two available energy sources for any part of the plane to move through the wall. The momentum of the plane,and the alleged force of the explosion. If the energy source was the latter, why did it propel one small part of the plane forward, while destroying the rest of it? And if the energy source was the momentum of the plane, why hasn’t the 100 ton fuselage burst through the rings, instead of the 6 ton engine?

I’m going to try to construct the best argument I can that this was caused by an engine. The engine became disconnected from the wing before the plane blew up. Otherwise the engine would have blown up too.

The engine must have been jolted free of the wing and propelled forward by its existing motion at the same time as something else stopped the rest of the plane in its tracks. By the time the explosion happened, the engine was out of range of the destructive blast, and already punching its way through the wall. Why did the engine burst free? As the plane was approaching the building, the wing hit a light pole weakening the mountings around the engine so that it was hanging by a thread. As the nose slammed into the wall, or perhaps the plane hit the ground just in front of the wall, the resultant change of momentum stopped the plane very quickly, jolting the engine free. It fired into the wall, bursting through as the plane blew up.

That’s the best I can do, but there are huge problems.

For a start, the engine weighed about 6 tons, according to these specifications for similar engines

http://home.swipnet.se/~w-48037/l1011techsp.htm

(Note: The weights listed next to the engine on the Boeing technical site referenced at the beginning of the article, do not refer to the engine's weight, but to its thrust power.)

It's a little difficult to imagine that the mountings attatching an engine of this weight could be so critically weakened by hitting a pole, but never mind - ignoring reality has become a regular necessity for any attempt to keep the 757 theory alive. Let's press on.

If we speculate that the nose of the 100 ton plane hit the wall,and stopped dead, hardly penetrating, then we can’t seriously suggest that an engine, 6% of the weight, now travelling at a lesser speed than what the plane would have been doing when it hit the wall, could punch its way through three rings. If the plane hit the ground, and stopped dead, a few feet from the wall, and then blew up, where is the 155ft fuselage crater,and the sideways damage from the wings? That’s without the explosion. Where is the circle of devastation which should be a radius of something more than 77 ft? This photo demonstrates that this didn’t happen.

http://www.serendipity.li/wot/june2aa/june2aa.htm

If the engine didn’t detach until after the explosion then it can’t have outrun the blast. Everything would have been blown up together. If the engine detached from the shock of impact, as the nose hit the wall, and then flew towards the wall, the nose had no reason to stop penetrating the wall until the explosion blew it up. This means that the nose was always further forward than the engine, so if the nose is blown up, so is the engine. If we postulate an angle for the plane and a position for the nose, to try to create a scenario that the engine shoots wide of the blast area, then it's also shooting wide of the impact area. You’d have to produce evidence of a second entry point. Whichever engine it was, it has to pass through the 65 ft hole area, and in any scenario where the nose penetrates the wall, it's going to pass through later than the nose. And since they must both be travelling into the building at the same angle, then the distance between them will never widen as a result of angle.

So unless you want to suggest that the engine actually fired from the wing before the impact (like a missile), then any scenario which has the nose penetrating the wall is impossible. In case someone suggests that the engine fired off immediately upon hitting a light pole, I’ll point out that they’re built to withstand that kind of contact, and even if they weren’t, that would knock the engine backwards, not shoot it ahead of the plane. In fact, whatever the cause of its detachment, if it came off when the plane was still moving, it's impossible for it to have been fired off faster than what the plane was moving, so if anything happened beforehand, it would have fallen off, not shot forward like a missile.

If the scenario involving the nose hitting the wall is impossible, and the scenario of the nose not hitting the wall is also impossible, then it didn’t happen.

So it was a missile. But let's pretend that the previous analysis doesn’t exist and look at other aspects of this question, pretending that the engine theory is still alive.

Let's pretend that it was possible for the plane to stop short of the wall and blow up outside, ignoring the lack of damage to the lawns, and say that the engine was jolted free by the previously speculated method, and managed to outrun the blast, before the plane blew up.
If the plane was doing 400 mph when it suddenly stopped, and the engine flew off at a speed of about 300 mph, then it was travelling towards the wall at about 440 ft per second. The way the engines are mounted on a 757

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/281582/L/

the engine would have about 60 ft to travel to strike the wall, allowing for the plane stopping 5 ft short of the wall (90 degree fuselage angle). Angling the fuselage at 45 degrees to make the engine’s flight path compatible with the direction of the third ring hole, makes negligible difference to the distance from engine to wall, as long we postulate that it was the inner wing engine. If it was the outer wing, it has to travel about 120 ft to strike the wall. Also, the effective horizontal width created to the north (assuming the plane to have approached from the south) by the outer engine angle, means that the front of the fuselage has to be placed hard against the right edge of the 65 ft hole, to fit the engine's entry point into the damaged area. This is significant, because we are now postulating a scenario where the wall suffered no impact other than the engine strike and the explosion. It's impossible to make a credible case for the fuselage cremation happening hard up against the edge of the hole, when just a few feet away windows were unbroken. So we need to assume that it was the inner engine. This enables the nose to be placed close to the centre of the area of 65 ft damage, while still allowing the engine to fire through the damaged area, avoiding the problem of having to suggest a non-existent second entry point.

So the engine had about 60 ft to travel to the wall. At 440 ft per second this would take close enough to 150 milliseconds. If the plane blew up before this, the engine would be toasted along with everything else, because it's travelling a line which takes the inner side of it only 15 ft from the exploding fuselage. So even if had reached the wall, that still wouldn’t save it. We really need to give it time to burrow into the wall a safe distance from the blast. If its speed halved to 220 ft per second, when it struck the wall, then it would take about another 50 ms to fully enter its 11.5 ft length into the wall, and we need to allow another 50 ms for it to burrow a further 10 ft to be safe. Even this might not be enough because its penetration path is crossing the middle of the 65 ft hole, in front of where the nose is blowing up - the part of the wall that would be subject to the most force. It might need another 50 ms of burrowing. So to keep the engine safe from the blast, we have to postulate a delay of 250 to 300 ms after the plane crashed, before it blew up. Instinctively, this seems impossible, although I can’t produce hard data to prove it. But the scenario as a whole is impossible.

This is what had to happen. The plane can’t have hit with the nose pointing sharply down into the ground, because then the engine would have been fired into the ground. So it had to land just about level, but stop dead - like a sudden 90 degree belly flop straight out of a momentum of 400 mph. Then we have to postulate a 250 to 300 ms delay, before it suddenly blows up with a ferocity never before seen in aviation history. During this delay, we have to postulate that it didn’t break up significantly, otherwise other wreckage would have gone flying off and also escaped the blast. Then it suddenly cremated itself, and did all this without damaging the lawns that it belly flopped on to. Impossible.

Postulating tilted wings to try to change distances and angles only makes it worse. If the wings were tilted at 45 degrees, then the lowest point of the upper engine is about 55 ft off the ground, and the the lowest point of the lower engine is about 20 ft off the ground. Since the hole is at ground level, you’d have to describe a precise downwards angle for the nose to get the engine to finish up at ground level after its penetration through the rings. But the bigger problem here is that the nose can’t have hit the ground with the wings tilted, because the lower wing would have broken off first. This makes it rather difficult to suggest the sudden stop necessary to fire off the upper engine wing with any speed. When is the sudden jolt ? When the wing breaks off, or when the nose hits? We probably have to speculate a halved speed for the engine now - if it could still happen at all - meaning that the delay before the explosion is now 500 - 600 ms, which is getting quite ridiculous, and the engine is now lacking the power it needs to have any chance of charging through 27 ft of stone, which is now a bit more, because it's being fired from a raised angle. So if you want the wings tilted, you have suggest that the nose was hitting the wall, which takes us back to the same problems that first led us to suggest that it must have hit the ground instead. And it's even worse now. With the wings tilted at 45 degrees, the nose would be hitting the wall at a height of about 40 ft, meaning that we have to suggest that it simply bounced off, or stuck in the wall and hung there (while the engine powered through the wall) or if the nose burst through the wall, we’re back to the same old problems.

So the whole engine theory is impossible all round, which ever way you look at it. Nevertheless, let's pretend it's still alive and press on.

There’s the question of whether the momentum and weight of the engine was enough to power its way through 3 rings of the building.
Let’s do some comparisons with weapons specifically made to penetrate strong buildings.

During WW 2, the British developed the “Tall Boy” Bomb
http://www.members.aol.com/nukeinfo2/

It weighed 12,000 lb and could punch its way through 10 ft of steel reinforced concrete, when dropped from a great height (a Lancaster bomber) Very impressive! The Pentagon may not be as strong, but the engine is alleged to have punched through nearly triple this width. The engine weighs about the same as the "Tall Boy." However the "Tall Boy" was travelling at several times the speed, and also contained explosives. And yet, somehow, it appears to be only marginally more effective, perhaps even less. All that engineering for nothing! If the penetrative performance of the 757 engine is anything to go on, it seems that the Brits would been better off to save their money and just drop big lumps of scrap metal. Not learning this lesson, they went on to develop the heaviest bomb of WW 2, the 22,000 lb “Grand slam” bomb which could penetrate steel reinforced concrete to a depth of about 12 ft. In addition to its enormous weight and explosive power, it was dropped from Lancaster bombers, giving it great speed by the time of impact. The article mentions that the bombs were exceeding the speed of sound (760 mph), by the time they hit, but doesn’t mention by how much. That could be calculated if you knew the height at which the Bombers were flying.

http://www.constable.ca/bombs.htm (see also previous link)

Considering that the engine did not have an explosive inside it, was travelling (optimistically) at 300 mph and weighed about half of the “Grand Slam”, it's a little difficult to work out how it was able to a penetration job which would appear to be about equal to that which the Grand Slam was capable of, and do it easily by the look of the photo. Even more remarkable is the fact that the face of the engine is the worst shape possible for penetrating a target. Tens of thousands of years ago, people worked out that pointed surfaces penetrate targets more easily than flat surfaces, and arrows, spears swords, bullets and missiles are designed according to this principle. The above articles mention that the “grand slam” was aerodynamically designed to ensure that the pointed end would be facing down when it struck. So the engine was really just like a heavier and more powerful version of the old mediaeval catapult. They had less powerful propulsion and couldn’t throw anything approaching that weight, but if they’d had even 10% of the alleged penetrative power of this remarkable engine, then most castles would have been demolished within the first hour of the siege.

In Dec 2001 it was reported that the US airforce’s new cave and bunker busting bombs could penetrate 11 ft of reinforced concrete, perhaps more.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2001/011213-attack02.htm

What a remarkable achievement! Decades of experience and research in the area of missile development, swallowing billions of dollars, have finally achieved a penetrative power approaching that of a flat ended, non explosive, 6 ton chunk of metal hurled through the air at a few hundred mph, like a bigger version of an ancient siege engine.

Where is this engine? Did it miraculously disintegrate after punching its way through three rings? Or have authorities rushed it away somewhere to hide any evidence for their own story?

In summary, any scenario which postulates the nose entering the wall to any significant degree is impossible, because the engine can’t have penetrated the wall more effectively than the nose, and would have been blown up along with the rest of the plane. Any scenario which has the nose bouncing off the wall is impossible, because then the engine couldn’t have penetrated, and it also creates the problem of why there’s no sign of the impact and explosion 110 ft out into the lawns.(Allowing for a 45 degree fuselage angle) Any scenario which postulates that the plane never contacted the building is impossible for the same reason, and also that the engine probably wouldn’t have had time to get to the wall before the explosion, unless we invoke the impossible combination of the belly flop and the long delay. The suggestion that the engine had enough penetrative power to create that hole is attributing to it powers equal to state of the art missile technology, and of the heaviest high explosive bombs of WW 2.

Even if it could have penetrated, where did it finish up, and why has it vanished? So it was a missile. Once more, the argument is concluded, but I will again suspend the findings to examine another aspect.


Next Contents
The World Trade Center Demolition
and the So-Called War on Terrorism
Serendipity Home Page