Reality: As I've explained in at least one prior column, Hani Hanjour's flying was hardly the show-quality demonstration often described. It was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation's capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with help from the 757's autopilot. Striking a stationary object -- even a large one like the Pentagon -- at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon's lawn.
It's true there's only a vestigial similarity between the cockpit of a light trainer and the flight deck of a Boeing. To put it mildly, the attackers, as private pilots, were completely out of their league. However, they were not setting out to perform single-engine missed approaches or Category 3 instrument landings with a failed hydraulic system. For good measure, at least two of the terrorist pilots had rented simulator time in jet aircraft, but striking the Pentagon, or navigating along the Hudson River to Manhattan on a cloudless morning, with the sole intention of steering head-on into a building, did not require a mastery of airmanship. The perpetrators had purchased manuals and videos describing the flight management systems of the 757/767, and as any desktop simulator enthusiast will tell you, elementary operation of the planes' navigational units and autopilots is chiefly an exercise in data programming. You can learn it at home. You won't be good, but you'll be good enough.
"They'd done their homework and they had what they needed," says a United Airlines pilot (name withheld on request), who has flown every model of Boeing from the 737 up. "Rudimentary knowledge and fearlessness."
"As everyone saw, their flying was sloppy and aggressive," says Michael (last name withheld), a pilot with several thousand hours in 757s and 767s. "Their skills and experience, or lack thereof, just weren't relevant."
"The hijackers required only the shallow understanding of the aircraft," agrees Ken Hertz, an airline pilot rated on the 757/767. "In much the same way that a person needn't be an experienced physician in order to perform CPR or set a broken bone."
That sentiment is echoed by Joe d'Eon, airline pilot and host of the "Fly With Me" podcast series. "It's the difference between a doctor and a butcher," says d'Eon.
According to the would-be detectives, it wasn't a passenger jet that hit the Pentagon, but either a radio-controlled fighter or a missile. The conspicuous dearth of wreckage proves this. This is the "magic bullet" of Sept. 11. Almost no recognizable pieces of the supposed 80-ton 757 were found at the scene. Why weren't the wings sheared off, many bloggers have demanded to know. Where's the tail? "Airplane crashes leave wreckage," insists one Web site, complete with a slide show of past disasters showing the plainly visible remains of tails, wings and sections of fuselage.
Reality: Airplane crashes do leave wreckage, though not always in the shapes and sizes you might expect. Flight 77's demise was an exceptionally high-speed, head-on, explosive collision with the reinforced masonry façade of an office building -- a type of impact rarely seen in air disasters and pretty much guaranteed to cause total destruction. The wings of an airplane, going 400 miles per hour into bricks and reinforced steel columns, do not, under any circumstances, bend or shear off. They shred into fragments, along with the rest of the plane.
Many small parts of Flight 77 were found in semi-recognizable condition, most of them inside the building and hard to discern amid the rubble. A slice of aluminum skin from the upper fuselage, for instance, along which part of the American Airlines livery is still visible, was photographed on the Pentagon lawn.
Earlier this week, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the public interest group Judicial Watch, the government officially released video footage, taken by a Pentagon security camera, showing blurry images of American 77. The quality of the footage is awful, and is destined to provoke, rather than staunch, further controversy.
Other Pentagon pictures show mutilated landing gear rims, and what looks to be the shattered turbine or compressor disk from a jet engine. That disk, say the skeptics, is of too small a diameter to be from the engine of a 757, but is the proper diameter to be from a cruise missile or unmanned Global Hawk drone.
Reality: Untrue on both counts. Experts say the disk is too large to have belonged to a cruise missile or Global Hawk. And in a modern turbofan engine, the turbine and compressor sections consist of multiple stages, using disks of varying diameter. Analysis by Aerospaceweb.org suggests the disk in the photo belonged to the intermediate compressor stage of the same model of Rolls-Royce engine that powered American 77.
The impact pattern with the Pentagon façade, we are told, is inconsistent with the size and shape of a 757. The hole is too narrow. And there is no outline of where the wings or tail would have struck, as seen on the World Trade Center towers.
Reality: The hole is not too narrow. The fuselage of a 757 is about 13 feet across, which roughly matches the entry wound into the Pentagon. Many conspiracy sites inflate a 757's fuselage height and diameter, citing values that include its landing gear or tail. In any event, we shouldn't expect an aluminum airframe colliding with heavy masonry to leave a silhouette. The damage will be greatly dispersed -- exactly as the Pentagon footage shows -- and points of impact will not necessarily be obvious.
We saw ghostly, wingtip-to-wingtip outlines of the 767s that struck the World Trade Center because the exterior of those skyscrapers was a thin wall of glass and lightweight steel. The Pentagon was an immensely more formidable structure, and the damage, both to the plane and to the building, reflected this exactly as it should have.
Numerous witnesses saw a small plane or missile-like object streaking toward the Pentagon.
Reality: As professional investigators will attest, eye- and ear-witness accounts of airplane accidents are notoriously unreliable. But for the record, an even greater number of people spoke of seeing an American Airlines 757 streaking toward, and smashing into, the Pentagon. Their testimony is conveniently absent from the conspiracy sites.
One of those people was Mike Walter, an anchor reporter for "USA Today Live." Walter was stuck in traffic near the Pentagon on Sept. 11. He watched the jet slam into the Pentagon and was interviewed widely. "Referring to the American Airlines jet metaphorically as a weapon," explains Walter, "I'd described it as being like 'a cruise missile with wings.'" This quote was taken out of context to support the conspiracy theories. It was even cited in Thierry Meyssan's "L'Effroyable Imposture," a book that became a No. 1 bestseller in France. Walter says, "It's tough being in journalism and seeing your own words being used to persuade people to believe something that simply isn't true. Anyone who has seen the full text of that interview knows that I was clearly talking about the American Airlines jet. Because that's what I saw.
"I hear from the conspiracy people on occasion," adds Walter. "I had one track me down, call me, question me, and then call me a liar before hanging up on me. I've also read online that I'm a shill for the CIA."
Next page: How many civilian jetliners zoom around a city, spiraling down to treetop level at 400 knots?
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