Flight Paths
Part 3: Flight 77 goes all the way to Kansas
(Updated 25th Sept 2004 - new evidence from the Commission hearings confirms the story)
Frank Levi (8th Sept 2004)
Thanks to Brad, Kjell, Nico, Woody, Corinne and Naserian for help and input.
Note:
This series makes several references to the following video clips (which unfortunately cannot be hosted on this site due to bandwidth restrictions)
http://irvingshapiro.tripod.com/cgi-bin/Flight_93/Video.htm
http://irvingshapiro.tripod.com/cgi-bin/Flight_93/Video2.htm
Maps of the flight paths produced by the company Flight Explorer can be viewed on this site:
http://www.avweb.com/other/911flightexplorer.html
It is advisable to familiarise yourself with these videos and images prior to reading this three part series. You may also want to read Operation Pearl (A.K. Dewdney) which clearly explains the theory behind "plane swapping".
Most of the people reading this text will no doubt be aware of the various theories that something other than American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. The issue of what actually did hit the Pentagon will not be discussed within this piece, but we will be showing new evidence that suggests that it was not Flight 77.
Here is the full sequence flight track from
Flight Explorer showing some key details. 
Notice
it takes 36 minutes to the end of this track, then 46 minutes back to DC
which is about what you would expect. The 9-11 commission suggested that
Flight 77 disappeared from the radar over southern Ohio (8:57) and the air
traffic controller thought that it had crashed. This supposedly happened
because of poor radar coverage in the area and the transponder being
switched off. Switching off the transponder on the other planes did not
have the same effect, the air traffic controllers were able to continue to
track them.
Well let's start by looking at the poor radar coverage as detailed in the commission report.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-42.html
The Flight Explorer software has various overlay options which can be placed to on the map to show the geographical location of various objects. One of these overlays is radar sites:
Well that looks suspiciously like a radar site to me, not too far away from where Flight 77 disappeared from the radar. And another two not far away. So why is the radar coverage so bad there, exactly? Some big trees in the way? Unless Flight 77 very suddenly dropped from its altitude of around 35000 feet I can see absolutely no reason why it would disappear from the radar.
Next, lets take a step back. As with Flight 11 and Flight 175, this plane has an unexplained deviation from its flight path early on in the journey. You can see it at around 8:41 on the Flight Explorer image. You can see it even clearer when we once again take some screen shots from the new flight tracker videos and transpose them onto the Flight Explorer map.
The red dotted line is the planned flight path. Flight 77 is deviating from its path, not only close to an airport (CKB, Clarksburg) but also right on the boundary between two Air Traffic Control centres. Once again we have to speculate that any "event", such as switching a plane or meeting another plane would be easier to cover up during the transition from one air traffic controller to another.
The following is a cut down animated gif edited from the original Flight Explorer animation. Look at the white text "data block" for flight 77. Just below the identity (AAL77) you can see the altitude and speed. Notice how the altitude fluctuates down from 350 (35000 ft) to 312 and back up again all at the same spot. Could we be looking at two planes here?
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Anyone who has downloaded and viewed the newly discovered video clips mentioned in the previous two parts will have surely noticed what happens next.
For the first part of the AVI clip, Flight 77 follows the same path as displayed in the Flight Explorer images. At roughly 8:56 the plane appears to stop in south Ohio:
At 9:07 it suddenly reappears slightly further along its flight path then the blip stops moving again:
At 9:25 the plane reappears again this time on the border between Indiana and Illinois
At 9:43 (impact) Flight 77 is flying over south Illinois and is nowhere near the Pentagon. The last few blips after that seem to be fairly random, but ultimately the plane seems to get as far as Kansas.
So is this video all we have to prove that Flight 77 did not turn around in Ohio?
The Detroit News featured a Flight path map which appears to support this:
(Click the map to view the source, thanks to Killtown for this one)
http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm
"At 9:05, FAA reports a possible hijack of United 175. Again, that's three minutes after the impact in the tower. That's how long it is taking now the information to flow through the system to the command and control agencies and through the command and control agencies to the pilots in the cockpit. At 9:09, Langley F-16s are directed to battle stations, just based on the general situation and the breaking news, and the general developing feeling about what's going on. And at about that same time, kind of way out in the West, is when America 77, which in the meantime has turned off its transponder and turned left back toward Washington, appears back in radar coverage. And my understanding is the FAA controllers now are beginning to pick up primary skin paints on an airplane, and they don't know exactly whether that is 77, and they are asking a lot of people whether it is, including an a C-130 that is westbound toward Ohio. At 9:11 FAA reports a crash into the South Tower. You can see now that lag time has increased from seven minutes from impact to report; now it's nine minutes from impact to report. You can only imagine what's going on on the floors of the control centers around the country. At 9:11 -- I just mentioned that -- 9:16, now FAA reports a possible hijack of United Flight 93, which is out in the Ohio area. But that's the last flight that is going to impact the ground. "
Note the time 9:05 fits in with Flight 77 reappearing to the west as well as the presence of the ubiquitous C-130.
Flight 77 turning round somewhere between Ohio and Kansas does not quite fit into the official timeline, the plane would simply not have enough time to make it back to Washington D.C. To me this is firm proof that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon.
Another anomaly with Flight 77 is the fact that the transponder, radio and primary radar signals were lost at the same time. Naturally the air traffic controller thought that the plane had crashed, as detailed in the Commission report:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-41.html
Can you think of a scenario in the cockpit where the hijackers could break into through the cockpit door, disable the transponder and the radio before the pilot could get any sort of warning signal to Air Traffic Control? With plastic knives and box cutters?
I would suggest that some sort of jamming/anti-radar technology was used to block the transponder signal, to block the radio signal and to block the primary radar returns (which didn't work very well) but I'm not an expert in this field. Funnily enough there were a number of experts in that precise field on more than one of those planes that same day.
People like:
http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight77/passengers.html
William E. Caswell, 54, Silver
Spring, MD, physicist, was a senior scientist for the U.S. Navy, retired
Army.
A third-generation physicist whose work at the Navy was so
classified that his family knew very little about what he did each
day.
They don't even know exactly why he was headed to Los Angeles on
the doomed American Airlines Flight 77.
"It was a trip he often took,"
his mother, Jean Caswell, said Friday. "We never knew what he was doing
there because he couldn't say. You just learn not to ask
questions."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/12/victim-capsule-flight77.htm
Stanley Hall, 68, of Clifton, Va., was "our dean of electronic warfare," said a colleague at Raytheon, a defense contractor. Hall, director of program management for Raytheon Electronics Warfare, helped develop and build anti-radar technology. He was quiet, competent and something of a father figure. "We have a lot of young engineers who looked up to him as a mentor," Raytheon spokesman Ron Colman said. He leaves a wife, a son and two daughters.
It's just a coincidence isn't it?