Reply #15: It was a plane.

[MrUnderhill]

Actually... the strike on the Empire State Building is the one that looked like a missile.

The only people questioning the Pentagon strike are people with little to no physics background. There are really only three parts of a jumbo jet that are going to "win" a battle with a reinforced concrete wall that thick... the keel and the two engines. The rest can be expected to do quite a bit less damage than people see in the "Die Hard" type movies.

Take a ball of steel hundredths of an inch thick and fill it with avgas and throw it against a reinforced concrete wall at a few hundred miles an hour and you'll see that there isn't much left of the ball... and not much damage to the wall other than needing a good pressure washing.

I remember studying explosives when I was in the Navy and calculating the amount of damage one of our 5" guns could do. I thought it was a lot watching the impact armor piercing rounds could do to target vessels... until I saw what the same size round had done to an armored turret on a battleship. I wondered "how much damage did it do?" and was told "see for yourself... it was never repaired". It was a dent perhaps .5" thick and a few inches across.

The Exocet missiles that everyone was so afraid of after the Sheffield incident would only force that ship to repaint that portion of the hull.

Not identical situations (obviously), but there's simply an issue of relative strength. The Pentagon and the WTC are not on the same level at all.

Additionally, the damage is WAY above what a fighter could do (with or without a missile) and too many eyewitnesses had the sucker fly right over them. You don't need to believe the Bush people are honest to believe there was a plane that hit the Pentagon.