Those Darn Lampposts

There are a lot of strange moments in this movie, but this one ranks at the top. Loose Change states the following:

Second [actually third], the light poles. On November 22nd, 2004, a private jet en route to Houston to pick up George Bush Senior clipped a single light pole and crashed a minute away from landing at Houston's Hobby Airport. The wing ripped off upon impact, scattering debris over 100 yards.

And yet, Flight 77 managed to tear 5 light poles completely out of the ground, without damaging either the wings or light poles themselves. Instead, they seem to have just popped out of the ground.

First, the private jet which crashed was a Gulfstream G-1159A, which has a maximum weight of 41,500 lbs. Compare that to a 757, with a maximum take off weight of 272,000 lbs, and you can see how this is not a very logical comparison.

To make this comparison would be, relatively speaking, the same as comparing the crash of a Honda Civic, at 2592 lbs...









With that of an uparmored HMMWV, weighing in at over 12,000 lbs.













As someone who has driven both, I would have to say, go with the Humvee.

The claim about there not being damage, is just plain ridiculous. The plane crashed half a second later, how would you check for damage to the wings anyway? They never explained what did knock the lamp poles out of the ground. Certainly not a cruise missile. Did the lamppost fairy just leave them there?

This is, of course ignoring the fact that people saw the plane hit the lampposts.

Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was on his way to work but stuck in a
traffic jam near the Pentagon when the plane flew over. "There was a huge screaming noise and I got out of the car as the plane came over. Everybody was running away in different directions. It was tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance. It hit some lampposts on the way in."

And finally, in an amazing display of Attention Deficit Disorder, they claim just a minute later in the film:

The second piece of debris was alegedly a piece of the fuselage. Skeptics have claimed that this is proof that Flight 77 hit the pentagon. But this piece could have come from any American Airlines plane. And why is it not singed or scratch after a 530 MPH impact, and the subsequent fireball?

Uhh, first you claim that the plane hit the lampposts without suffering any damage, and then when pieces of the plane are found... you claim the existence of debris outside of the pentagon proves it was fake. Yeah, Ok...

Update: By the way, this is one of those "undamaged" lamposts: