Pilots for 9-11 Troof: No-Planers?

I love how he uses the term "alleged" when referring to the planes. Looks like they're arguing that the flights that hit the WTC weren't 767s. What a bunch of maroons!

An MIT PhD Takes On Rob Balsamo

I confess that I can't follow the math, but I'm going to link this debunking of Balsamo's claim that the g-forces required of AA-77 given the flight path are too high for the plane to withstand for those who can.

Balsamo came up with a radius of 2085 feet, which is less than 10% of the radius I calculated for a genuinely circular arc that connects the top of the VDOT antenna to level flight at the base of the Pentagon. My calculations are correct, so Balsamo either made a mistake in his measurement, or chose a flight path whose acceleration is ten times the acceleration required for a genuinely circular arc.

After adding 1 g for earth's gravity, Balsamo gets a total of 10.14 g. As shown above, the correct value for a circular arc that passes above the VDOT antenna and ends in level flight at the base of the Pentagon is 1.9 g. Balsamo's "corrected" calculation is off by a factor of 5.

And this certainly sounds accurate:

The video amounts to an argument from authority. The self-assuredness of Balsamo's video monologue, combined with his sneering contempt for critics, is designed to convince viewers that he really does understand the physics and mathematics, while his detractors do not. In reality, Rob Balsamo is a former airline pilot with no discernible skills in mathematics or physics and a history of making outrageous mistakes in his calculations.

Hat Tip: Paul W in the comments.

The Airfones Issue Redux

(Update: See the bottom of this post)

Well, every now and then we get lucky. My co-blogger James B did a terrific job of debunking David Ray Griffin's claim about the Airfones having been removed from the 757s prior to 9-11; so good a job in fact that it was the first error that Griffin acknowledged making in his new book, at least briefly.

But then Rob Balsamo and the crackpots over at Pilots for 9-11 Denial got into the act. They posted a revision to the American Airlines 757 repair manual which seemed to indicate that the Airfones had been disabled prior to 9-11.

And here's where the luck comes in. At some point, we attracted the attention of a person who was in position to know a little more about the maintenance of American Airlines planes. He was mostly annoyed at the "Truthers" but when it came to this issue he really got ticked, so he did some digging.

He backtracked from ECO F0878 and came across ECO F0871 and F0874. F0874 tells the mechanics to put the airphone switch to the off position and pull the associated circuit breakers. F0871 requires installation of a placard on all the Airfones in the plane informing the passengers that the phones would no longer work. Both are dated March 2002.

Which means what, sports fans? Yep, that the Airfones on American's fleet of 757s still worked as of 9/11/01, and in fact were not turned off until a good six months later. Thanks greatly to our anonymous source on this! So now it's up to Rob Balsamo and David Ray Griffin to retract their claim that the phone systems were uninstalled prior to 9-11. Surely their source can check out ECO F0871 and ECO F0874 and tell them the dates those were issued?

Update: Rob Balsamo, obviously not the most trustworthy of sources, claims in the comments to have hoaxed me with this series of emails. So let's put up the red light on this one. I still think the JREF crew are right, that the PfT post is a phony. But unlike Rob, I'm not going to leave my post up without a disclaimer. I am no longer confident in this story, and in retrospect it should not have been posted.

Update II: I had a long phone conversation with Rob Balsamo last night. He stated eventually that he had not hoaxed me with the emails. I do feel that I jumped the gun a little with this post. On the larger issue (whether Airfones worked on Flight 77 on 9/11/01), I am confident that they did. Our buddy Pomeroo checked with American Airlines and this was their response:

Ron, I am doublechecking with my maintenance folks so I give you accurate data.

(June 29, 2007)

Ron, engineers at our primary Maintenance & Engineering base in Tulsa tell me that they cannot find any record that the 757 aircraft flown into the Pentagon on 9/11 had had its seatback phones deactivated by that date. An Engineering Change Order to deactivate the seatback phone system on the 757 fleet had been issued by that time.

It is our contention that the seatback phones on Flight 77 were working because there is no entry in that aircraft’s records to indicate when the phones were disconnected.

So this appears to be a validation of both sides on the issue. AA says that there had been an ECO to deactivate the phones prior to 9-11, but that change had not been made on the plane that turned out to be AA77. Note as well that in the Moussaoui trial, the government did not claim that phone calls had been made from Airfones; the phone calls that are listed in the flash animation do not list the row they were made from. This may be an issue with American Airlines as compared to United Airlines as I note that the only call from an AA flight that day that is identified by location on the plane called from is the call from Betty Ong, and that location may have been identified because she stated that she was in her jumpseat at 3R during the call.

LTC Guy Razer, USMC

The alleged LTC Guy Razer, who bizarrely has been transferred to the Marine Corps, is interviewed in this clip from the Pilots for 9/11 Truth. Not too much new here. He apparently is a huge Dylan Avery fan and repeatedly praises him. When asked for proof that he is a fighter pilot he claims the military lost his records (big surprise), and oh yeah, he says he is still living in a tent!

Update: A reader points us towards the FAA database, which I was able to download here, which shows the following for Mr. Razer:


UNIQUE NO A1558748
FIRST NAME GUY STEWART
LAST NAME RAZER
STREET 1 GENERAL DELIVERY
CITY LAS VEGAS
STATE NV
ZIP CODE 89125-9999
REGION WP
MED CLASS 1
MED DATE 62005
MED EXP DATE 122005

Hmm, so we have a homeless pilot with bad eyesight and an out-of-date physical.

No 757 Hit the Pentagon!

We haven't heard much from Uncle Fetzer lately, what with the fact that 911 Blogger spends more time attacking him than we do (shills, all of them) so I was amused to read this "press release" from him supporting the "Pilots for 9/11 Truth".

Don't be taken in by photos showing damage to the second floor or those taken after the upper floors collapsed, which happened 20-30 minutes later," Fetzer said. "In fact, debris begins to show up on the completely clean lawn in short order, which might have been dropped from a C-130 that was circling above the Pentagon or placed there by men in suits who were photographed carrying debris with them." The most striking is a piece from the fuselage of a commercial airliner, which is frequently adduced as evidence.

James Hanson, a newspaper reporter who earned his law degree from the University of Michigan College of Law, has traced that debris to an American Airlines 757 that crashed in a rain forest above Cali, Columbia in 1995. "It was the kind of slow-speed crash that would have torn off paneling in this fashion, with no fires, leaving them largely intact." Fetzer has been so impressed with his research he has invited Hanson to submit his study to Scholars for consideration for publication on its web site, 911scholars.org.

The Pentagon has become a kind of litmus test for rationality in the study of 9/11," Fetzer said. "Those who persist in maintaining that a Boeing 757 hit the building are either unfamiliar with the evidence or cognitively impaired. Unless," he added, "they want to mislead the American people. The evidence is beyond clear and compelling. It places this issue 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. No Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon."

David Ray Griffin Still Trying on the Airfone Thing

Well I have to give him credit for being persistent. Even after being completely embarassed by having his no airfone on AA77 thing being proven wrong on this blog, even before the claim came out in his new book, he is still trying to desperately come up with evidence to support it. I came across this e-mail on a truther mailing list I am on:

The question has come up whether the Boeing 757s made for American Airlines (as distinct from those made for United Airlines) that would have been in service in 2001 had onboard (seat-back) phones. If they did not, then obviously Ted Olson’s claim about Barbara Olson’s call from a seat-back phone on AA Flight 77 cannot be true.

We know that they did not have them in 2004 (although the 767 and 777 did). But we cannot get any clear information about whether they had them in 2001. We received a purported email from a “Chad Kinder” in public relations for AA that said that they did not. But we have been unable to verify the authenticity of this email or even whether there is a Chad Kinder who works for AA.

It would seem that there were would be all sorts of people who could answer the question, including AA mechanics, pilots, and flight attendants. If any of you can help us get this answer---hopefully within the week---we would greatly appreciate it.

Yours truly,

Rob Balsamo and David Ray Griffin

This argument is pretty silly though. This was widely publicized at the time. The odds that none of the thousands of American Airlines employees, not to mention hundreds of thousands of their passengers, would not have noticed the fact that they didn't have airfones installed on their planes is pretty farfetched. Although I don't doubt that 6 years after the fact they will be able to find a single truther, a Lauro Chavez type, who will now suddenly recall that in fact there were no airfones installed.

Well, how do we know there were phones installed? Well, I know by truther logic we are not allowed to use the 9/11 Commission report, since its findings do not support their hoped outcome, but simply read the footnotes.

56. FBI report, "American Airlines Airphone Usage," Sept. 20, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Ronald and Nancy May, Sept. 12, 2001.

57.The records available for the phone calls from American 77 do not allow for a determination of which of four "connected calls to unknown numbers" represent the two between Barbara and Ted Olson, although the FBI and DOJ believe that all four represent communications between Barbara Olson and her husband's office (all family members of the Flight 77 passengers and crew were canvassed to see if they had received any phone calls from the hijacked flight, and only Renee May's parents and Ted Olson indicated that they had received such calls).The four calls were at 9:15:34 for 1 minute, 42 seconds; 9:20:15 for 4 minutes, 34 seconds; 9:25:48 for 2 minutes, 34 seconds; and 9:30:56 for 4 minutes, 20 seconds. FBI report, "American Airlines Airphone Usage," Sept. 20, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Theodore Olson, Sept. 11, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Helen Voss, Sept. 14, 2001;AAL response to the Commission's supplemental document request, Jan. 20, 2004.

58. FBI report, "American Airlines Airphone Usage," Sept. 20, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Theodore Olson, Sept. 11, 2001.

So obviously both American Airlines and the FBI seem to believe that they had airfones installed. But I guess they are all involved in the plot too.

Incidently, I meant to post this earlier, but I got distracted with other things, if you want to know what type of nutcase Rob Balsamo is, read the comments on this Italian language debunking site. Not the type of argument you would expect from an aviation professional. In fact, I would not want to be flying on his plane at all.

Knife Fights Over At the Looser Forum

I suppose I shouldn't enjoy these outbursts of nuttiness as much as I do, but one of the great things about debunking the Deniers is that we're not their worst enemies; it's the other people in the movement. As others have noted, this is like that scene in The Life of Brian, where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea announces that the only group they hate worse than the Romans is the People's Front for Judean Liberation.

The Deniers went for a good part of 2006 on the Unity Ticket, but since the end of the summer they have been engaged in a good deal of internecine warfare. This dustup starts over a claim that Rob Balsamo, the space cadet who heads up Pilots for 9-11 Denial, never was a pilot, and anyway, he died a year ago (cue spooky music).

BTW, TSA=Transportation Safety Administration.

Space Cadet

I had seen this interview over at 9-11 Blogger, and thought the morons over at the Pilots group had actually gotten themselves a real "name" with the son of the founder of the Learjet empire. Of course, I should have known better and done a little digging. Fortunately our longtime reader Sword of Truth either had the information at hand or did the necessary Googling.

Turns out John Lear might be one of the Brazil nuts in the conspiracy theory can. You can get a feel for this when he starts into his nonsense, starting about seven minutes in, when he claims that it would be very hard to hit the twin towers. Let's remember, those towers were 208 feet wide. I don't know how wide the average runway is, but it's for darn sure not that distance.

Lear also repeats the supposed October Surprise story, where the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign supposedly negotiated with the Iranians to ensure that the embassy hostages were not released before the election. This story has been out there for years; Clock Lady Barbara "Voices in my head told me to work for Reagan" Honegger even wrote a book about it.

But let's get back to Lear. He's quite a character, with some rather fanciful notions. From the UFO Conspiracy page on Wikipedia:

In the late 1980s, John Lear became prominent in UFO circles. Citing "unnamed but well-connected sources" (Clark 1998, 157), Lear asserted that the U.S. government had in fact recovered dozens of UFOs over the decades. In exchange for advanced technology, the government allowed for a limited number of alien abductions.

This proceeded for some years, until in 1972 the government discovered that the aliens were kidnapping far more persons than their agreement had stipulated. This dispute culminated in a conflict between aliens and humans at a secret military base near Dulce, New Mexico. The aliens supposedly killed about 40 high-ranking military officials or scientists, and many more military personnel who tried to invade the base.

Following this conflict, Lear reports, the aliens have essentially gone about their schemes with no interference. Up to 10% of the U.S. population has been abducted, and the Strategic Defense Initiative was actually proposed to protect from alien invaders, not Soviet missiles.

You know, I had wondered where 10% of my neighborhood went to! Sounds like a sci-fi story reject.

Notice as well, that Lear fits a certain pattern that almost guarantees that half of the 9-11 Denial movement will turn against him. Let's see if you can pick it out of this paragraph:

Back on the Area 51 front, Casolaro was hearing rumors that Michael Riconosciuto had worked for Lear Aircraft in Reno, Nevada. This connected him to Bill Lear, creator of the Lear jet, who is often claimed by UFO buffs as having done research on anti-gravity for the government as well as John Lear, a former CIA pilot who also hit the UFO circuit with tales of saucers and aliens in cahoots with the US government. It is now becoming distant history, but back in 1989, a man named Bob Lazar went public with his claims that he had back-engineered alien spacecraft at Area 51. Lear and Lazar lectured widely on the UFO circuit in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with other UFO lecture celebrities like Bill English and William Cooper. Cooper's classic, Behold A Pale Horse (Flagstaff AZ: Light Technology Publications, 1991), shared the title of the first draft proposal of Casolaro's manuscript that eventually became The Octopus.

Obviously, it's that he's "a former CIA pilot." This kind of "insider" status immediately grants him credibility, but solely because he supports the CT viewpoint. If he said that the 9-11 Deniers are fruitcakes, he'd immediately be dismissed much like JamesB is, as an obvious CIA tool. ;) And inevitably, he will run afoul of the No-Planers, or the No-Planers at the Pentagon, or the No-Planers in Shanksville or the people who believe the opposite of those folks but have some other element of the conspiracy theory.

Interestingly, although Lear claims to be new to 9-11 Denial, he skirted close to the edge back in a 2003 interview with Art Bell.

John called 9/11 a tremendous feat of airmanship. "This had to be accomplished by pilots with training in 757 simulator." Whoever concocted this did some switches of airplanes, but everything was still covered.

"It took about 200 or 300 hours of simulator practice time for each pilot." John Lear.

"They were doing 600 miles and hour at 700 feet! That is amazing, in air races we only do 400 miles per hour. That took skill and a long time, probably a year."

Hitting the Pentagon was a tremendous feat. The process of going down increases the airflow and the lift, and makes it even harder to continue going down and "avoid being pushed up and over."

"We don't want to get Osama... Other than that video tape, we don't have a shred of evidence" John claims.

That's it for the 9-11 stuff, but John did have some more important information to offer:

John claims we have not been going back to the moon because we were told to stay away. That's why Nasa abruptly canceled the program.

Later in the program, John Lear gave Art Bell a sample briefing that Art might receive if the Government chose him to decide to release all the information about UFO's, aliens, and related things, to the public. This briefing included talk of buildings on the moon, Venus not really having the sulfuric atmosphere we say it has (otherwise how did the space craft parachutes survive it), human mutilations, financial corrupt, etc.