On September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a reclaimed strip mine in
Somerset County, Pennsylvania.  According to the FBI, the aircraft impacted intact after an
apparent struggle in the cockpit between determined terrorists and equally determined passengers.

The FBI released this photo shortly after the crash.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection released this photo a few days later.

The pattern of impact is consistent with an aircraft with significant lateral movement,
a "fan" pattern where debris is blown in the direction the aircraft was headed.  [see this PBS link:]
Debris found two and eight miles from the crash was explained by this "splatter" effect, bolstered by
winds reported in the area at the time.  The effect of the wind can be seen in the burned trees as well.

NOAA records indicate an average windspeed that day of between 7 and 8 knots, with a maximum sustained
windspeed of 13 knots.  This jibes with the FBI's contention that the debris was carried by the wind.

Except....

Look at this photo of an SR-71 crash in 1967.  Faithful Bartcop
readers know I'm intimately familiar with this crash.

The grass in this farmer's field is similar to that replanted in stripmine reclamation projects.
Windspeed at the time of this accident was recorded as 15 knots.  As you can see, fire from the
wreckage was spread through the grass by the wind.  You can clearly determine the direction
of the wind by the way the fire spread.  Just like the FBI and PDEP photos.

Except....

In order to put the photos in perspective, I obtained DOQ (Digital Orthophoto Quadrangle)
imagery from the USGS of the Pennsylvania site, as a "before" comparison.

This showed two important things.  First, that the impact indeed occured on the border between
flammable grassland and equally flammable forest.

Second, and much more importantly, it showed me which way was north.
Something the other photos oddly enough didn't bother to indicate.

Clearly, the photos from the FBI and PDEP show a fan pattern which indicates
an aircraft movement south, as well as a wind blowing towards the south.
Had it been blowing another direction, the grass would have caught fire.

The debris the FBI contends was blown by the wind was found several
miles to the north and east, near Indian Lake.  In other words, to get there
from the impact, it would have to have flown 2 to 8 miles against the strong wind.

This means simply that the debris separated from the aircraft before it hit the ground,
the result of an in-flight breakup of some kind.  There are several possibly causes for this.

The debris could simply have been dropped from the moving plane.
This is unlikely, as a 757's doors are constructed with the "plug" model, which is
to say they only open inward - an impossible feat when the aircraft is pressurized.

A bomb detonation within the fuselage is equally unlikely, considering the size of the
impact crater.  The Pan Am flight which exploded over Lockerbie was spread out
over 100 square miles.  In addition, Ashcroft's FBI (who of course we implicitly trust)
told us there was no evidence of bomb material in the wreckage.

The third, and most likely cause, was a minor but fatal explosion of an engine, which
could rip the fuselage and cripple the plane but not cause it to necessarily drop like a stone.

Given the situation, in the most likely culprit in an engine explosion would be an air-to-air missile,
which would home in on the engine's heat output, and not have enough high explosive in its
warhead to vaporize the entire aircraft (flight93crash.com cites the Korean 747 the USSR
shot down in 1983 as an excellent example of this).

That last is speculative;  the information before it is not.
The Department of Defense may know more than it is telling,
but the FBI is simply lying.

robb@blackvault.com

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