Questions for John Lear, page 33

We were talking flying as usual and as I brought up the topic of an amateur pilot flying a commercial airliner so-so feet from the ground at full speed to hit the pentagon he looked a little more skeptical than I am used to seeing.

He brought up the very real and very relevant point of ground proximity effect upon the plane and said he found it ''very difficult'' to believe that the plane could have followed the reported last few seconds of flight path.

He mentioned at such a high speed also the plane would have a tendency to ''spiral''( I forgot the term he used) uncontrollably at low altitude

BTW He was drunk because he had to perform his very first ''missed approach'' in his career AWWWWW!!!

Hello Agent T, I've had a few memorable missed approaches, all in weather. They keep the crew busy.

The chances of an amateur pilot flying the profile into the Pentagon are zero, nil. It just couldn't be done. First of all, as I mentioned in another thread, the control forces would be extremely heavy because the flaps are up (which limits the authority of the controls). Second of all to bring the airliner down to about a foot off of the ground and keep it there while impacting the Pentagon is not highly unlikely, its impossible. At that high speed (or any speed for the matter, but more at high speed) there is a huge amount of air passing under the wing. When this huge amount of air contacts the ground (called 'ground effect' and manifests itself at about one half the span of the wing or in this case about 70 or 80 feet) there is a huge buoying effect which tends to bounce the airplane up. In the profile I watched I saw not the slightest bounce or 'buoy'. The skill level required to keep an airliner traveling at 350 to 450 knots within 1 foot of the ground is phenomenal. It would be slightly easier to hit the Pentagon in a steep dive such that 'ground effect' would not play a role. But if that were the case, more of the empennage or tail assembly would have been thrown up and over the Pentagon on impact. As I have mentioned before, the only way that the WTC or Pentagon scenarios could have happened with a pilot at the controls (as opposed to remote control) would be to have trained the pilots in a Boeing 757/767 visual simulator. Base on my experience this would have taken about 300 to 500 hours. Training is given in 4 hour periods once a day. So 75 to 125 days training with one day off every 5 days of training. Thats a lot of simulator time each for 4 pilots. You certainly could not contract kind of time from an air carrier simply because they have their own pilots to train and keep current. Most of the middle east carriers operate Airbuses. Only Israel operates the Boeing 757/767 and would have a Boeing 757/767 simulator. But why would Israel want to train Arab terrorists how to crash into buildings with a 757/767?

hi Mr. Lear,

This one is very "amusing" to me, I said almost the same thing to my friends and here on ats I think only a few days ater the 911 but instead of the pentagon I was talking about the wtc planes.

I design and fly rc planes and I know something about planes in general and how they are flown, and the skills required to perform a trick like the one we saw at NY at 911.

My point is that an amateur pilot or even a pilot with moderate experience on single motor planes could not assume the control of an airliner and at the midle of a curve trajectory at more than 600km/h colide with a building 50meters wide. My idea is that this type of manouver would be difficult for an experienced pilot and impossible to an amateur.

At that time I also said that there were only two ways to do the trick, one is to remote controll the planes, other i´m not completely sure about but was the possibility to imput gps data into the autopilot of the planes and let them crash into the buildings...

Do you agree?

regards,

fred