5 feet, and the tail stands 40 feet high - the plane is much too big to fit through a hole less than 20 feet wide. Also, there was no evidence of a burned out wreck, as would have been expected.
The day after 9/11, the fire county chief in charge of the fire at the Pentagon said that there were "some small pieces...but not large sections...[T]here's no fuselage sections and that sort of thing" (Griffin, 2004, 33). This was confirmed by the Department of Defense. A Boeing 757's fuselage is made of aluminum, which does not melt in an ordinary fire, and its engines are made of steel. Jet fuel is a hydrocarbon and a hydrocarbon fire is not hot enough to vaporize steel. Also, if the fire had been hot enough to vaporize the engines, it would have done much more damage to the Pentagon (34). Officials later stated they had identified some of the passengers remains through fingerprints. This is also puzzling, because if the fire was hot enough to vaporize the entire plane, why did it not vaporize the human tissue?
A photograph from the Department of Defense shows "the plane only destroyed the first ring of the building," leaving a hole only seven feet in diameter in the other rings (Griffin, 2004, 31). However, a Boeing 757 weighs over 100 tons, and if it was traveling at "250 to 440 miles per hour, it would have caused tremendous devastation." Griffin suggests that what could have created a seven-foot hole in the inside wall of the third ring was a missile. He says that missiles weighted with depleted uranium, which is a very dense metal that heats with friction and makes piercing easier, could have done this damage. "An airplane crashes and smashes. A missile of this type pierces" (31). Further evidence for the damage being caused by a missile is that photographs of the Twin Towers burning show yellow flames in the black smoke, but photographs of the Pentagon burning show red flames, suggesting a much hotter fire such as...