Nevertheless, the aircarft went southwest near Springfield and then veered left over Arlington and then put the nose down coming over Ft Myer picking off trees and light poles near the helicopter pad next to building.
Terrance Kean, 35, who lives in a 14-story building nearby, heard the loud jet engines and glanced out his window.
"I saw this very, very large passenger jet," said the architect, who had been packing for a move. "It just plowed right into the side of the Pentagon. The nose penetrated into the portico. And then it sort of disappeared, and there was fire and smoke everywhere. . . . It was very sort of surreal."
...
Mary Ann Owens, a journalist with Gannett News Service - was driving along by the side of the Pentagon. Here, she recalls the events of that horrific day and her feelings about the tragedy 12 months on. The sound of sudden and certain death roared in my ears as I sat lodged in gridlock on Washington Boulevard, next to the Pentagon on September 11. Up to that moment I had only experienced shock by the news coming from New York City and frustration with the worse-than-normal traffic snarl ... but it wasn't until I heard the demon screaming of that engine that I expected to die. Between the Pentagon's helicopter pad, which sits next to the road, and Reagan Washington National Airport a couple of miles south, aviation noise is common along my commute to the silver office towers in Rosslyn where Gannett Co Inc. were housed last autumn. But this engine noise was different. It was too sudden, too loud, too encompassing. Looking up didn't tell me what type of plane it was because it was so close I could only see the bottom. Realising the Pentagon was its target, I didn't think the careering, full-throttled craft would get that far. Its downward angle was too sharp, its elevation of maybe 50 feet, too low. Street lights toppled as the plane barely cleared the Interstate 395 overpass. Gripping the steering wheel of my vibrating car, I involuntarily ducked as the wobbling plane thundered over my head. Once it passed, I raised slightly and grimaced as the left wing dipped and scraped the helicopter area just before the nose crashed into the southwest wall of the Pentagon. Still gripping the wheel, I could feel both the car and my heart jolt at the moment of impact. An instant inferno blazed about 125 yards from me. The plane, the wall and the victims disappeared under coal-black smoke, three-storey tall flames and intense heat. As the thudding stopped, screams of horror and hysteria rose from the line of cars (...) The full impact of actually being alive overwhelmed me. A mere 125 yards had made me a witness instead of a casualty. Survival wasn't a miracle, it was luck ... pure luck.
Sean Boger, Air Traffic Controller and Pentagon tower chief - "I just looked up and I saw the big nose and the wings of the aircraft coming right at us and I just watched it hit the building." "It exploded. I fell to the ground and covered my head. I could actually hear the metal going through the building."
Creed, Dan He and two colleagues from Oracle software were stopped in a car near the Naval Annex, next to the Pentagon, when they saw the plane dive down and level off. "It was no more than 30 feet off the ground, and it was screaming. It was just screaming. It was nothing more than a guided missile at that point," Creed said. "I can still see the plane. I can still see it right now. It's just the most frightening thing in the world, going full speed, going full throttle, its wheels up," Creed recalls.
Hemphill, Albert From the view of the Navy Annex : After a few moments, Lt Gen Ron Kadish, Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization entered the Secure Conference Room to pursue the day's activities and do real work. This office, with two nice windows and a great view of the monuments, the Capitol and the Pentagon was "good digs" by any Pentagon standard. I walked in the office and stood peering out of the window looking at the Pentagon. As I stood there, I instinctively ducked at the extremely loud roar and whine of a jet engine spooling up. Immediately, the large silver cylinder of an aircraft appeared in my window, coming over my right shoulder as I faced the Westside of the Pentagon directly towards the heliport. The aircraft, looking to be either a 757 or Airbus, seemed to come directly over the annex, as if it had been following Columbia Pike - an Arlington road leading to Pentagon. The aircraft was moving fast, at what I could only be estimate as between 250 to 300 knots. All in all, I probably only had the aircraft in my field of view for approximately 3 seconds. The aircraft was at a sharp downward angle of attack, on a direct course for the Pentagon. It was "clean", in as much as, there were no flaps applied and no apparent landing gear deployed. He was slightly left wing down as he appeared in my line of sight, as if he'd just "jinked" to avoid something. As he crossed Route 110 he appeared to level his wings, making a slight right wing slow adjustment as he impacted low on the Westside of the building to the right of the helo, tower and fire vehicle around corridor 5. What instantly followed was a large yellow fireball accompanied by an extremely bass sounding, deep thunderous boom. The yellow fireball rose quickly as black smoke engulfed the entire Westside of the Pentagon, obscuring the whole of the heliport. I could feel the concussion and felt the shockwave of the blast impact the window of the Annex, knocking me against the desk.
Liebner, Lincoln After the second plane hit the World Trade Center, Major Lincoln Leibner jumped in his pickup truck and raced to the Pentagon. As he ran to an entrance, he heard jet engines and turned in time to see the American Airlines plane diving toward the building. "I was close enough that I could see through the windows of the airplane, and watch as it as it hit," he said. "There was no doubt in my mind what I was watching. Not for a second. It was accelerating," he said. "It was wheels up, flaps up, engines full throttle. "
Richard Benedetto, a USA TODAY reporter, saw the plane slam into the Pentagon. "It sounded like an artillery shell. It hit on the west side of the building, near the helipad."
Vin Narayanan I left home at 8:15 a.m. on Sept. 11 to begin what is normally a 35-minute commute. But traffic was unusually thick that day. As I inched my way toward Washington, I considered taking an alternate route — one that would not take me past the Pentagon. But for some reason, I decided to drive my usual way in. At 9 a.m., sports-talk radio began reporting the attacks on World Trade Center. ... traffic continued to crawl. At 9:35 a.m., I pulled alongside the Pentagon. With traffic at a standstill, my eyes wandered around the road, looking for the cause of the traffic jam. Then I looked up to my left and saw an American Airlines jet flying right at me. The jet roared over my head, clearing my car by about 25 feet. The tail of the plane clipped the overhanging exit sign above me as it headed straight at the Pentagon. The windows were dark on American Airlines Flight 77 as it streaked toward its target, only 50 yards away. The hijacked jet slammed into the Pentagon at a ferocious speed. But the Pentagon's wall held up like a champ. It barely budged as the nose of the plane curled upwards and crumpled before exploding into a massive fireball. The people who built that wall should be proud. Its ability to withstand the initial impact of the jet probably saved thousands of lives. I hopped out of my car after the jet exploded, nearly oblivious to a second jet hovering in the skies. (darn, down below we find the second plane close to the event was asked to look, a C-130, only a few thousand feet away
Rodney Washington (400 feet from the lamppost, facing the Pentagon!)
, a systems engineer for a Pentagon contractor, was stuck in stand-still traffic a few hundred yards from the Pentagon when the American Airlines jet roared overhead from the southwest. ''It was extremely loud, as you can imagine, a plane that size, it was deafening,'' Washington said. The plane was flying low and rapidly descended, Washington said, knocking over light poles before hitting the ground on a helicopter pad just in front of the Pentagon and essentially bouncing into it. It ''landed there and the momentum took it into the Pentagon,'' Washington said. ''There was a very, very brief delay and then it exploded.'' Washington speculated that it could have been worse: ''If it had kept altitude a little bit higher it probably would have landed in the middle of the Pentagon, in that court.'' (the delay, the time it takes sound to travel! Wow)
Phillip Thompson
There is no doubt in my mind that last week’s attack on America was an act of war. I fought in the Gulf War. I saw bombs and missiles explode overhead. I saw people die. And when, on my way to work Sept. 11, I saw an American Airlines jet come overhead and slam into the Pentagon, it all came back. Hard. I was sitting in heavy traffic in the I-395 HOV lanes about 9:45 a.m., directly across from the Navy Annex. I could see the roof of the Pentagon and, in the distance, the Washington Monument. I heard the scream of a jet engine and, turning to look, saw my driver’s side window filled with the fuselage of the doomed airliner. It was flying only a couple of hundred feet off the ground — I could see the passenger windows glide by. The plane looked as if it were coming in for a landing — cruising at a shallow angle, wings level, very steady. But, strangely, the landing gear was up and the flaps weren’t down. I knew what was about to happen, but my brain couldn’t quite process the information. Like the other commuters on the road, I was stunned into disbelief. The fireball that erupted upon impact blossomed skyward, and the blast hit us in a wave. I don’t remember hearing a sound. It was so eerily similar to another experience during the Gulf War — a missile strike that killed a Marine in my unit — that when I jumped out of my SUV, I felt like I’d jumped into my past and was in combat once again. The feeling was the same, but the context was all wrong. My first instinct was to run toward the Pentagon, where I knew people were dead, wounded and dying. But the building was on fire, and even if I made it to the scene, I couldn’t be of much help. I tried to call my wife, but the cell-phone circuits were jammed. Commuters were beginning to panic — some turned their cars around and drove back down the northbound HOV lanes, against traffic. Others wailed and sobbed. Across the way, the Navy Annex parking lot was full of screaming people. Sirens howled in the distance. I started directing cars to pull to the side of the HOV lanes to make way for emergency vehicles. On the way in to work, I’d heard about the two planes that attacked the World Trade Center, and now that came to mind. What if “dash two” was inbound to the Pentagon? Then a gray C-130 flew overhead, setting off a new round of panic. I tried to reassure people that the plane was not a threat. All around me people began to panic, fleeing for their lives. Afraid of being trapped, I drove through a gap in the median barrier and drove across 395 to an exit ramp. I turned south into Crystal City, trying to call my wife the entire time. At a red light, two frightened women approached me and asked for a ride to safety. They said they had just fled the Pentagon. I offered to take them wherever they needed to go and managed through the rest of the morning and afternoon to get them to their destinations. It wasn’t until much later that the shock wore off. I was home then, able to watch TV. Now, for the first time, I was seeing the images that most people had been watching all day. And sitting there in my living room, I was consumed by a feeling that haunted me for months after coming home from the Gulf War: an irrational fear that at any moment something was going to crash near me and kill me. Once again, I found myself trying to shake off the experiences of a person who’s gone to war. I struggled all day for context for the event, an explanation for the shock and fear I felt as I watched TV. This is, after all, America. This is our home. Anyone who has served in the military understands the context of war — but war, through American eyes, takes place far from home, on distant shores. And though I, like many others, always feared a terrorist attack on America was possible, it was excruciating to watch war come to America before my very eyes.
