(it's actually a repost from a while ago)
After reading Eastman's theory, a few things come to mind:
1) Did I miss a bio, or is all we know about Eastman's training is that he's an "M.A., M.S." Masters of WHAT? Could be Literature and Horticulture.
2) "Comment: The man being interviewed by CNN above was also a CNN reporter. No one else reports having seen in the hole pieces of aircraft"
This simply isn't true:
"Lt. Cmdr. David Tarantino, U.S. Navy
I stepped into the open breezeway between C and B rings to get some fresh air. I saw these two holes where the aircraft had come through. You could see an aircraft tire that had come through three rings of the Pentagon, and there were charts and other stuff that was obviously from the aircraft."
"Tom Hovis, thovis@mindspring.com a Fairfax, Assoc. Member, reports: The nosewheel I understand is in the grass near the second ring."
"Todd Tiahrt, Kansas District 4 representative, U.S. House of Representatives wrote:
The next day we came to the Pentagon. The Pentagon has five outer rings labeled A through E, with E being the outer ring. In the C and B rings the plane had punched a hole you could a drive a truck around in, and I saw an airplane tire. It made it very real."
"Carlton Burkhammer was bussed to the Pentagon with other firefighters from Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Station 14. Within the building he spotted lime-green pieces from the interior of the plane"
"“I picked up a child's hand. That was it. Just a child's hand and that's when I got angry. To wonder why someone could do this. You can come after me. I'm a soldier. I have sworn to protect and defend, but that wasn't right,”
3) Eastman believes that the debris that could be associated with a 757 was planted "An early picture shows an agent in white shirt carrying a piece of "debris" that looks very much like the "planted" piece of false evidence" and yet admits that "The first photographer to capture this specimen did not arrive at the scene until 10 minutes after the crash.". I have doubts that people had run around and finished "planting" evidence 10 minutes after the crash. Most of the pieces that could be identified as coming from a particular plane were larger (engine parts, wheel, cockpit seat). With dozens (if not hundreds) of onlookers, it seems unlikely that this evidence could have been planted without detection.
4) His scenario detailing how AAL77 got to Reagan Airport is flawed. Eastman states "With its engines off so that its silence was remarked by Riskus and other witnesses, Flight 77 approached the Pentagon's west wall at an angle much closer to 90 degrees than the 45-degree approach of the killer jet." A 757 is not a sailplane. With its engines "off" it would never have made it to Reagan. In the next paragraph, he states "At a speed between a third and two-thirds that of sound and leveling from its necessarily accelerating dive, Flight 77 was over Reagan National Airport before the sound of the killer jet's crash reached the Capitol Building or Washington Monument" Which is it? Were the engines "off" of was the 757 traveling at 300-400 knots? You can't have it both ways. At 300-400 feet, 400 knots would represent the engines at full throttle, not turned "off".
5) Eastman's statement "Any of the three runways of Reagan could have been used by Flight 77, which, by the way, did not have to land immediately for a successful getaway -- it could have disguised itself as a plane taking off as well as one landing in those critical few seconds of its disappearing act and its "blending in" operation." shows his complete lack of knowledge of ATC procedures. A 757 does NOT land at a busy airport without everybody knowing its identity. There is no "blending in" and his thought that "it could have disguised itself as a plane taking off as well as one landing" simply makes no sense.
6) In Eastman's profile of the equipment on the the supposed F-16 involved, He lists "a voice-activated maneuvering system allowing the pilot to "point" the aircraft in unusual flight attitudes." How, exactly, does a voice-actuated system allow a pilot to maneuver the plane more efficiently and, if the plane was in fact using remote guidance, why would voice commands be used at all?
7) He states "But the famous fragment was discovered by photographers lying on the south lawn, far to the port side (left side of plane, right side of this picture) of the attack plane as it crossed the lawn in its approach to its target. Since the piece can neither have bored through the crashing fuselage to get so far to the port side nor could it have flown against an explosion radiating out in all directions, even assuming it did pop off under stresses from the compression of the plane during the first split second of the crash, we must conclude that the piece
did not come from the crash at all. The piece thus had to have been
carried to the spot and planted by an accomplice some time before the
moment, a full ten minutes after the crash". If we know that debris was found on the highway (beyond the south lawn) then Eastman is completely wrong about this particular fragment not being to be where it was without being planted. He also says "The wind, as the photos of smoke show, was blowing from the southwest -- against alleged flight path of this light piece of sheet aluminum." A wind would have to be very strong to have any effect on the trajectory of blast debris. The wind in question would have made no difference.
The other issues I have with Eastman (his spelling, his weird Geocities web page (look at the picture of "ol Dick Eastman" on the upper left)
http://www.geocities.com/oldickeastman/Dick_Eastman_pag ...
notwithstanding, all I see in his report is a mix of lay opinions with incorrect facts liberally mixed in. There is NO input from anybody with technical qualifications.
I could rant on a webpage and use it as a cite, too. That wouldn't make either page worth the bandwidth it took to download it.