Dear Math Teachers,

I have for your consideration, and for the consideration of your students, a math problem which I've found very fascinating over the years. It's a great example of how math can help us to unravel mysteries in the real world.

Here's it is:
Andrew's Air Force Base is 10 miles from the Pentagon. Their sole mission is to defend the airspace around the Capitol and Pentagon, and they are ready to go at a moment's notice.
An F-16 can fly at over 1,500 miles per hour.
How long would it take to get from Andrews to the Pentagon in an F-16 at top speed? At only 750 mph? At only 325 mph? How long would it take if you just got in your car and drove at 60 mph?

The first plane was hijacked on 9/11 at 8:13 am.
The first tower was struck at 8:46 am.
Flight 77 was confirmed as a hijack between 8:46 and 8:55 am.
The second tower was struck at 9:03 am.
Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:38 am.

It is standard operating procedure to scramble jets to intercept off-course aircraft which aren't responding to radio contact. It happens around 100 times per year, even though it's usually a false alarm. It requires no special authorization, but is an automatic response. Standard response time is about 20 minutes.

Your math is probably better than mine, but it seems to me that something doesn't quite add up here. By my calculations, fighter jets should have had plenty of time to protect the Pentagon, even if we grant that no one anywhere suspected that a terrorist attack was underway until after the second tower was hit. What do you make of this?

There are some other interesting things about the Pentagon which aren't strictly math problems, but may also be illuminating for you to consider:

The Pentagon is the most heavily defended building on the planet. It is surrounded by five missile batteries which are designed to shoot down any incoming object not broadcasting a friendly military transponder. Why didn't they shoot down Flight 77?

If the plane had dived straight into the Pentagon from the direction it was coming, it would have hit Donald Rumsfeld's office and wiped out thousands of top military officers. Instead, it performed an elaborate spiral around to the other side of the building to strike the one section of the Pentagon which had been specially reinforced to withstand just such an attack. Instead of thousands of top military officials being killed, it was only a few hundred civilian workers.

On 9/10/01, two interesting things happened. Firstly, top Pentagon officials cancelled flights they had scheduled for the next day. Secondly, Rumsfeld announced that an astounding $2.3 trillion was missing from the Pentagon budget. Events of the following day wiped this from most people's minds, and any records which may have eventually uncovered the whereabouts of the missing trillions was also wiped out. The records were stored in the section of the Pentagon that was hit. The only other known copies were stored in the Department of Defense offices in World Trade Center Building 7 which mysteriously collapsed around 5:20 pm on 9/11. The Official 9/11 Commission Report later forgot to mention this (not just the money... they forgot to mention Building 7's collapse at all).

Something else to consider is if the five aerial war game exercises coordinated by Dick Cheney on 9/11 had anything to do with why our Air Force wasn't able to intercept a single one of those jetliners. It's the first time in history that a civilian has been placed in charge of NORAD operations. Some of the war games were live-fly drills. Some of them were simulating hijackings. Some of them postulated planes being flown into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Here's one last math question for you: What do you suppose the probability is that all of this is just a coincidence?

Please do let me know what sort of an answer you and/or your students come up with.

P.S. You can look up all of this for yourselves at www.complete911timeline.org where all of the facts and times I mentioned are cross-referenced to multiple sources.

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