[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Graham

Or any real evidence...

Of course not any real evidence, where do ""I"" get the evidence from??? I haven't been to the Pentagon recently. have you?? I, like you, can only make a decision on what is available through the media.

Therefore I have made my judgement on the reports that I have read and I believe there are some things that don't add up. There are definitely anomalies. These anomalies may be able to be explained but from what I have read they have not been explained to my satisfaction

I may well be wrong but I am perfectly entitled to be sceptical.

Sorry, who's this "they"? The only people I'm aware of who are asserting that the *nose* of the plane went right through are the conspiracy theorists.

They is Lee Avey, head of the Pentagon renovation project:

Lee Evey, head of the Pentagon renovation project, explained how this happened at a press conference on September 15. « The rings are E, D, C, B and A. Between B and C is a driveway that goes around the Pentagon. It's called A-E Drive. The airplane traveled in a path about like this, and the nose of the aircraft broke through this innermost wall of C ring into A-E Drive. [†¦] The nose of the plane just barely broke through the inside of the C ring, so it was extending into A-E Drive a little bit. So that's the extent of penetration of the aircraft. »

The same Lee Avey also says:

"We made several modifications to the building as part of that renovation that we think helped save people's lives," says Lee Evey, who runs a billion-dollar project to renovate the Pentagon. Theyâ₠¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve been working on it since 1993. The first section was five days from being finished when the terrorists hit it with the plane.
The renovation project built strength into the 60-year-old limestone exterior with a web of steel beams and columns.

"You have these steel tubes and, again, they go from the first floor and go all the way to the fifth floor," says Evey. "We have everything bolted together in a strong steel matrix. It supports and encases the windows and provides tremendous additional strength to the wall."

When the plane hit at 350 miles an hour, the limestone layer shattered. But inside, those shards of stone were caught by a shield of cloth that lines the entire section of the building.

It is a special cloth that helps prevent masonry from fragmenting and turning into shrapnel. The cloth is also used to make bullet-resistant vests.

Contradictory statements really. They've constructed a massive steel reinforcement mesh with Steel "poles" as opposed to usual steel bars which would be much thicker. The plane disintegrated on impact yet according to Mr Avey the nose managed to poke through 3 separate structures.

Through the first "tremendously" strong wall and then through at least 5 more other normally reinforced concrete walls.

Oh yes - that makes perfect sense. Obviously the nose of the plane was rubbed down with anti-newtons laws cream before it hit.

As to why only *one* engine penetrated, as a Civil Engineer consider if one hit a structural support and the other just a blank wall, one would lose a lot more momentum than the other, wouldn't it?

As a civil engineer I read the article. The entire wall was reinforced, there are no "blank" walls as you put it. Even in a normally reinforced structure the difference in steel distribution would not be great becauase in an RC structure such as the Pentagon it is likely the walls and columns are all structural. As oppsed to steel structure where the frame takes all the load and the walls are mere "infills".