A former U.S. Naval aviator has reignited debate over the final moments of American Airlines Flight 77, questioning how a Boeing 757 could perform the dramatic manoeuvers described in official reports and why no clear video of the aircraft approaching the Pentagon has ever been released.
The discussion, recounted by author John Leake on his Focal Points Substack, centres on a number of technical and evidentiary gaps that remain more than two decades after the September 11 attacks.
Leake describes a detailed conversation with his longtime friend—now a major airline pilot—about the flight path and extreme control inputs attributed to hijacker Hani Hanjour.
Official accounts state that Hanjour, with minimal documented simulator experience on large commercial jets, allegedly took control of AA Flight 77 at 34,000 feet, reversed course toward Washington, then executed a high-speed descending corkscrew turn before striking the Pentagon’s western façade at roughly 460 knots.
According to Leake’s pilot source, such manoeuvres would require extensive, specific simulator practice—far more than the patchy and inconsistently documented training attributed to Hanjour. The pilot also questioned whether a 757 could withstand the rapid descent and hard banking without exceeding its structural limits, suggesting a thorough investigation into the aircraft’s performance envelope would have been warranted.
Leake then turned to the long-standing issue of video evidence. Despite the Pentagon being one of the most heavily surveilled buildings in America, and despite its proximity to the Reagan National Airport control tower—equipped with cameras of its own—no clear footage of the plane’s approach has ever been made public. The only release, secured through a Judicial Watch FOIA request in 2006, consists of a handful of parking-booth frames in which the alleged aircraft appears only as a brief white blur preceding the explosion.
“That the Department of Defense did not release this footage immediately in 2001 is the first question that comes to my mind,” Leake writes, adding that an absence of footage from Reagan’s tower is equally perplexing. He highlights that even early-2000s surveillance systems could capture multiple identifiable frames of fast-moving cars, while modern mobile phone cameras easily record supersonic military jets with clarity—raising the question of why no similar imagery of Flight 77 exists.
Leake stresses that his intention is not to dispute that AA Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Instead, he argues that the lack of a single clear, publicly released image or video of the aircraft’s final seconds remains an unresolved anomaly: “My purpose with this post is NOT to claim that AA Flight 77 didn’t strike the Pentagon, but to point out the strangeness of the fact that the U.S. government has apparently been unable to find a single photograph or video of the incident.”
Rare old footage of the 9/11 Pentagon attack
There was no plane involved
Looks like a projectile/missile coming in from feet above ground level pic.twitter.com/cI4RXKeADV
— Vision4theBlind (@Vision4theBlind) August 20, 2023
The official 9/11 Pentagon attack story is a myth: This video of the Pentagon attack recorded by a security camera at the Doubletree Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, provides no evidence that a Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as was officially claimed. pic.twitter.com/EF8QSZ3Tm2
— Shoestring 9/11 (@shoestring911) August 6, 2025
This is a photo of the Pentagon shortly after being hit on 9/11.
Does it look like a full jumbo jet airliner crashed into this spot? Where is the wreckage? pic.twitter.com/bNTUXfGc41
— Retro Coast (@RetroCoast) September 11, 2023
Christchurch has parallels to 911
All the evidence is there but nothing is being done
https://jameshfetzer.org/2015/05/planes-no-planes-and-video-fakery/
Then there is Oklahoma
Fertilizer bombs don’t do that much damage
Especially when the explosions come from the inside out
Unexploded bombs
All summarized in the third paragraph with:
During the research I have done on this question, some of the most important reasons to question the use of planes on 9/11 are (1) that Flights 11 and 77 were not even scheduled to fly that day and, (2) that, according to FAA Registration records I have in hand, the planes corresponding to Flights 93 and 175 were not deregistered until 28 September 2005, which raises the questions, “How can planes that were not in the air have crashed on 9/11?” and “How can planes that crashed on 9/11 have still been in the air four years later?”
http://whale.to/b/911.html
https://www.bitchute.com/video/3xJuGJ9K6S0C
There were no planes on 911
The FBI went around all the businesses surrounding the Pentagon to seize all video footage from security cameras. The one video released to the public from the petrol station has had frames removed to hide the fact that it was a cruise missile not a Boeing 757 that hit the Pentagon.
Coincidently where the missile hit was where the audit team were working on an unaccounted $2.3 trillion amount of money. Just the day before 9/11 the US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld has held a press conference announcing the audit.
For anyone who cares to do a deep dive into 9/11 it becomes very clear that this was a joint Israeli Mossad and US based Zionist NeoCon operation initiated solely to bring about the destruction of Israel’s perceived enemy countries in the Middle East.
The cruise missile was fired from an Israeli German-built submarine.
I’ve seen the footage before it got sctrubbed…
There was definitely no plane
The supposed planes engines which contained titanium the hardest substance known to man were never found
I don’t even think there was a missile
They wouldn’t have left the accuracy of such an integral link in the fraud to chance
More like planed explosives
http://www.whale.to/b/flight_77.html
http://www.whale.to/a/rumsfeld_h.html
Documentaries have been made using the digitized archival interviews of the firefighters , the building owners and eyewitnesses to the twin towers collapse. Everyone said they heard repeated explosions, and the building 7 owner said he brought the tower down by his own decision, because of the fire. Who made money that day? https://islamicstatewatch.com/2025/09/01/al-qaeda-911-fraud/
Can’t ’ Pull ‘ a building in a few hours.