Campo It was a passenger plane. I think an American Airways plane, Mr Campo said. "I was cutting the grass and it came in screaming over my head. I felt the impact. The whole ground shook and the whole area was full of fire. I could never imagine I would see anything like that here."
Pentagon eyewitness accounts | World news | The Guardian
Cissell, James R. As former Cincinnatian James R. Cissell sat in traffic on a Virginia interstate by the Pentagon Tuesday morning, he saw the blur of a commercial jet and wondered why it was flying so low. ''Right about the time it was crossing over the highway, it kind of dawned on me what was happening,'' said Cissell, son of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Jim Cissell. In the next blink of an eye, he realized he had a front-row seat to history, as the plane plowed into the Pentagon, sending a fireball exploding into the air and scattering debris - including a tire rim suspected of belonging to the airplane - past his car. (...) In the next seconds dozens of things flashed through his mind. ''I thought, 'This isn't really happening. That is a big plane.' Then I saw the faces of some of the passengers on board,'' Cissell said. While he remembers seeing the crash, Cissell remembers none of the sounds. ''It came in in a perfectly straight line,'' he said. ''It didn't slow down. I want to say it accelerated. It just shot straight in.''
http://www.cincypost.com/attack/cissel091201.html
Cleveland, Allen Allen Cleveland of Woodbridge Virginia looked out from a Metro train going to National Airport, to see a jet heading down toward the Pentagon. "I thought, 'There's no landing strip on that side of the subway tracks,' " Before he could process that thought, he saw "a huge mushroom cloud. A lady staThe lady next to me was in absolute hysterics."" . . a silver pasenger jet, mid sized"
http://mfile.akamai.com/920/rm/thepo.../091101-5s.ram
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.
http://www.ahwatukee.com/afn/communi...s/020906a.html (broken link)
Day Wayne T. For one employee with Wedge One's mechanical subcontractor John J. Kirlin Inc., Rockville MD, "lucky" is an understatement. "We had one guy who was standing, looking out the window and saw the plane when it was coming in. He was in front of one of the blast-resistant windows," says Kirlin President Wayne T. Day, who believes the window structure saved the man's life. According to Matt Hahr, Kirlin's senior project manager at the Pentagon, the employee "was thrown about 80 ft down the hall through the air. As he was traveling through the air, he says the ceiling was coming down from the concussion. He got thrown into a closet, the door slammed shut and the fireball went past him," recounts Hahr. "Jet fuel was on him and it irritated his eyes, but he didn't get burned. Then the fireball blew over and the sprinklers came on, and he was able to crawl out of the closet and get out of the building through the courtyard."
http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp
Defina "The only way you could tell that an aircraft was inside was that we saw pieces of the nose gear. The devastation was horrific. It was obvious that some of the victims we found had no time to react. The distance the firefighters had to travel down corridors to reach the fires was a problem. With only a good 25 minutes of air in their SCBA bottles, to save air they left off their face pieces as they walked and took in a lot of smoke," Captain Defina said. Captain Defina was the shift commander [of an aircraft rescue firefighters crew.]
http://www.nfpa.org/NFPAJournal/Onli...e_11.01.01.asp
DiPaula, Michael Michael DiPaula 41, project coordinator Pentagon Renovation Team - He left a meeting in the Pentagon just minutes before the crash, looking for an electrician who didn't show, in a construction trailer less than 75 feet away. "Suddenly, an airplane roared into view, nearly shearing the roof off the trailer before slamming into the E ring. 'It sounded like a missile,' DiPaula recalls . . . Buried in debris and covered with airplane fuel, he was briefly listed by authorities as missing, but eventually crawled from the flaming debris and the shroud of black smoke unscathed.
http://www.sunspot.net/search/bal-ar...1990.htmlstory (broken link) (killtown)
Dubill, Bob " (...) when he saw a jetliner fly over the roadway. It filled his field of vision. The jet was 40-feet off the ground speeding toward the Pentagon. The wheels were up
Cancelled
Eiden, Steve Steve Eiden, a truck driver, had picked up his cargo that Tuesday morning in Williamsburg, Va., and was en route to New York City and witnessed the aftermath. He took the Highway 95 loop in the area of the Pentagon and thought it odd to see a plane in restricted airspace, thinking to himself it was odd that it was flying so low. "You could almost see the people in the windows," he said as he watched the plane disappear behind a line of trees, followed by a tall plume of black smoke. Then he saw the Pentagon on fire, and an announcement came over the radio that the Pentagon had been hit.
http://www.baxterbulletin.com/ads/ch...001/page2.html (broken link)
Evey, Walker Lee The plane approached the Pentagon about six feet off the ground, clipping a light pole, a car antenna, a construction trailer and an emergency generator before slicing into the building, said Lee Evey, the manager of the Pentagon's ongoing billion-dollar renovation. The plane penetrated three of the Pentagon's five rings, but was probably stopped from going farther by hundreds of concrete columns. The plane peeled back as it entered, leaving pieces of the front of the plane near the outside of the building and pieces from the rear of the aircraft farther inside, Evey said. The floors just above the impact remained intact for about 35 minutes after the crash, allowing many people in those offices to escape, Evey said
http://detnews.com/2001/nation/0110/...ion-312016.htm (broken link)
Evey, Walker Lee Internally, the Wedge One project included: complete demolition of existing facilities; significant abatement of hazardous materials (most notably, 28 million lbs. of asbestos-contaminated material was removed); installation of all new electrical, mechanical, plumbing and telecommunication systems within the existing floorplan; structural steel reinforcement; and replacement of all 1,282 windows in the section, including 386 blast-resistant units on the outermost "E Ring" and innermost "A Ring" of the building. All-new office space was created with an open space plan aimed at enhancing flexibility (...) Amazingly, the plane pushed through the outermost "E Ring", and drove deep into the interior, its nose coming to rest just inside the "C Ring."
http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp
Flyler, Kim Kim Flyler was trying to sneak into a parking space near to the building when she saw the plane: "At that moment I heard a plane and then a loud cracking noise.... Right before the plane hit the building, you could see the silhouettes of people in the back two rows. You couldn't see if they were male or female, but you could tell there was a human being in there."
The Observer, Sept. 8, 2002
Gaines, Kat Kat Gaines, heading south on Route 110, approached the parking lots, saw a low-flying jetliner strike the top of nearby telephone poles. "
http://www.fccc.org/News/valor.htm (broken link)
Hagos, Afework Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was on his way to work but stuck in a traffic jam near the Pentagon when the plane flew over. "There was a huge screaming noise and I got out of the car as the plane came over. Everybody was running away in different directions. It was tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance. It hit some lampposts on the way in."
Pentagon eyewitness accounts | World news | The Guardian
Kean, Terrance 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."
Loud Boom, Then Flames In Hallways (washingtonpost.com)