LincolnLeibner

 

A tree and the backend of a crash truck at the heliport near the crash site were on fire and the ground was scorched, Maj. Leibner recounted. "The plane went into the building like a toy into a birthday cake," he said. "The aircraft went in between the second and third floors."

LincolnLeibner

 

Maj. Leibner drove in and made it as far as the south parking lot, where he got out on foot. "I heard the plane first," he said. "I thought it was a flyover Arlington cemetery."

LincolnLeibner

 

I immediately ran towards the point of impact. I passed some construction workers, who were running the other way. I got to the building. Remarkably, there was no debris from the airplane. In the immediate area around the Pentagon, the grass was all scorched and blackened. Windows were obviously knocked out and you could hear a fire inside the building but the fires weren’t that prevalent at that point. It was just smoke, and it wasn’t even all that bad...

MaryannRamos

 

As victims staggered from the building, Ramos couldn't tell what had wrought the destruction. There were no signs of a plane. "All I could see was a giant hole in the building," she said. "I thought it was a Piper cub (small plane). I found a couple little, thin pieces of twisted aluminum, that's all, on the ground. I gave it to the FBI. There were lots of flames at the top, a black hole and smoke."

LincolnLeibner

 

I told them what I had seen and what I gather is that I was the first personal account that he had. Even at this point, I don’t believe the Secretary was confident that, in fact, a civilian airliner had hit the building. I think they still speculated about a bomb, a cruise missile, a small aircraft, but I was glad I was able to give useful information. I told them the plane came in full throttle, level, flaps up, wheels up, wasn’t crashed into the building, was flown into the building.

The Secretary was essentially incredulous, but, then again, maybe that was just his manner. He asked me if I was sure.

LincolnLeibner

 

Then he heard the noise. Leibner had grown up in Arlington, Va., not far from Reagan National Airport, and he knew the jetliners' flight paths. For him, it was a sixth sense, and this sense told him this roar was coming from a very unusual direction. It was, he surmised in the fraction of a second that these calculations sometimes take, probably a military flyover for a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, ground-attack aircraft or fighters sent aloft as a tribute to a fallen soldier. Pretty routine stuff. But then it struck him: No, this was no A10 or F15. This was a passenger jet.

LincolnLeibner

 

And when he got there, in direct contradiction to the air-crash scenes he had watched on film or imagined a hundred times, there was no debris. No tail. No piece of the fuselage. There was nothing. There was only the fire in the grass and bits of the building strewn about, with a cruel randomness that made as little sense as the crash itself.