Some emergency responders and other witnesses are surprised at the lack of major plane debris at the Flight 77 crash site at the Pentagon: 
Brian Ladd of the Fort Myer Fire Department arrives at the scene a few minutes after the attack. Yet, “Expecting to see pieces of the wings or fuselage,” he instead reportedly sees “millions of tiny pieces” of debris spread “everywhere.” [Goldberg et al., 2007, pp. 68] Captain John Durrer of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Fire Department also arrives within minutes of the crash. He will later recall thinking: “Well where’s the airplane, you know, where’s the parts to it? You would think there’d be something.” Reportedly, “The near total disintegration of the plane had left only a multitude of bits scattered outside the building.” [Goldberg et al., 2007, pp. 70] Sergeant Ronald Galey, a helicopter pilot with the US Park Police, arrives over the Pentagon in his helicopter within minutes of the attack (see Shortly After 9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001). He will describe what he sees there: “[I]t was a relatively small hole in the side of the building. I’m going, ‘This couldn’t possibly have been a 757.’ There’s absolutely nothing that you could identify as an aircraft part anywhere around there. Nothing. Just couldn’t have been.” Galey will add, “I just can’t emphasize enough, the initial damage, looking at it, it just didn’t look like a 757 hit that building.” [US Naval Historical Center, 11/20/2001] Sergeant Keith Bohn, another Park Police helicopter pilot, lands his helicopter near the crash site shortly after the attack. He will recall: “When I landed on the scene, there was actually a particular slit into the side of the Pentagon, which is hard to believe that an aircraft made it, but it’s that small of a slit.… I could not see any aviation parts. I couldn’t see an engine or a wing. There was just rubble, pieces, small pieces.” [US Naval Historical Center, 11/19/2001] Steve DeChiaro, the president of a New Jersey technology firm, had just arrived at the Pentagon when it was hit and ran toward the crash site. He will recall: “But when I looked at the site, my brain could not resolve the fact that it was a plane because it only seemed like a small hole in the building. No tail. No wings. No nothing.” [Scripps Howard News Service, 8/1/2002] Early in the afternoon, CNN Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre reports: “[T]he only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you can pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage, nothing like that anywhere around, which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon and then caused the side to collapse.” [CNN, 9/11/2001] Sheryl Alleger, a Navy officer at the Pentagon, goes past the crash site in an ambulance in the afternoon. She will recall: “[Y]ou couldn’t see any bits of the airplane, that was the thing that got me.… I expected to see the tail sticking out.… But—nothing. It was like the building swallowed the plane.” [Hilton, 2002, pp. 143] Eileen Murphy, a nurse at the Pentagon’s DiLorenzo Tricare Health Clinic, will recall: “I expected to see the airplane, so I guess my initial impression was: ‘Where’s the plane? How come there’s not a plane?’ I would have thought the building would have stopped it and somehow we would have seen something like part
of, or half of the plane, or the lower part, or the back of the plane. So it was just a real surprise that the plane wasn’t there.” [Marble and Milhiser, 9/2004, pp. 96] Sergeant Reginald Powell, a radiologist at the DiLorenzo Tricare Health Clinic, will say: “I was in awe that I saw no plane, nothing left from the plane. It was like it disintegrated as it went into the building.” [Marble and Milhiser, 9/2004, pp. 119] Captain Dennis Gilroy, acting commander of the Fort Myer Fire Department, reportedly “wondered why he saw no aircraft parts” when he arrives at the scene. [Goldberg et al., 2007, pp. 68]
Other witnesses will say they come across some pieces of plane debris: Rich Fitzharris, an electrical engineer working at the Pentagon, later remembers seeing “small pieces of debris, the largest of which might have been part of an engine shroud.” [Mlakar et al., 1/2003, pp. 13 
] Allyn Kilsheimer, a structural engineer who arrives at the Pentagon at about 5:00 p.m., will recall: “I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane.” [Popular Mechanics, 3/2005; Goldberg et al., 2007, pp. 100]
Later on during the day, the FBI arranges a search of the lawn in front of the crash site. According to the Defense Department’s book about the Pentagon attack: “Although much of the plane disintegrated within the Pentagon, the searchers found many scraps and a few personal items widely scattered on the grass and heliport. Plane remnants varied from half-dollar size to a few feet long.” [Goldberg et al., 2007, pp. 159] Also, one photo will show what appears to be plane debris on the lawn in front of the Pentagon, with the red, white, and blue stripes of American Airlines. [Knight Ridder, 4/28/2002]
September 14, 2001: Investigators Find Flight 77 Black Boxes, but Accounts Conflict over Details
At around 3:40 a.m., investigators at the Pentagon recover the two “black boxes” from Flight 77. [Washington Times, 9/14/2001] These boxes are the plane’s flight data recorder and its cockpit voice recorder. [BBC, 9/15/2001] Some news reports claim they are found by two Fairfax County firefighters, Carlton Burkhammer and Brian Moravitz, as they comb through debris near the impact site. [Washington Post, 9/19/2001; Newsweek, 9/28/2001] But according to Arlington County spokesman Dick Bridges, members of the FBI’s evidence response team find them. [PBS, 9/14/2001; Washington Post, 9/14/2001] Authors Patrick Creed and Rick Newman will later clarify that Burkhammer and Moravitz find an object initially believed to be one of the black boxes, but closer inspection reveals it to be just “a charred chunk of machinery.” Subsequently, FBI photographer Jennifer Hill finds the cockpit voice recorder in a stack of rubble while assisting searchers. Thirty minutes later, a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) expert locates the flight data recorder in the same area. [Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 396-397 and 400-402] But Allyn Kilsheimer, a structural engineer who helps coordinate the emergency response at the Pentagon, later claims he had “found the black box,” which, he says, he had “stepped on… by accident.” [GW Magazine, 3/2002; Popular Mechanics, 3/2005] Washington FBI agent Christopher Combs says, “Somebody almost threw [the black boxes] away because they didn’t know what they looked like.” [Disaster News Network, 10/30/2002]
Conflicting Accounts of Where Boxes Are Found – According to Dick Bridges, the two recorders are discovered “right where the plane came into the building.” [Associated Press, 9/14/2001] But the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Pentagon Building Performance Report, released in 2003, will claim that the flight data recorder was found “nearly 300 ft into the structure.” [Mlakar et al., 1/2003, pp. 40 ] In Creed and Newman’s account, the recorders are found in the Pentagon’s middle C Ring, near the “punch-out” hole made by the impacting aircraft. [Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 400-402]
Boxes Taken Away for Analysis – The boxes are taken to the NTSB’s laboratory in Washington, where data is extracted from the flight data recorder, but they are reclaimed by the FBI later on in the morning. [Washington Times, 9/14/2001; Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 402] A flight data recorder tracks an airplane’s flight movements for the last 25 hours, while the cockpit voice recorder contains radio transmissions and sounds from the cockpit for the last 30 minutes of its flight. Both are mounted in the tail of an aircraft and are encased in very strong materials like titanium. According to American Airlines and United Airlines, the black boxes aboard Flight 77 and the other hijacked planes were modern solid-state versions, which are more resistant to damage than older magnetic tape recorders. [Associated Press, 9/15/2001; BBC, 9/15/2001] FBI Director Robert Mueller later says that Flight 77’s data recorder has provided altitude, speed, and other information about the flight, but the voice recorder contained “nothing useful.” [CBS News, 2/25/2002] The 9/11 Commission will describe the cockpit voice recorder as being “badly burned and not recoverable.” [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 456] According to CBS News, preliminary information shows that the cockpit voice tape “appears to be blank or erased.” [CBS News, 9/16/2001] The two black boxes from Flight 93 are also recovered around this time (see September 13-14, 2001).
