It wasn’t a Sunday, it was a Tuesday.
Good catch.
9/11’s Anniversary was today, on a Sunday though you are right, the attack took place on a Tuesday. The blast at the Pentagon rocked my house and if I hadn’t been late for work, I might have been passing by the Pentagon when the plane went in.
We heard it coming up Shirley Highway shortly before it crashed.
Here’s something you might not see about why the Pentagon got hit instead of the White House or Capital. The plane had circled the beltway at a low altitude then came up Shirley Highway (95) towards DC.
Because of vegetation covering the viewing approach to DC (i.e. both the White House and the Capital), the plane’s pilot couldn’t see either target within enough time to direct the plane into them.
When he came up 95 which had an obstructing rise and then flew over the rise, the only thing he could see was the Pentagon directly in front of him. That’s the target he chose and went it. It would have been a matter of just seconds before he hit it.
That is why many people never saw the plane hit UNLESS they were on the ground at the Pentagon or looking out of a few apartment complexes at the top of 95 overlooking the Pentagon.
Only one film so far has been found that showed the plane hitting the Pentagon and exploding immediately upon impact with the outer wall. It sheared off the wings but the body of the plane with its fuel rammed through several Pentagon outer rings, spewing flaming fuel right before it exploded.
Got a lot of my flight and targeting information from a Vietnam F-4 fighter-bomber pilot (Red River Rat) who showed me how the views of the pilot were obstructed and how he had little time to decide to hit the Pentagon or try again to find the White House or Capital.
As a reporter, now mainly researcher, I learned how to ask questions like these when I was in Nam and then covered the Pentagon for a few years. Glad to share what I learned here at FR.