Tim Gilbert: And now one man plans to find out the truth once and for all.
Lisa Wilkinson: American businessman Paul Salo joins us now from Bangkok. Paul, good morning to you, firstly, what are some of the concerns around what really happened on 9-11?
Paul Salo: Hi Lisa! Hey Tim! Thanks for having me on the show! I’m less concerned about what theoretically happened. I want to see what actually happens when you recreate the event. So when you fly at that speed. Or at the speed that we are going to attempt. Into a building and see what actually happens. I guess my project is not so much about thinking. Like hey who did it? Maybe somebody did it maybe somebody didn’t. We don’t really know. As a lot of people know, I’m not a conspiracy theorist myself but I think this is a very seminal event in many people’s lives. In fact, some of the best minds from Australia were in that building and passed away. It set in motion the war in Iraq and many many things so I think it’s a worthwhile event to find out more about what happened and what actually happens in that situation.
Obviously there are a lot of conspiracies “that it wasn’t an airplane”. There are so many different conspiracy theories. That “it was a controlled demolition” is what a lot of people think. i.e. That there were explosives that caused the building to fall down. And you can see why some people think that because obviously it’s a very tall building, 109 stories, and to fall straight down is actually not that easy. It’s an art and a science. (controlled demolition of large structures like that) so there are some people that have some doubts. And we want to do our best attempt to recreate the physical part, obviously we don’t want to recreate the mental anguish. But we want to see what happens so that you can see for yourself what happens either way. I think we have the right to do that. We have the right to know.
Tim: So I’m assuming from all that that you are doubting whether the Twin Towers could have collapsed like that simply from the crashing of a plane into the building. You want to try and see that impact. How on earth are you going to do that?
Paul: Well a lot of people will say, “these building were built in 1971 with a particular steel and the structure was very unique actually. Because they built it to be very robust to take an airplane crash. Obviously they didn’t envision a Boeing 767 ER (Extended Range) airplane that we have now but back then they did the best they could. This was a very solid structure and there are people who will say, “it’s impossible! You can’t recreate the time. You can’t recreate the moment. You can’t recreate the underlying land composition (and foundation)!”
And what I say to these perfectionists is, what choice do we have? We have two choices really. One is to go to Starbucks and have another latte and think about it. And the other one is to actually try to recreate the event. So we’re going to do our best. We have a team of aeronautical engineers and pilots who are very professional and ready to do their best to recreate the physics exactly as it was. Now obviously we can’t have the same building. We can’t go back in time. But we can do our best to find a suitable structure.
There’s two parts of it basically. There is the airplane part and there is the building part. The airplane we can recreate almost exactly. The 767 ER still exists obviously so that’s probably 60-70% of it. The other 30-40% (however you want to call it) is the building. We are going to do our best to get a structure that is close as possible to the World Trade Center. Basically the choice is that. Do we want to try something to see what happens. There are quite a few people worldwide who doubt and that’s why there is a show like this right now. There are people who wonder and they want to see for themselves. I think some very rational people would like to see what happens in this extreme situation.
Lisa: Alright Paul, we’re gonna have to leave it there but I’m sure there are a few people who will be fascinated to see where you go with this so we’ll make sure that we’ve got the details of how that all goes forward on our website. Thank you very much for your time this morning.
Paul: (cut off) You’re welcome Lisa and Tim. Thanks for having me on the show. I really enjoyed it.
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