Originally Posted by Racnad

If you look at the still pictures of the impact, you see a lot of debris coming from the building and falling that is not on fire. This debris would be mostly pieces of the plane. If the passport happend to be right behind a larger chunk of metal - perhaps one of the pieces visible in the photographs - it could have traveled through the building without being shredded and then fell, while the fireball, being hot, traveled mostly up.

Your watch metaphor does not apply, since nothing needs to randomly re-assemble.

I'll look at your links later.