Speaking as a 10 year veteran of flight simulators who’s never flown a real plane an inch…
It seems to me that anybody with a decent computer and Microsoft Flight Simulator and six months practice could have hit the WTC. It seems to me they overtrained.
I don’t mean to suggest that the training didn’t help, but they exposed themselves, and possibly Al Queda, to possibly unnecessary security risks. Most of what we know aboout them is from their time in flight school. Since they were in a single place for such an extended time, and mixing with a lot of strangers, they inevitably left a lot more clues around. It might even be that clues they left during this period, especially the documentation (and money)they provided to flight schools, pointed the finger back at Al Queda.
It all might have been blown in advance. One of them might have tasted America, found it good, and ratted out the others. Or maybe one of them might have said something in the wrong place.
They could have trained for this in Afghanistan, if the Taliban were fully behind it. They could have stayed in a cave with a decent generator, a sixpack of Dell computers, and sometimes even a spin around the neighborhood in a real Taliban transport plane.
Maybe the Pentagon hit demanded better piloting, but even it’s one big honkin’ target from the air, hard to miss visually (at least compared to the White House). Does anybody know whether these guys ever flew within visual range of their targets ahead of time? I could see that as being a real advantage, but I don’t think they did.
Any real pilots care to express an opinion on how necessary hands-on time on a big airliner would be to do this, considering no worries about takeoff or landing?