I’ve heard it said constantly on the news that this attack must have required huge amounts of resources and planning, and therefore only another nation or Osama Bin Laden (sp?) could be behind it. I don’t think this is so. As I see it (please correct me if I’m wrong), what is needed to have carried out an attack such as this is:
12 men willing to die (3 per plane), at least 4 of whom are pilots. Considering the frequency of suicide bombings in the mid-east, as well as the hundreds (thousands?) of Japanese kamikazes during WWII, finding 12 such men might not be as hard as it sounds.
Knives of some sort.
Enough money for 12 plane tickets. Seeing as these were suicide missions, I’m sure the attackers wouldn’t mind clearing out their savings accounts.
Flight schedules for the major airlines (available online, I’m sure).
Time to rehearse.
If nothing else is needed, why does everyone assume a massive organization and millions of dollars behind the attacks? It is entirely conceivable that everyone who had anything to do with the attacks died in the crashes. Am I wrong? Am I missing something really obvious that everyone on TV sees? Can we, in fact, be sure that it was some huge organization? How so?
(Of course, there may well be a huge organization and lots of money behind the attacks. I just don’t understand why everyone assumes that that must be the case).
It is a bit frightenning how low tech this all was. The biggest single expense seems to have been flight training which was still only 10k each. I am unclear on when they enrolled at the school but that would give some indication of the amount of time was spent in preparation. Otherwise they were on enough of a budget that two of them were begging for free accomodation while at the school. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole opperation was accomplished for less than 250k. A significant amount of money but hardly prohibitive or sufficient to assume state backing.
The planning also does not seem to require sophisticated planning as has been continually suggested. Once the initial idea of multiple hijacks is put forward the coordination required is pretty obvious and only required access to online booking. It wouldn’t take long to identify a selection of suitable flights likely to be underbooked on a midweek morning flight with final selection to be made a few days prior.
Thank you for starting this thread. I agree that it wouldn’t have taken a large organization or a well funded one.
Maybe a pilot could help me out with this: How hard could it be for someone, who is trained to fly a smaller or even a large (but different model) airplane, to get a layout of the cockpit and sit at home and familiarize themselves with the instrument panel?
I understand that the plane would handle a bit differently, but these people weren’t trying to land or takeoff, no intricate manuevers, basically just turning the aircraft. If you already are familiar with flying some type of airplane wouldn’t it be fairly easy?
My understanding is that these “bombing” runs were, on the contrary, HIGHLY intricate maneuvers. These planes have computer overrides on them that effectvely prevents running them purposely into objects – THAT had to be overridden somehow.
I don’t see that the coordination would be complicated, but there would only be one time period. Once it was discovered that aircraft were being hijacked with knives, there would be no more chances.
One thing in particular that seemed ``unprofessional’’ to me is that the Pennsylvania and Washington crashes happened an hour after the crashes in NYC, well after people realized that they were deliberate acts of terrorism. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to strike all the targets nearly simultaneously, before anyone had time to react? I heard reports that there was actually a fighter jet following the plane that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania.
To do it all spread out actually lends more fear to people.
If all four (or however many extra that didn’t work) planes hit their targets simultaneously, we’d have a bunch of fear but realize nothing else was going to be targeted – everything had already been hit en masse. At least there’d be less fear of “what plane is going to hit what now?”
When they were all spread out, we get badly scared. Then scared again. Then again. We don’t know what’s going to be hit next. We notice our gov’t wasn’t able to prevent the last attacks despite knowing about terrorist attacks. Thus…more fear.
That and probably gettin’ them all to crash at once would have taken quite a bit of timing and communication effors between all the planes, making it easier for them to be eavesdropped and all.
Buy Microsoft Flight simulator. The latest version has a VERY accurate 767 cockpit, and there are scenery packs that give a good 3D lanscape of major cities. Including NY. I’ve seen a friend fly a small plane between the WTC towers in flight sim.