As a side question, why do people still assume that the Pentagon was a primary target at all? It obviously was not. Both the White House and Capitol buildings were much more important but they are very hard to see from the air. The White House is just a huge mansion after all. The Washington Monument can guide you close to it but these were just pilots trained on simulators. Even the Capitol isn’t huge or obvious from the air. If the terrorists had any sense or competence, they could have hit either of those two primary targets.
Instead, they couldn’t see what they were looking for and went for the largest office building in the world that is obvious from the air due to its size and shape. The whole thing was shear incompetence and they even hit an area of the Pentagon under construction because they had no idea what they were doing.
Why isn’t that pointed out more frequently? They screwed the pooch badly and failed at their mission. The World Trade Center attackers did a great job at what they wanted to do. The Washington D.C. attackers would have a hard time screwing things up more badly than they did.
Shagnasty: Those are precisely the kinds of things that make some kinds of moron certain that the Pentagon crash was done entirely by the American government (with a missile, according to some theories) and I don’t think anyone really wants to feed those trolls any more lines to confuse the ignorant.
The Capitol is ridiculously easy to pick out from the air. It’s a giant building, in the middle of an open area, and in the middle of the city. Hell, you could use the national mall as an approach guide.
As to the OP, anyone who’s flown knows that you don’t just hop up and run off of an airplane. It’s too cramped of a space, and there are way too many people in the way.
The Capitol building is the most often-speculated site for where Flight 93 was headed. I’ve read some discussions that make me think that the Pentagon was the primary target for 77 - it was a strike against the military HQ of the Great Satan after all.
Yes, the pilot was barely competent - he came in way too high and had to make a circle to lose altitude, then he barely kept it from hitting the ground before the Pentagon wall, but he managed to do basically what he intended.
Far from being factually unreliable, Wikipedia is edited mercilessly by its community of member/contributors. If you add something that’s incorrect it can be deleted within seconds.
All the buildings in question are in close proximity to a prominent fork in the Potomac, which is the first thing I’d look for if flying to DC (as National airport is also close to that point). Yes, the Pentagon has a very distinct shape - but the green park areas - the Mall - is MUCH larger than that building, and being the tail end of summer would still be a distinct stripe of green in an otherwise urban setting. This would stand out quite prominently. Any pilot that can find a runway and land on it would be able to find that green stripe and make use of it. The Capitol is at the east end of it. The White House sits at the north end of another green patch intersecting the Mall. Cripes, that would hardly be different than doing a low pass over a runway, something everyone learns to do in their student pilot days.
If they could find the Pentagon they should have been able to find either of the other two buildings, particularly while flying at relatively low altitude.
At the time of 9/11 I had about half the training of the terrorist pilots, yet I was routinely picking out much less distinct features from the landscape while flying.
Because it’s hogwash.
Yes, the hijackers had some trouble handling the big airplane because simulators aren’t reality and they were moving like bats out of hell, but to do their job they didn’t have had a lot of expertise in big Boeings. There is not, however, any reason to question their navigational competence.
If the plane is grounded and they are holding passengers on it, due to lack of a jetway or other reasons, the doors would be closed.
If the plane is at the jetway with the doors open and passengers are free to leave, they would leave. There have been situations ( late flight and I need to make the connection), when I have attempted to move fast and be the first one of the plane and these attempts are uniformly unsuccessful, at best I advance 3 rows or so and get lots of dirty looks. I’m just not picturing the scenario you are putting out there.
Yeah, it can be deleted in seconds, but most often errors languish for a lot longer than that. As I pointed out in the last thread on Wikipedia accuracy (and just focusing on comparisons of accuracy between Wikipedia and other encyclopedias is bullshit anyway), I corrected a rather embarrassingly wrong claim, leading to the deletion of a whole section, on a very prominent page (the largest open problem in computer science) that was edited regularly. This error had been around for over three years.
No, it isn’t. Not as long as other encyclopedias are accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow. All encyclopedias are subject to factual errors but only one is held up to the scrutiny warranted.
Yes it is. There’s more to producing an encyclopedia than producing an error free document. The fact that so many Wikipedia articles are completely unintelligible, with atrocious choice of language, is something that is never mentioned. Further, an awful lot of Wikipedia articles are “cited” in name only. Have you ever examined the quality of cites used in some of their articles?
Let’s not even mention the fact that the Nature study looks like it is fundamentally flawed, highlighting stylistic choices as “errors” when they’re no such thing (and in some cases, being downright wrong).
Also, I will admit that Wikipedia has many, often frustrating problems; however, that doesn’t send it’s worth to 0. Despite its many flaws (which we can, of course, discuss how to improve), it also has many strengths, and I still find it invaluable; the world with Wikipedia is much better than the world without it.
My scenario is this: People were coming onto the plane when the notice to ground all planes came out. The captain said sorry we will be here for a while and the people took off.
Regarding wikipedia I have on more than one occasion made Luke Skywalker the only known gay jedi who is also very well hung. That was corrected in less then 3 minutes
There are multiple “experts” who monitor different articles on Wikipedia. Also, any article that is a hot topic is monitored by people and bots.
A friend of mine tried vandalizing a page belonging to a controversial political figure (non-malicious) and the page was reverted back within 5 seconds.
I’ve spent a little time reading the various edits in the history–when they do a revert, they cite vandalism sometimes, and if you read the vandalized pages, some of them can be amusing. But you can see what time the vandalism occurred and what time the page was reverted and it’s always pretty fast.