I doubt they could have hit much lower without running into other buildings first.
And hey, grab a kid and hold the knife to her throat and you’ll see 100 adults become really compliant.
**
Right.
Also – as commented earlier in the thread: 757 and 767 have an extreme degree of operational commonality. Train someone to handle one, you’ve trained him in the other. Since this was a concerted effort it makes sense they’d seek to maximize their options. The transponder deactivation in at least one plane seems to point to someone who knew what to do – or what to prevent the flight crew from doing. And yes, it would make sense to do like a normal hijacker and have one pro pilot fly you until you’re almost there, then cut his neck right at the last moment and take over for final. You don’t need to get too far along in training to do controlled flight into obstacles but that Pentagon guy nailed it in a controlled power-dive after circling – an untrained person would crash well short or overshoot.
From the right angles, it’s possible. It was pretty clear on the side closest to water, for instance. That they didn’t do anything like this is more support for inexperienced people at the controls, IMO.
I find it hard to believe they could do so much damage with just box cutters.
UNLESS there were a lot of them.
OR UNLESS they used a lot of confusion or were sophisticated enuff (not thug like) to convince the passengers they would land safely.
Either way it seems like that had to well organized.
CNN and ABC confirmed one of the flight attendents managed to give the seat number of one of the terrorists. This would indicate there was more than one (at least on one plane)
Not being a flyer I may be wrong but isn’t everyone required to be in an assigned seat? And don’t they check out your ID before you board?
What I am getting at is it should from that (if true) be easy to find out who were the terrorist. OK Jane Doe checks out a secretary from Boston etc. The ones that don’t check out are the aliases (I will assume they didn’t use their real names).
<i>From the right angles, it’s possible. It was pretty clear on the side closest to water, for instance. That they didn’t do anything like this is more support for inexperienced people at the controls, IMO.</i>
I think you’re a little off there. ABC news reported that, based on early evidence, there appeared to be Bin Laden supporters on the planes that HAD UNDERGONE FLIGHT TRAINING.
Now, it’s stupid to argue if they were good pilots or bad pilots.
They were accurate enough to run a huge plane directly into the World Trade Center…twice…
Now, if you can honestly tell me that a person can do that without sufficient piloting experience, I’ll respect your opinion.
As for the plane not aiming for the bottom of the towers to avoid hitting other buildings, I think that’s the most logical thing to believe. Their aim was to kill as many Americans as possible, and that meant being SURE that they would have a clear course to the WTCenter towers. They were smart enough to hijack the plains, they wouldn’t be STUPID enough to accidentally run into another building, one less populated.
This is my opinion, I’ve been watching the news all day. All the experts have been saying that whoever piloted the planes into the targets(definitely NOT the original pilots, most say), had a fairly high degree of piloting skill.
You underestimate the power of Panic. You see someone with a weapon, you see him say that he’s hijacking the plane, and suddenly, all thoughts of a Rambo-like heroic rescue disappear from your mind.
If the passengers knew that the planes would be used as the instruments of murder for 10,000 people, they wouldn’t have gone along so easily.
CNN reported the second bombing was purposely timed so that the cameras would have enuff time to be on the burning tower so when the second plane came in the whole country could see.
BTW CNN has an exclusive shot of the plane flying into the second building and you can see it fly DIRECTLY into it.
All the other vids I’ve seen are the plane coming in from the back or side.
The tape is un bloody believable.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by GaryM *
**
shouldnt this read…
"would you trade your life, along with the lives of the people you will endanger inside the WTC, for the life of your family.
Well, try 540 mph for the second plane to hit the towers. At least that’s what I measured as a minimum from videotape (frame counting, length of plane, etc.). Note that the building was about twice as wide as the plane. Not much margine for error, especially considering updrafts and low flying, etc.
Well, training a suicide pilot for this would fall well short of full training. The pilot would, IMHO, only need to know how to:
- disable autopilot
- steer
- control altitude
- reduce speed
- co-ordinate # 2,3,and 4 to begin a descent
- Roughly estimate turning radius
I mean it’s not like he needs to estimate fuel consumption, deal with bad weather, co-ordinate with traffic control, or land the darned thing. So yeah, definitely these guys had some training, but not enough to, say, retire from terrorism and pass a pilot’s exam.
i think this slate article is not at all well thought out. I’ll cut them slack because every journalist is writing as fast as they can right now.
the author, James Fallows, claims that the hijackers were fairly experienced because they were able to navigate thru a drastic course change and control its decent down to “attack” level.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, this kind of hijacking was unprecedented - it’s likely that no pilot or passenger probably considered they were being used as bombs - until it was too late.
more likely, it proceeded as a “normal hijacking”.
hijacker: everyone to the back of the plane. i have a bomb, if you cooperate no one gets hurt. Mr. Pilot, land us in Laguardia or I’ll slit your throat.
then when they get near NY, he kills the pilot anyway & just has to aim for the big building. I have no knowledge of how hard this particular manuever is, but i doubt the hijacker had to do much more than that.
My father-in-law loves Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. He’s bought every release they’ve made. He likes to calculate the headings and follow flight paths as accurately as possible. He does really well and can even land the bigger planes. He has taken a couple piloting classes, but never got his liscense (too much money).
Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is billed as acutally used to teach real pilots before they go into the air. So I’m guessing it has its physics down pretty good as well as how the instuments work and their relative location.
I’ve played it a couple of times myself when I’m over there. I actually have found it hard NOT to hit the buildings. (“Let’s take the Leer for a spin and buzz the Sears Tower. Ooops!”)
It’s my guess that the hijackers spent many hours in front of a PC with MS Flight Sim and had a decent idea of how to fly a plane into a building.
So let’s see. A thousand dollars or so for a PC with the plane joystick and MS Flight Sim. Plane tickets from terrorist hideout to U.S and tickets for trips to L.A. for approximately 15 hijackers (3-4 per plane, one-way), $30,000. Most terrorist organizations have a plethora of fake IDs, so no money there. 15 razor blades, $30. Don’t need to pay they guys, so all in all, not too much money or training needed. Just get the real pilots to get you to the area and rely on your MS Flight Sim training to get you into the building.
Saw a couple of engineers on the tube yesterday.
They both kind of marvelled that the towers withstood the initial strikes. Said they were incredibly strong structures.
They said the collapse was due to structural weakening partway down the building due to the high temperatures caused by the fires. Then the mass of the higher floors pancaked down, and basically hammered the rest of the buildings down.
They said if the buildings had been hit much higher, there wouldn’t have been enough mass above to cause the collapse. And if hit lower, the support structure is much stronger, such that there may not have been the necessary structural failure.
I agree that it is not inconceivable that a plane could have been hijacked yesterday with knives and threats. Not sure it will be sufficient tomorrow.
“shouldnt this read… 'would you trade your life, along with the lives of the people you will endanger inside the WTC, for the life of your family.”
How in the name of everything holy and unholy would the people on the plane (other than the terrorists) know that this is what the terrorists planned to do, until the moment when they saw themselves bearing down on the World Trade Center?!?!?!?!
Hijackings until now have involved people who DIDN’T intend to kill everyone aboard unless they didn’t get what they demanded, while people who wanted to kill everyone on a plane would simply plant a bomb. This is the first time, at least in American experience, that someone has hijacked a plane with the PURPOSE of killing everyone aboard, never mind a target on the ground.
I just heard on the news that the feds believe that there were 3 to 6 hijackers on each plane, and that they had flight training at 4 schools in the US, and that they think that this operation has been in the planning stages for TWO YEARS.
Also,it was stated that the reason that the fourth plane went down was that the passengers had found out (via cell phone) what had happened in NYC, and that they rose up in riot against the hijackers. Probably won’t know for sure until they find the blackboxes.
Here’s a (perhaps) more balanced view of the skills & training the terrorist pilots would have needed, from someone who’s had some 767 piloting training: http://www.msnbc.com/news/627524.asp . From the relevant section:
“[The 767] is a docile, easy-to-fly plane. But it has a sophisticated flight-management system used for navigation. If you’re not trained on the 767’s system, you’d need the plane’s pilots to navigate for you. Once a hijacker had the twin towers in sight, only modest flight training would be necessary to maneuver the plane toward them.” And from another part of the essay: “Also, why did the plane turn at Albany? One answer is that the Hudson River is a natural geographical landmark that leads directly to the World Trade Center and is easy to navigate for a hijacker who’s likely inexperienced as a pilot.”