See subject.
Probably but with possible significant fire damage. The ESB is built with an incredibly sturdy iron frame wrapped in thick stone facing, unlike WTC1 and 2 which were basically engineering houses of cards - a fragile structure hanging from a central pylon.
A bomber hit the ESB in 1945, doing amazingly little damage to the building. A 767 is a much bigger plane with a larger fuel load, but I’d venture to say that unless everything went as wrong as it could go, the ESB would withstand such a hit and be rebuildable.
It stood a direct hit from a B-25 in 1945, but on that occasion they got the fire out (a heroic effort in itself). I suspect one of the 9/11 planes might have had a bigger fuel load, though.
It depends, but I’d say probably. It’s survived planes running into it before, after all. Not to mention giant apes.
It would depend on angle of impact, speed of aircraft and a bunch of other factors. But because it was of traditional construction, I think it would hold up better to impact stresses. An interesting article on the subject.
I would just like to say “Hello” to all the folks at the NSA who are intensely monitoring this thread at the moment. 
From the article:
Ah, it was a different time then…
The stone facing is decoration. What makes the building sturdy is the higher number of steel girders that exist throughout the building and the fact that they are basically encased in a concrete like substance as a fire retardant. The WTC was just the opposite. It used much less steel in a double tube design and the girders were insulated with a fluffy spray on insulation material. This was blown off upon impact exposing the girders to intense heat.
Structurally, the WTC was designed to withstand a DC8 sized aircraft. Wide-body aircraft didn’t exist when it was developed. They started construction in 1966 and the 747 was still in design phase.
Even if the impact and the subsequent fire didn’t topple the building, I can’t imagine that the ESB would have been structurally sound afterwards. Long-term, it would probably have to be at least partially demolished.
I don’t think so. The ESB is highly compartmentalized, and that would tend to limit the damage from both the impact and the subsequent fire. They could probably rebuild the damaged section much more cheaply than demolishing it.
Note the other point in the article. The glass facade of the WTC broke easily and all over, and even more so with heat of the fire; so there was a lot more air feeding the fire than would be the case in the ESB.
A lot of the fuel would be in the wings (doess the 767 have a mid-body fuel tank like 747’s?) and splatter across the facade rather than filling the interior, assuming the exterior wall (like with the Pentagon) would essentially stop the wing structure.
How much more armoured/solid was a B25? Modern passenger planes are made as light as possible with minimal consideration to any bullet or shrapnel protection… although obviously there’s a limit to the weight of armour you can put on an airplane.
The B-25 had a max takeoff weight of 35,000 lb. The 767-200ER (American Airlines flight 11) is 395,000 lb.
Nearly half of the 767’s weight being fuel - more than three times the entire weight of the B-25. Of course, the kinetic energy would be non-trivial…
The higher speed would be a factor but the larger plane isn’t going to be any denser and possible less dense. The center shaft of the 767 engine is a big hunk of metal but the rest of the engine is fluff compared to a radial engine. I would think the floor deck of a 767 is going to be more robust than a B-24. It’s surprising to see how much of the building was damaged by the wings.
But at the end of the day it was the fuel in the plane that ignited the flammable material in the WTC and that is what weakened the floor joists. those in turn sagged and pulled the outer walls in and they were holding the building up. When they snapped it was an instant fail.
None of the aircraft used in the 9-11 attacks were 747s.
I read the post as “the first jumbo/wide body was still in development.”
Yes, I shouldn’t have assumed everybody knew the 747 was the first wide body.
We’ve done the comparison in previous WTC threads but with over ten times the mass and at a much higher impact velocity (IIRC the WTC planes hit at around 600mph and the B-25 was coming in for a landing, so going closer to 100mph)…the WTC got hit with a whallop packing several HUNDRED times the kinetic energy of the ESB, around 400x as much by these back of the envelope calculations.
Not very solid and not well armoured. Armoured seats for the pilots and bombardier and bits of armour plate protecting the gunners.
I would say the B-25 was equally, if not more, fragile as a modern airliner.
What does kinetic energy has to do with it? Nothing about WTC crumble demonstrates that kinetic energy made a difference. If it did, it would NOT crumble uniformly but rather on the side affected by kinetic force impact. No?
From that linked article above:*
Furthermore, the Empire State Building is a reinforced masonry structure in which the structural steel beams are encased within limestone walls or slabs of concrete 8 inches (20 cm) thick. This heavy mass provides exceptional fire protection that insulates the steel within from excessive heating. Many modern skyscrapers like the WTC towers have eliminated this extensive use of stone and concrete to reduce cost. The World Trade Center instead relied on lightweight spay-on coatings for insulation. This insulation was simply blown off the WTC structure by the 767 collisions exposing the steel beams and floor trusses to the raging fire.*
This I think, even with the much greater fuel load of the WTC plane’s, would have made all the difference. All aircraft are inherently not very ‘dense’ as to their volume to weight ratios. I still maintain that one of the terrorists’ other ideas, to crash them into a nuclear power plant, would have been like shooting a beer can into a brick wall, it wouldn’t have even breached the containment buildings. The single key factor in the WTC collapses was the loss of the fire-proof coating on its (more sophisticated yet more sparse) metal framework (combined with the massive fuel loads).