Just to pre-empt another conspiracist tack: they weren’t familiar with 757s or 767s, their sims being 727s. However, the different planes were intentionally made as similar as possible, to assist training a pilot from one to fly another.
Wouldn’t this be true of all the other buildings in the immediate area i.e. the Millinium Hotel, The US Post Office?
I’m not a pilot and I don’t know how easy it is to bring a plane down from cruising altitude to the altitude required to hit the first tower and then perform the manuever required to hit the second tower banking the plane at the last moment to ensure that the entire plane hit the building. Is that something that just isn’t a big deal for a pilot?
It seems that all of the hijacking pilots got their training here, are all pilots trained here? Were Iraqi pilots that flew the jumbo jets for Iraqi Airways also trained here?
I can’t answer the rest of your questions, but you have to remember that location is everything. The debris pattern of the WTC buildings was fairly localized, I imagine, so that the buildings closest to them would be the most likely to be hit by debris. The buildings located near the imact points would be subjected to more debris than others. Also the age of the buildings plays an important factor as well. When the WTC was built there was no such aircraft as the 757, so it’s hardly reasonable for one to expect the buildings to withstand the impact of a plane which didn’t exist when they were created. (After all, one of the engineers on the WTC said that the only way to prevent a building from being brought down by an airplane was to not have airplanes crash into them.) Newer buildings would be built to more rigid standards than the WTC, so they could be expected to withstand a larger impact than ones built at the time of the WTC.
Many of the engineers who designed the WTC are still alive, don’t you think that if they were a bit suspicious about what happened, they’d be speaking out? There were probably dozens if not hundreds of engineers on that project, kind of hard to bribe 'em all or kill 'em all off without raising suspicion don’t you think?
There’s big hints of mafia involvement in the contracts of the initial build. Hell, this was 70s New York, what else was going to happen?!!!
Yeah, but those contracts were handed out to the companies that were actually going to be building the Towers. Not the engineering firm that designed it. I’ve seen a number of interviews with the engineers after the attack, and all of them are pretty well shaken up by what happened. If there was a hint of foul play in their minds, they’d speak up. I’ll never forget seeing an interview with one engineer nearly two years after the attacks took place, you could see the emotion twisting in her face, and her choking back tears when the discussion turned to 9/11. I can’t believe for a moment that emotion was faked.
If you consider that an ordinary flight in an airliner, at the end of the trip the pilot has to touch down on a strip of pavement about 150 feet wide and they almost always do so gently and dead center, nosewheel right on the centerline painted on the strip you’ll realize that these machines, for all their size and mass, can be steered very precisely.
Adjusting altitude wouldn’t be that big a deal, given that they had hundreds of miles in which to do so gently - they didn’t dive bomb the buildings at the last minute, they came in at the altitude to do the job. Sudden moves would be a problem, but they had time to set up their approach gradually.
Given that the towers were visible from quite far off that day, giving them time to line everything up, no I don’t think this was a tremendous effort. I’m sure it WAS an effort - these guys weren’t supermen after all and they weren’t fully trained to fly an airliner - but not as much an effort as some folks seem to think. The first plane to hit the towers seemed to be right on target from the film clips I’ve seen. The second one seemd to be doing the more “extreme” manuvering. I mean, they almost missed the darn thing and if they had it would have taken miles to turn that puppy around and try again - airliners do not turn on a dime. Even so, it wasn’t that extreme - a steeper bank than an airline pilot would choose to do with passengers (outside of a life-or-death emergency) but steeper turns than what they did are a rountine part of flight training. Why did the second one come in off-target? Well, maybe he wasn’t as skillful a pilot. Maybe seeing a flaming building made all this more real to him and he hesistated for a moment before going through with the deed. Maybe there were some ferocious air currents circulating around the area from the burning building. What gets me watching video of the second impact is not “how did he make the plane do that?” but rather "how could someone do that delibrately?
Flight training is (I’m told) cheaper in the US than anywhere else in the world. A LOT of foreign people get their training in the US, both private pilots and commercial. Some smaller countries save on the cost of maintaining their own training infrastructure by, essentially, renting ours. It’s nothing unusual for foreign air force pilots to receive training from the US military, either, for that matter. (The soviets used to do some of this sort of thing, too - it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re still providing flight training as a source of revenue) There are countries with no civilian aviation at all - if a person who lives in such a country is not a military pilot and still wants to fly they can come to the US, earn a license, and fly here (and a lot of other places - a private license lets you fly world-wide for the most part). And some wealthy businessmen do just that - take a flying vacation in the US or other country once or twice a year.
The little one-runway no-control-tower airfield I’m based at has had Indian, Danish, and Finnish CFI’s in the past couple years in addition to the US born insturctors - all of whom came to the US to get training through commercial licenses. The Dane and the Finn have since returned to their native countries to pursue airline careers there. When 9/11 hit we had three Italians who had found it cheaper to come to the US, stay in a hotel for a couple months, and pay for flight training here than to do so in Italy. (They’ve since gone back home as well - pilot certificates in hand)
So, really, a bunch of foreigners taking flight training in the US is nothing unusual - which made it a lot easier to blend in. MANY pilots from other countries have been trained partly or wholly in the US. Given that Afganistan under the Taliban didn’t have civilian aviation training they had to go somewhere to learn to fly - by training in the US they not only would have access to all the training they could possibly need, they’d be training in the airspace they’d actually be doing the deed in. This is like the army being able to train on the actual battlefield they’ll be fighting a war on. They would not only know our airspace system, they’d know its weaknesses, too.
I don’t know about Iraqi airline pilots - it’s possible they utilized US training. Or perhaps someone else’s (Soviets, France… many MENA countries use their equipment, I expect they use their training as well). Aviation is international, after all, airplanes are built to go places. The US isn’t the only country providing training to people from outside their borders.