Either is fine. Or no answer at all. It’s up to you.
To be quite honest, i’m not sure what you could possibly say to convince me that the actions of 9/11 were “poorly planned,” or that they required “little skill or timing.”
Fair enough. I’ll give you a straight answer after a quick question. What is your level of knowledge of heavy commercial aircraft? It’s not a trick question, just want to explain it from the right perspective.
Depends what you mean by my knowledge of them.
I’ve flown in them a bunch of times as a passenger, i know their layout, i know the basic principles behind the workings of a jet engine, and i also know—based on information provided by some of the SDMB’s own pilots—that any civilian with no flight experience who jumped behind the controls and tried to fly such an aircraft would probably crash the thing within a few minutes.
Is that what you wanted to know?
OK, that helps with the explanation.
I spent more than a few hours deconstructing the events of 9/11 (from a procedural point of view). My interest was to evaluate the complexity of the operation. I have a general aviation background and access to people who both fly the aircraft (of 9/11) and have an intimate knowledge of the structural limitations involved. I don’t know if I can cite any of this to your satisfaction so I’ll keep it brief.
What the terrorists did with the aircraft was not as difficult as you think. I just took my nephew (9 years old) flying yesterday for the first time and he had no problems plodding around the sky in a simple airplane. I literally told him nothing about flying. The major difference between my plane and a 757 is power management. It is a huge difference but can be learned through flight instruction.
None of the Terrorists had to take off or land. There were no requirements for trim settings. They didn’t have to navigate with the aircraft’s instruments or fly blindly using instruments alone. All they needed was a five-minute lesson with a handheld GPS (which can be programmed with an artificial way-point such as a building). Once the airplanes were airborne and trimmed for level flight they became exponentially easier to fly. All the real skill needed to get it to cruise altitude was done by the airline pilots. From that point on it only required basic flight skills and knowledge of power management.
757’s are very heavy so it takes time/distance to descend and establish a proper approach speed. That’s assuming you want to land safely. If your intentions are not to land safely then you need only descend at a speed less than VNE (Velocity Never to Exceed). Commercial airframes are de-rated for safety so there is some wiggle room with that number. The VNE speed for a 757 is 513 knots which is about 12% above the operating speed. This is all the terrorists had to worry about en route. The only real skill involved was pulling back power on descent to maintain a speed below VNE. Remember, not only are they not trying to slow the plane down for landing they’re trying to maximize the speed of impact
If the terrorist had to land these aircraft it would a significant feat given their training. However, the WTC represented an object that could be seen at a great distance and hit without diving at it. The trick was to stay under VNE long enough to keep the wings from pulling off. I will give more credit for the Pentagon strike because it was harder to visually acquire (although it would have been easy to find with a GPS). All they needed to know was the descent rate and it would have been easy to program a final approach based on that info. I do this all the time when trying to find a grass strip runway I’ve never been too. I simply draw a line on my GPS map that fits my speed and descent and that becomes my base-leg turn off. It is alarmingly simple to do. I can descend without actually seeing the runway until I’m almost on top of it.
What makes the 9/11 attack so profound is the simplicity of it all. Sleeper cells were inserted legally allowing the attackers to establish an ever-increasing level of anonymity over time. Such a concept can be extended to fund the attack by having the assailant earn money using a work visa. The longer the cell exists the more money can be generated and the less attention drawn. However, in this case I believe they were funded from outside the country. The flight training was minimal compared to that of a military pilot and the ammunition used was a self guided 270,000 lb. fuel-air bomb purchased with a charge card (making it a US funded weapon). The success of the assault was based on passed responses to hijacks. Historically, pilots have agreed to a hijacker’s demands to avoid the death of their passengers, (which is what happened).
Aside from some pilot training there appears to be a working knowledge of building construction (which the Bin Laden family business would have afforded). The WTC was a new style of steel girder construction and it used a loose type of insulation. It was vulnerable to an uncontrolled fire (unlike the Empire State Building). From conversations with engineers, I had originally expected the buildings to stand for close to 2 hrs. They didn’t make it by half. The impact blew the insulation off which accelerated the process.
Maybe my definition of simple is different (by degrees) from yours but IMO this was a simple concept that required little training to achieve. The flight instruction was so minimal that the instructors alerted the FBI that they were training people who didn’t express a desire to perfect their landing skills. From a planning standpoint, it was probably harder to establish the cells in the United States than anything else.
Well, in all those paragraphs you have provided some convincing arguments that the plan may not have required a whole lot of skill, in terms of flying the aircraft. You have also provided what i think is a reasonable analysis of the terrorists’ expectations regarding the reaction of the planes’ flight crew and passengers.
But your initial assertion was that the attack was “poorly planned.” In my opinion, the question of an attack’s planning can largely be separated from the issue of skills tht you focus on so closely. Even if i concede your points about the relative ease of the terrorists’ flight ssignments, it doesn’t negate the efficiency and success of their planning. If your previous post has done anything, it is further convince me that the attacks were, in fact, extraordinarily well planned.
YMMV.
Gotta agree. The fact that they came up with a scheme that required relatively little flying skill points to a well planned endeavour. Hijacking the plane before level flight would have required more skill but would not have been as well planned.
Sure, I agree but words are meaningless without action. I just don’t see any organization within the western democracies that have espoused any action or taken any action that compares to the atrocities perpetrated by Islamists. that is not to say it can’t happen.
Maybe “poorly planned” is a poor choice of words. I could also say (from a planning point of view) that it was pure genius in both conception and simplicity. It is not mutually exclusive to say that it could have been planned better. I was deliberately vague in my analysis and ended up leaving out the parts of the attack I thought were lacking. I admit I failed in this respect and I don’t wish to expand on the issue. I’ll be content if I conveyed the simplicity of the operation because ultimately that is where the danger lies. They caused over a half trillion dollars in damage with minimal skill and virtually no investment.