Inspired by another thread: Did weather have any effect on the hijackers picking the 11th of September.
I don’t know about the weather in the DC area, but the weather in New England was ideal. When the first plane was hijacked over Albany, New York City was already visible some 140 miles away. This is something that normally occurs only about twice a month. Long range navigation was a breeze that day.
Is there any way of knowing whether the hijackers had a back-up plan to change the date should the weather have been poor on that day? Or is it possible that September 11th WAS their alternate date postponed from an earlier poor-weather day. Did the teams of hijackers have any way of communicating with (or even knowing who) any of the other teams in case of bad weather? Was it known whether any of the pilots were instrument rated? Even with an instrument rating, finding the WTC would have been a bit of a problem if the ceiling was under 1500 feet and/or the visibility was under two miles.
Do we know when the irreversible “go” decision was made and communicated to the teams?
It was clear as a bell in the northeast that day, and I’ve always presumed that that worked in the hijackers’ favor. If it were IFR they could just have easily crashed the planes anywhere, but it would have been much more difficult to hit anything as small as a particular building, depending on how low the weather was.
I guess you would know more than me about flying conditions being unusual, but the weather was not unusual that day for the second week in September, at least not in New York City. the weather was practically identical for the next 4 years, actually.
They would quote the visibility at the ground-floor entrance to the WTC observation deck. Visibility of 60-90 miles was hardly unusual in the fall, from the top of 2 WTC. Or as I used to say, “On a clear day you can see forever… or at least as far as New Paltz.”