In other words, if the airports hadn’t been shut down when they were, could there have been more attacks on different cities?
The four planes that crashed (2 in NYC, 1 at the Pentagon, and 1 in Penn headed for DC) are the only planes that we know of. No evidence has turned up for any other hijackers involved on that day or other planes.
The plan, as far as we know it, required close coordination and near-simultaneous takeoff times. The hijackers realized that it wouldn’t be long after the first hit, and even less time after the second, before the word got out and later plans would be foiled, which is exactly what happened in the Shanksville, PA crash. As it was, normal airport delays made their plans not quite as perfect as they had hoped, but in the confusion, it worked 75% anyway.
By the time the airports were being shut, if any aircraft wasn’t already hijacked, it wasn’t likely to be. The jig was up.
So it’s unlikely that additional flights were planned beyond the four we know about, although I do recall multiple, frenzied reports of such that turned out to be false. Chalk that up to panic and the fog of war.
I’ve always wondered if they didn’t plan their attacks for the first flights of the day to take advantage of the early-morning “grogginess” of human nature. Security would be less alert, air-traffic control might not have been as tight as it is later in the day, even the flight crews might have been suffering a case of the “Mondays” on the daybreak flights after a weekend off. Transcon crews don’t typically work over the weekend, I’ve been told, and are the more senior, relaxed, and routine-oriented crews second only to trans-oceanic crews.
There are transcon flights all day long, and if they waited until, say, 8am Pacific time and hijacked flights on both coasts they might have pulled off an East-West double whammy. Additionally, they would have caught the WTC buildings almost fully packed just prior to lunch-time breaks, rather than when people were still coming in to work and such.
Guess we’ll never know what their planning sessions were like, but thankfully they didn’t wait. Small comfort.
That’s a serious case of the Mondays if it extends into Tuesday.
Well you know what I mean… nobody is at their best first thing in the morning or this time of night.
But what would your targets be on the West Coast? There isn’t anything that iconic that Muslim crazies would recognize. Disneyland? The Golden Gate Bridge? Dodger Stadium?
Golden Gate. TransAmerica (!) tower. Space Needle in Seattle. Maybe LAX itself? Any given Los Angeles Freeway with it’s famous gridlock. Not to mention numerous Naval bases.
Just off the top of my head, of course.
The La Brea Tar Pits could use a good spanking. And speaking of pits, Hollywood qualifies.
I don’t believe any of the hijackers violated airport security rules when they boarded the aircraft. Boxcutters were not banned at the time. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe perfect security at the airports would have changed the result. What did change was by noon that day pilots all over the world learned not to surrender their aircraft. At that point the age of airline hijacking was (almost) entirely over. Crashing or blowing up aircraft continued, but taking control of aircraft stopped being an option as soon as pilots realized what was going on.
Space Needle would be a pretty challenging target.
I’d say Disneyland would be the number one on the West Coast, as far as terrorist motives would go-- the catch is if you hit Disneyland at 9:00 AM EST, it’d only be 6:00 AM PST and nobody would be there. So you’d have to do your east coast attacks later.
I assume they have good reasons for picking morning flights and not afternoon ones, which would mean the time zone issue would defeat any really devastating attack on the west coast.
That’s one of the most astounding things about 9/11, a day jam-packed with “astounding.” That in that short time window, a plane in flight and intended for harm got the message in time for action to be taken.
Even more astounding, it appears that the hijackers’ rush to the flight 93 cockpit was only a minute after the ATC’s warning, “beware of cockpit intrusion”, while the pilots were still trying to figure out what that meant, and were asking for confirmation. They obviously didn’t understand the importance of it. If only the warning had been a minute earlier and/or more intense, things might have been vastly different.
Anecdote: For a brief time, rumors swirled that the small Virginia town of Leesburg was the target of the rumored “4th plane.” (There is a major air-traffic control center located there). Without any clear reassurance from the national government, the news reporters cast around for some answer as to whether Leesburg had been hit yet.
Finally someone thought to call the local Sheriff. And thus it was that much of the nation listened breathlessly to the calm voice of the Loudoun County Sheriff, who flatly told us that the Leesburg center had NOT been hit and nothing much seemed to be happening.
Leesburg had NOT been targeted – the rumored 4th plane turned out to be Flight 93, which went down in Shanksville. But for a brief, absurd time, people thought maybe foreign terrorists had picked Leesburg as a vital target like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.