I’ve watched a few documentaries on Flight 93, the last plane that was apparently headed for the Capitol but crashed after a passenger revolt. A few things caught my eye on this about the hijackers.
After hijacking the aircraft, the hijackers did not all enter the cockpit. Unlike in Flight 11, Flight 175, (not sure about Flight 77). This was a really dumb move. They were already disadvantaged from having 4 hijackers on board due to the 5th being denied entry into the US. Why in Gods name would they expose themselves to the passengers knowing that their could be a revolt and their mission would fail?
Allowing passengers to make calls. If they were in the passenger cabins, you would think that they wouldn’t want communication to the ground. Doing this would alert the passengers of what was going on and a revolt would start.
Ziad Jarrah did not continue flying the plane. He was essentially at the controls of the cockpit. He could have thrown them off balance till it reached Washington. But he didn’t. He crashed the plane fearing passengers would overpower him.
It makes me question whether the whole thing was staged… Just food for thought
It was all staged. There’s absolutely no way the twin towers could’ve fallen just because some floors at the top were burning. And of course, there’s the the building next to the twin towers that fell WITHOUT being hit.
It was all staged. Spooked the hell out of most Americans, made them lose their sense of reasoning and got them believing that some guy in a cave could’ve pulled it off. If some guy living in an Afghan cave did that, then I can assure that they would’ve been more attacks on that scale immediately after the 9-11 attacks.
Why did they make so many mistakes? Well, be fair. They were complete beginners; none of them had ever attempted anything of the kind before. They were on a learning curve.
Allowing phone calls didn’t work out well, true, but had the mission succeeded it might have served to increase the shock value of the episode. As for trying to throw the passengers off balance, they did try that. Thing is, you can’t throw the plane wildly about in the sky and maintain a course for your target. It makes no sense to think they could have done it all the way to Washington.
Does this suggest the whole thing was staged? Don’t be insane. If this were staged, the other 9/11 hijackings must have been as well. They were carried through successfully; this was not. If for some unfathomable reason staging a hijack involved makingdeliberate errors to ensure that it did not reach it’s target, how come the others reached their target? Conspiracy theories have to have at least a veneer of rationality if they are to be any fun.
Pushing all the conspiracy theories aside, There was talk of conflict between Ziad Jarrah and Mohammad Atta. Apparently Atta got a vibe that he was not “disciplined” enough to carry out the attacks. He didn’t seem as serious as the other pilot hijackers.
There aren’t really that many ways to rehearse or improve upon a hijacking. You get one shot, and hijacking an aircraft moving at 475mph, with 50-100 passengers, a trained flight crew, and over monitored and policed airspace is probably not that easy to pull off even if you simulate that event tens or hundreds of times.
And yes, they were down a highjacker, but the passenger load was also unusually light that morning, with only 44 people total on board an airplane that could carry over 180. Based on what audio was picked up from the airplane (voice recorder, overheard on phone calls, etc.) they apparently stabbed at least one of the flight crew to prove they were serious and repeatedly told the passengers that they had a bomb. They may have felt a need to keep an eye on the passengers (turns out that was correct) rather than all retreating to the cockpit and ignoring them. If they ignored the passengers they could have revolted all the same, too.
The crowd control worked as long as the passengers believed they had some chance to live through the hijacking. Dangling “if you cooperate you live” in front of people can be a very effective way of maintaining control, particularly if there is bloody evidence that if you don’t cooperate you will die. Keep in mind, too, that until that day nearly all hijackers were interested in transportation to somewhere and cooperating passengers usually did survive. The cockpit flight recorder has the hijackers telling the passengers that they are returning to the airport, which implies a normal landing, not crashing into a building. Once the passengers realized they were in fact going to die in a poor man’s cruise missile they no longer had anything to lose and that is when they revolted.
The initial three impacts all occurred relatively close to each other, and all three of those hijackings happened about 30 minutes after take off, basically just after the airplane reached cruise altitude. In those three cases the passengers being allowed to make calls wouldn’t make a difference. Flight 93’s take off was delayed by 46 minutes, so it may be the Flight 93 guys were following the same planned timeline, but with a significant delay that they may or may not have been aware of or thought about. If Flight 93 had taken off on time they might have impacted their planned target around the time the Pentagon was hit, and the fact this was suicide terrorism would not have made it to the news yet, to be relayed to the passengers in the air.
If Flight 93 had left the ground on time passenger phone calls would have made no difference, as they did not for the other planes which likewise had passengers calling the ground. It was that 45-60 minute delay in starting the hijacking that made the difference, and the Flight 93 hijackers may have been unaware of what the passengers were being told, or not considered that the delay in beginning their hijacking made a difference regarding passengers communicating with other people.
Er… and you know this how?
All that is definitely known is that someone had the yoke pulled hard right and pushed downward for the airplane’s final maneuver, with someone in the cockpit yelling “give to me” over and over. That could have been one person deliberately crashing the airplane, or it could have been two people struggling over the yoke. Who had their hands on the controls? We don’t know. We will never know. It could have been the hijackers… or it could have been a passenger deciding that it was better to crash in a field than hit the intended target, whatever it was… or it could have been the end result of a fight over the controls.
As a matter of fact, the pilot at the controls did, in fact, roll and pitch the airplane more than once, presumably to knock people off their feet and/or disorient the passengers. The problem is that that would also knock the hijackers off their feet and disorient them. The pilot would have had to keep that up for 20 minutes in order to reach Washington, DC and doing so while also maintaining course and not crashing the airplane may not have been within his abilities.
Look, there’s a perfectly good “conspiracy theory” that fits the facts: 19 people under the direction of Osama bin Laden hijacked four airplanes and deliberately crashed three of them them into three buildings and the fourth wound up in a field in Pennsylvania. Why people have to make up other shit I don’t know.
Ah, Poe’s Law.
That being said, I’ve always thought it odd that Atta chose to strike the North Tower at such a high point. It would seemingly make more sense to hit at a lower level - the 2nd airplane did.
You imply that it was merely a bit of fire and everything should have been fine. That’s just plain not the case. Having a plane smash into the building at top speed did a lot of structural damage, including damaging the insulation and weakening the central support pillar, which, along with the heat from the flames, eventually buckled - and once the 57th-110th floors fall onto the 56th floor, that floor’s going to fall onto the 55th floor, and so on.
Of course, even if the buildings hadn’t collapsed, they still would have been permanently compromised and unsalvageable - they’d have to be condemned and deconstructed anyway.
You mean the building that was pelted with large chunks of debris from said towers and was on fire for 12 hours with no attempts at fighting the fire?
Assuming it was staged, don’t you think “they” could have come up with a more internally consistent story?
Well of course it was staged. It was staged by Al Qaida operatives under the direction of Osama bin Laden. They staged it by hijacking airliners and flying them into buildings to cause extreme structural damage.
Personally, I think anyone discussing the issue should be required to establish their stupidity threshold, i.e. what level of stupidity are they prepared to tolerate. Thinking Tower 7 was destroyed on purpose by the Port Authority (or any other state or federal agency) is, for example, pretty firmly stupid.
Yes, it’s clear that the whole point of staging 9-11 was to destroy Building 7. All a smokescreen my friends.
This is the dumbest part of it all. If you’re the Illuminati and there’s something embarrassing about Building 7, you just hire a moving company to pack all those alien bodies and gold bars into trucks, and you move it all to your new base in North Dakota.
It turns out that there really are powerful people who control the country. These people operate in plain sight and while you might not know their names you could easily learn about them by reading the Wall Street Journal and suchlike. When they want to dispose of alien body parts and perpetual motion machines they don’t crash airplanes into nearby buildings, they pull up trucks with bright and cheery corporate livery painted on the sides and unload all that shit.
Adding to Broomstick’s excellent post, you’re saying this as if he crashed the plane intentionally because of some remote suspicion that the passengers might overpower him.
While we don’t know the exact details of what went on in the cockpit, it was clear from the voice recorder that the passengers were in the process of overpowering the hijackers. Whether it was an unintentional crash due to fighting over the controls, or Jarrah intentionally crashed it because he could see that the primary mission had failed, both of those are completely plausible without any conspiracy nonsense of the Illuminati staging the crash.
