No, I'm thinking in terms of how SMALL the twin towers are in comparison with how much space an aircraft can traverse at 400+ MPH. The likelihood of missing the buildings by such a plane which was NOT set up for guided approach would be far far greater than the likelihood of deliberately hitting them. It would be sort of like 2 cars playing chicken on an abandoned 16 lane highway in total darkness- far more likely to miss each other than to collide. The only way to acheive the accuracy needed for this series of three successful strikes would take a lot more planning, technology and expertise than those turkey hi-jackers would have had available to them.

If the "official" version of events had said the hi-jackers were highly experienced Egyptian or Syrian Air Force fighter pilots, then I would have no quarrel- that would have made the story believable. But to say that it was executed by "pilots" who only had flight simulator training, and little if any experience at the controls of a real jumbo jet- I am, and will remain very skeptical.

Dave

Look at driving a car....do you look at whats 10 feet in front of the car as you drive or ar you looking 1-200 feet down the road....how about at 100 mph...the concept is the same. It would not be hard to hit a big landmark like that in the daytime. Now doing it at night then thats a whole different ballgame.

Oh, BS. They had enough flight training to program the onboard GPS and fly the plane to entered coordinates. There's a lot of sky up there and they had from Boston to NYC to line-up on the GPS points. The towers were about as wide as a landing strip and vertical.

Yes, but how well do a heavy airliners control surfaces normally respond to directional input when the plane is not slowed down for approach, with the added lift of full flaps? To fly into something by "line of sight" with no landing beacon at cruising speed would be very difficult I would think. Just the smallest margine of error a little to the left or right, and they would have missed their target, and probably have crashed into something else as the plane decended. I'm thinking too- that second plane made quite a spectacular "hook" into the building, banked at quite a steep angle. That was definately not line of sight flying. And then the Pentagon! The window of altitude available to them was only 4 story's high, was it not? How could any pilot other than one who is experienced in landing on the decks of Carriers possibly judge how high he needs to be on approach with such a limited vertical window? Overshooting or crashing the plane long before, would have been far more likely- but as we all know, the Pentagon was hit spot on, as were the other two targets in New York. How could anyone possibly explain this given the lack of experience by the pilots? GPS? Maybe- but if it can set altitude with such pin-point accuracy as this, wow!!! Sign me up! I often need help when driving through tunnels!

Dave

GPS Handhelds can give you +/- 10M altitude, sometimes better. 10M to a 500M tall building ain't much error. The onboard GPS is suffiently accurate to land an airplane.

I cannot speak to flying a large airplane at a specific point and hitting it. That calls for a pilot who flies them. Also, I can't speak to the difference between a flight simulator cockpit and flying an airplane. If the aircraft is already airborne how much difference is there between the simulation and flying it?

The Pentagon is 500M high?? Wouldn't it be more like 20M?

Well not having flown a huge plane....but having actually flown a low wing gruman once where I was the one at the controls...you do have yaw and pitch issue that change the attitude of the plane and eventually its direction but the easiest thing to do in an airplane is point and fly it to a visible landmark....it doesn't take very much knowledge to do that at all. And is very easy to do. as long as you know the rudder controls (feet). THe alieron and elevators are controled by the wheel or stick.

The Pentagon was a bit harder...having seen photos the plane actually hit the ground then slid a fairly short distance to hit the building...so it was not a direct strike...more like a richocet. BUt keep in mind these terrorists all had a lot more flight training than your average person.

And computer flight simulators do give you a lot of the basics....Now I am talking computer simulators...not the arcade games where you fly a plane.

Twin Towers, silly. But you probably suspected that's what I meant, since that's where this discussion originated. Are we now shifting to the Pentagon or are we going to back and forth and perhaps to a Pennsylvania farm, dancing among them like Jackie Chan in a kung fu movie?

... simply talking about 9-11 as a whole, and how such a bizarre attack on the United States could have been pulled off so successfully. To talk about the Towers is one part, to talk about the Pentagon is another- each with it's own set of problems that are difficult to explain away. I'm simply suggesting that I believe the GPS answer doesn't hold water when it comes to the Pentagon crash.

Dave

Flying a plane is easy.........taking off isn't nearly as easy........landing it safely is whats hard.

Okay, so let's be objective and start from the beginning and take them one at a time because they are separate problems and may or may not reflect a conspiracy and the conspiracy could be any number of cabals, all laid at the feet of Bin laden or it could have been Bin Laden.

1. Could hijackers, of whatever origin, comandeered an aircraft and flown it into the towers given only simulator cockpit training?

2. Is it possible to radio-control an airplane more accurately than a novice trainee could fly it?

3. How difficult would it be to plant explosives in the buildings, unnoticed by maintenace staff and security personnel, sufficient to bring them down?

1. I don't know since I've never flown a plane and never sat in a cockpit simulator and undergone flight training. However, plenty of folks have been on TV interviews that have said the simulator trainers are effective and could give a pilot sufficient training to ram a building. Now for that to be untrue, the news media must also be part of the conspiracy. Let's leave that for a moment.

2. I don't know.

3. I never visited those particular buildings so I don't know. A truck loaded with about a ton of explosives failed to bring it down the first try. So either it would take more explsoves or a different approach. The different approach would be using the means and methods of the building demolition engineers. They don't use much explosive. But they do a hell of a lot of prep like cutting support beams, running wiring throughout the structure, and setting shaped charges in carefully prepared locations. It would be difficult to conceal that kind of activity, wouldn't it?

My Company has 4 offices within 2 blocks of where the WTC stood......they were still in manhattan when they fell (the evacuation happened later.. There were no explosions after the planes hit. Many were out in the streets when this happened....if there was an explosion to bring it down everyone in manhattan not indoors would have heard it.