On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 12:22:42AM +0100, David Howe wrote:
Also, it's worth remembering that airplanes aren't all that easy to fly. This means that the perpetrators needed to find five adequate pilots, Hmm. not actually sure about this - not having ever flown anything at all, but how much skill exactly does it take to keep something already pointed in more or less the right direction on target for two-three minutes until impact? ok, you couldn't expect a clean landing or even a halfway-smooth flight path from someone who has played a MS-Windows flight sim for a few months, but - if he was going from switching off autopilot to keeping the plane pointed at something the size of the WTC....... I would imagine it would all be on the yoke too, no throttles or concerns about airspeed given you are not really going to care that much what speed or acceleration you have on impact...
Actually, according to the pretty pictures on ABC the flight path for one of the planes at least required a 45 degree turn, and involved a lot of accelleration/slowing, the slow replays also show some not-so-good flying skills, or perhaps a goodbye roll..
which in turn means that they needed to know *in advance* which kinds of planes they would be hijacking. While a lot of the pilot training could be done using Flight Simulator, you still need to know what to train for. ... or train for the two/three more common types, then pick a flight *on the day* that actually is flying that type of plane. book seats at the last minute (not a problem for domestic flights) or pre-book three or four different seats per attacker, and each picks a flight with the right sort of plane from the "pool" of available flights.
Just about every airline with a website displays the kind of plane you'll be in, months in advance. Matthew S. Hallacy