I Want To Talk About 911 [September 11 Attacks - 9/11]

@DownTheStreet The fact that they burned for an hour before collapsing, when other buildings have burned for over day, but still stand? The third building was just office fires. All the buildings were built to withstand numerous hits by aircraft.

Ok, so what about the Pentagon? 61 CCTV cameras, and the only shot they can produce is of a missile hitting the building? No plane parts on the lawn outside?

Give me strength!!! 🙄

Interestingly, I had one friend who watched both planes hammer the towers - and nothing else. And another friend in the pentagon at the time. I believe their narratives. And yeah there is CCTV of the plane impacting the pentagon @KatyB

@DownTheStreet Its never been published. How about drones? Don't you think the army have the technology? If you seriously believe this BS narrative, then there really is no help for you's!!

@DownTheStreet I saw the second plane hit, I saw the buildings pancake down because of the specific design used, with only exterior support.

Over the last years there has been not the slightest shred of serious evidence to refute the findings of the 911 committee report.

@samueltyler2 OMG!! Wrong on two counts - firstly do you know the structure of the buildings? NIST's own report shows an internal AND external steel structure, using a serious amount of steel! And secondly you have rewritten the laws of physics!! For every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. Even if it did 'pancake', 40 floors (say) could only destroy the next 40 floors before it itself would be totally destroyed!!!

No wonder this world is in such a mess when you people just accept such blatant rubbish!!!

This is a picture of the structure, just for your info

@KatyB

[quote]40 floors (say) could only destroy the next 40 floors before it itself would be totally destroyed!!![/quote]

I think you're wrong there. Inertia and all that.

@Pikachu 40 floors couldn't destroy twice as much as itself. People are looking to fit an argument around the narrative. Give it up and consider the fact you've been lied to! Do you believe a 'hijackers' passport was found in pristine condition in the ground, in the rubble, too?

The dictionary definition of inertia is "lack of activity or interest, or unwillingness to make an effort to do anything". Sounds like people who have swallowed the narrative to me!

@KatyB While I don't have a question about the aircraft being able to bring down the towers, I have a hundred other questions.

One big question is that I don't believe amateur, or even mildly experienced pilots could have pulled it off. And certainly not with just simulator experience or just a "little" flight time in those aircraft types.

Landing on a runway is a lot different from trying to hit a spot. In a runway landing there are all kinds of aids, glide slope lights, glide-slope indicators, ground radar, etc., and the runway is marked with big bright lines. There are marker beacons, approach lights. etc., etc. All to help the pilots avoid misinterpreting what what they see with their eyes or feel with their bodies.

There was none of that for the hijackers trying to fly into buildings.

@KatyB Another part that I was never abe to accept is that per the released news stories, none of the airplanes hijacked were carrying deadheading crew members or commuting crew members.

If I had to make an educated guess, 35% of cockpit crew members and 20% of cabin crew are distant commuters. Additionally, airlines routinely send crew members as passengers to cover other flights.

The odds of 4 flights with none of the above seems statistically remote, and would suggest the likelihood of insider participants.

@Heartlander you are repeating the words of so many conspiracy theorists with no proof. From the sources that I spoke to, one of our friends was allegedly the first passenger to die on the plane that was brought down in PA, the evidence is clear that there events happened as reported in the final report. I am told by experienced pilots, that once a plane is in the air, there is really very little involved in flying it and it wouldn't take much to hit the towers after a few hours of simulator flu=ying and some flying time. Remember they did take flying lessons. There should have been a hint when they took lessons and were not interested in learning take off or landings.

I am not saying that a coverup is impossible, but over the past years, no one has been able to disclose any concrete evidence to support it. As things go, it would be strange for someone not to have leaked something by now.

@samueltyler2 My reference to the difficulty is from my own experience. I years ago did the assortment of flying that would be required to pull this off.

While knowing what switches to push can make flying via autopilot "handsfree" there are no ILS transmitter to guide the plane into buildings. No VASI lights to visually help the pilot hit the exact spots. No marker beacons, etc.

To put it in perspective, what they did would be more closely compared to landing on an aircraft carrier, or making a ground extraction or LAPES drop, or a military style short-field landing. But even these things require the involvement of people other than the pilots, and require special training and practice.

That they weren't interested in landings implies that they didn't know what they were doing. To hit the targets, they would have had to establish a descending path that led to the targets and know how to make the plane fly that path. Learning to put an airplane on the first thousand feed of the runway without hitting the runway lights is a good place to start learning that.

Also if you look at attempts to crash into buildings, including the white house, they typically miss their intended target. The attempt in 94 to crash into the white house was to the left and short. That was typical inexperienced pilot behavior. The pilot was in the left seat; inexperienced pilots often land on the left side of the runway. Had he been flying from the right seat he'd probably have missed it to the right.

@HeartlanderI hardly think that your experience in trying to learn how to fly a plane would rise to admissible in any investigation. You are one person, perhaps others would have learned the skills necessary better than you.

@samueltyler2

Possiby. We're all students to one extent or another.

I spent years as a military pilot instructor and would give my opinion a bit of authority on this.

Oh ... and for a period of a couple dozen years I probably read the details of every aircraft accident on earth, and knew people involved. And I really don't think the findings/conclusions are always accurate. Just look at what's happening over the 737 Max for a peek at the weight that special interest carries.

Without being framed by a runway environment and all the visual and electronic helpers, these were difficult hits, especially the one that hit the pentagon.

@Heartlander Perhaps with current day GPS accuracy, the chore may not be that difficult. If the terrorists knew how to run the autopilot and GPS, and knew the coordinates, wouldn't that have been easy to do?

@samueltyler2

I'm old enough to be about 2 plane generations behind time on avionics, and yes, as I understand GPS and inertial guidance have since been integrated into the flight control systems.

But I don't think, at their level, that they would have had difficulty finding the WTC and pentagon, with or without. That's easy enough to practice on a simulator. My disbelief is more on the final run. I would liken it to an attempt to make a carrier landing for the first time ever, without an instructor pilot. Or an assault/short runway landing without training.

I remember reading the cockpit voice recorder transcripts for the plane that crashed in PA. It read like cockpit chaos from beginning to end. We don't know about the others but I assume that it was probably chaos there also.

Add to the mysteries is that no-one has yet come up with an explanation of how the hijackers go into the cockpits.

@Heartlander I haven't personally heard the recordings, but our friends widow was told about the death of her husband from the recordings. He was riding in first class, his throat was slashed. There was chaos because the passengers learned of the events and were fighting the terrorists.

From what was published in the record, the terrorists had little to no problem gaining cockpit access with their weapon, boxcutters, they fought their way in with limited resistance. Before that event, the airlines taught crews about highjacking for profit and diversion, not to weaponize the plane. Confronted with threats tomtueir lives, they did not resist.

@samueltyler2 To some extent. Hijackings had turned more deadly over the later 1970, when they started murdering passengers and hostages. Until then it was mostly about someone wanting to go to Havana. Also a few major incidents, like the bomb at Laguardia (197?), and a few airplanes blown up in flight, all added to the need for greater and greater security.

I also worked for a dozen+ years for one of the major airlines, so I rode the curve, so to speak, as policies and procedures changed. Though I may have been gone from the business a bit before 9/11, there was considerable concern for cockpit security in my era. There were protocol exchanges between pilot-flt attendant before the door was unlocked. While I could accept some laxness, the idea that they gained access to all 4 is hard to follow.

While I can personally think of a a few ways that they could have gotten into the cockpit, they all required a bit insider awareness, and wouldn't be common knowledge. Also, as far as I understand, the takeovers had to have been so swift that the pilots didn't have time to do any of a number of things that would have alerted air traffic controllers. The awareness came slowly as center controllers got no responses from the pilots, and the planes were observed on radar to be deviating from their flight plans/clearances.

@Heartlander I was not in the airline business, but spent a great deal of time in medical forensics. You would be surprised how often health care providers failed to pick up on what to me was an obvious problem, sometimes actual murders and attempted murders, and delayed reporting or doing anything until it was way too late. I understand that the terrorists threatened to kill the passengers unless the flight crew cooperated, and in the case of our friend, did kill him.

@samueltyler2

I think the need to defer until it's too late is pretty universal.

Putting myself in those pilot shoes, I have trouble believing that they all would have unlocked the door based on threats to kill the passengers or cabin crew members. Just the threat of such and the pilots would have likely first have singled the air traffic controller, one way or another, that something very serious was up, and immediately initiated actions to land someplace, anyplace.

I don't know how the 767 cockpit doors then worked, but as I remember 707/727/737 from my generation, cockpit doors had keys, much like the front door on most houses. While they could be opened and closed from inside the cockpits, they could also be unlocked from the cabin side with a key.

Since there seems to be no reports about the pilots singling that the flight was in trouble, it would seem that both pilots were overwhelmed within one or two seconds after the terrorist gained entry to the cockpit.

I would imagine that forensic evidence would help answer many of such unknowns, but I have to also assume that the intense impact and heat destroyed much of the evidence. Enumerating the possibilities isn't the same as manufacturing conspiracy theories. One possibility is that the terrorist had keys to the cockpits.

@Heartlander I remember that when travelling with our kids, they were often invited into the cockpit, even during a flight. I do not recall any keys ever being used to open the door, if there was any form of lock, it would have been like a bolt lock inside the door, but I doubt that as well. I also don't remember having a crew member sit in the cockpit when a member of the crew left and a crew member standing at the cockpit door during that time. I think things were very lax before 911. No one imagine such a scenario from happening. I was part of an anti-terrorism planning team after the first attempt on the trade center and before 911. They broke us up into small groups to plan on ways to harden any targets. The first thing the group was supposed to do was to pick a target. I convinced my group to choose the trade center in the opinion that, if I were a terrorist, i'd want to show everyone that even if I failed the first time, I would retry and succeed the next time. Everyone laughed and thought it funny. Of course, my opinion was somewhat based on the fact that the drawing on the cover of he manual for the meeting was a drawing of both towers with a gunsight over them! After 911 several of the people in my group emailed to ask if any black SUVs were parked outside of my home!

Thanks for hearting my drawings.

@samueltyler2 Cockpit arrangements went through a bit of transitions over the years. Except for the older DC9s and 737s, most arrangements were for a 3 man crew with one or two additional jump seats. Though the 737 was designed for a 2 man crew, some airlines continued to fly a 3rd flight-officer in the jump seat. So basically, the cockpit door knob was within reach of the 3rd flight deck officer, and in-flight, he/she handled the door which was kept locked in flight.

I'm thinking very early '70s or late '60s saw the end of passenger visits to the cockpit during flight. Then there was a sequence of regulation changes that restricted flight deck access and restricted flight officers from leaving their station.

Other than in-flight, though, on longer ground delays it was routine to open the cockpit doors and invite people to visit. It was a nice way to share with the passengers that the crew was helpless to do anything about weather or traffic delays. The longest I remember was like a 6 hour delay between push-back and take-off. It was one of the Air Traffic Controllers wildcat job actions. People were pissed and a "we're all in this together" posture probably prevented a mutiny.

The cockpit key wasn't a routine way to gain access to the cockpit, and only the pilots used it, or even knew about it. If the flight engineer left his/her station to get coffee or use the restroom, he'd/she'd lock the door behind him/her, get the coffee and use the key to regain entrance to the cockpit. The doorknob was beyond reach of the pilot and copilot. One key fit all the locks in the fleet, so it was common to just put the key on your keychain.

I think that Lufthansa suicide flight of a few years ago made a good case for the complexity of hardening the cockpit doors.

The other suicide flight, Air Egypt 990, I believe was a 767, and supposedly the captain was able to reenter the cockpit and fight with the relief officer. Too late, sadly. But that he got back into the cockpit suggests alternative ways to gain entry on 767s without being opened from inside the cockpit.

All the regulations about filling the cockpit seats or posting a guard at the door if one of the pilots had to go to the restroom came after 9/11.

A lot of the lax procedures leading up to 9/11 came with the crew reduction from 3 to 2. While the automation of systems may have made many of the flight engineer's duties unnecessary, there was a lot more to his/her role than managing/monitoring systems. An important role was that the flight engineer was also like the buffer between the two pilots in the seats and everything else. The buffer between the pilots flying and the cabin crew, the buffer between the two pilots and the company business, the crew member that coordinated with maintenance. In the cockpit, to even get to the pilots flying, you have to first climb over the flight engineer. But then, since the flight engineer didn't have to always look out the front windows, he/she could open the cockpit door face on.