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WTC pilots
Summary
Skeptical of the alleged hijackers' ability to hit the World Trade Center in the way they did, several commercial pilots tried it themselves on a flight simulator and said they couldn't do it on the first try. It took several tries, and these are guys who fly these kinds of jets all the time.
The difficulty goes beyond the high-speed maneuvering, especially the second plane, which flew down to about the Statue of Liberty and then did a very high-speed bank to the north to slam right into the South Tower. It also involves finding New York in the first place.
Aeronautical engineer and experienced pilot Nila Sagadevan notes that once reaching altitude after take-off "the pilot loses virtually all external visual reference cue" and unless he or she was an expert instrument-rated pilot, which none of the supposed hijackers were, the pilot "would have ZERO SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, i.e., the pilot wouldn’t have a clue where s/he was in relation to the earth."
Sagadevan stresses that at hijack altitude there's nothing outside the cockpit to provide any visual reference cues, making it highly implausible that these particular alleged hijackers could have instantly made a beeline for their targets in the way that was done. And in the case of the WTC pilots "their 'final approach' maneuvers at over 500 MPH are simply far too incredible to have been executed by pilots who could not solo basic training aircraft."
The difficulty goes beyond the high-speed maneuvering, especially the second plane, which flew down to about the Statue of Liberty and then did a very high-speed bank to the north to slam right into the South Tower. It also involves finding New York in the first place.
Aeronautical engineer and experienced pilot Nila Sagadevan notes that once reaching altitude after take-off "the pilot loses virtually all external visual reference cue" and unless he or she was an expert instrument-rated pilot, which none of the supposed hijackers were, the pilot "would have ZERO SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, i.e., the pilot wouldn’t have a clue where s/he was in relation to the earth."
Sagadevan stresses that at hijack altitude there's nothing outside the cockpit to provide any visual reference cues, making it highly implausible that these particular alleged hijackers could have instantly made a beeline for their targets in the way that was done. And in the case of the WTC pilots "their 'final approach' maneuvers at over 500 MPH are simply far too incredible to have been executed by pilots who could not solo basic training aircraft."
Source: pilotsfor911truth.org and Sagadevan's article is in various places, google him.
Analysis
They sure make it sound unlikely these guys could have even found the cities their targets were in, and it sounds at least somewhat suspicious to me. My uneducated instinct is, hey, I'm behind the wheel of the plane, surely the position of the sun lets me know east, west, north, and south, and I can follow coastline or the Hudson down to NYC. My outsized ego whispers to me, hey, there's the World Trade Center, just point straight at it and boom, job done. But experience has proven that I'm sometimes wrong when I talk about things I know nothing about. Therefore I am inclined to take the word of actual experts on such matters, and accept that it's probably harder — much harder — than you'd think. So yeah, it's suspicious. Only my layman status and a general effort towards conservatism has me holding back on stars here.
Bottom line, me, I give it:
Discussion
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People's Court
Quotes
"In reality, a clueless non-pilot would encounter almost insurmountable difficulties in attempting to navigate and fly a 200,000-lb airliner into a building located on the ground, 7 miles below and hundreds of miles away and out of sight, and in an unknown direction, while flying at over 500 MPH — and all this under extremely stressful circumstances."-- Nila Sagadevan, aeronautical engineer and a qualified pilot of heavy aircraft.
Currently showing comments 1 through 2 of 2 total comments.
1. tnt 11 Jan 2008 05:21:59 PM
With Alla on your side, all is possible.
Besides, why discuss if they could do it when they actually did do it? Somebody did it for sure. Maybe not the alleged perps, but somebody and that somebody would damn sure have to know how to fly the plane, but as long as they can keep it in the air, I agree they could hit the Trade Centers. They have windshields, don't they?
2. john 11 Jan 2008 09:22:13 PM
The hard thing for me is that the expertise required -- and that second plane hit at high speed while doing a steep-ass banking turn -- means you had not just some regular pilot, you had the best pilot in the world. And where do you find a guy with that talent who's also willing to kill himself? It can't have been these guys they say it was. No way. If it was a human pilot, it was somebody else, somebody with hundreds if not thousands of hours in the cockpit of a jumbo jet. And suicidal tendencies. Possible, I guess, but not the guys they said it was, which is damn fishy.
The other possibility of course is that it was done by remote control. Which sounds insane at first until you read over and over again about how possible it is with well-established technology. The technical capability is actually not disputed.
Kinda makes you go hmmmmm.....