North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Analysis from a JHU CS Prof
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
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