More thoughts

My father was a soldier. My mother grew up in the middle of the war. Her father was involved with the resistance in Belgium. I've been (however briefly) a soldier. I am struck how little the people around me know about millitary tactics.

Coordinating the not-so-simultaneous hijacking of several planes, particularly if the hijackers are expendable and the planes being hijacked are domestic flights, is not such a huge undertaking. The toughest part of flying an airplane is the take-off and landing, and in this case neither one is an issue. Everything else one would need to know to steer the jet could be practiced with Microsoft flight sim and one of the more expensive "realistic" flight control outfits you can get for the game... the New York landscape has included the World Trade Center since version 1.

Hijacking the planes is relatively simple. That goes on all the time. The coordination wasn't particularly precise - the half hour gap between the crashes isn't what I would call split-second timing. The only trick in the coordination is getting all the planes to their targets before anyone realises it is a deliberate attack. My guess is that the crash in Pittsburgh was a failed hijacking that was part of the same plan. Any one of the targets would have been sufficient from the point of view of the terrorists, selecting multiple targets with relatively close timing simply ensures success.

Using commerical airliners for the attack is, again simply a matter of the tiniest bit of historical knowledge, simple planning, and a few martyrs. Just look the damage inflicted by Japanese Kamakazes and you have the basic concept illustrated. Bigger plane, bigger bomb. Again nothing magical or brilliant about it.

There are several ways the infrastructure of Manhattan is horribly vulnerable, as are the infrastructures of most North American cities.

The method of attack was also pretty much the perfect way to take the towers down. The bombing in 1993 failed miserably because the bomber used the wrong approach. Most skyscrapers are built with a load supporting centre columns and the floors are cantilevered around this. In that situation a bomb in an elevator shaft (like in the Matrix) is a good way to bring the building down. The 1993 bomber set off his bomb in the parkade near the centre of the building. The epic stupidity of this is that the WTC had load bearing walls and wasn't dependent on the central core for anything other than building services. This was done to increase usable space in the towers and is well known to anyone with even a passing interest in achitecture.

The "stripes" on the sides of the building were the load bearing columns and the floors in the building were stressed to hold the columns together, basically a system of internal buttressing. Crashing the planes in and causing those load bearing floors to collapse inward and take out the floors below caused the buildings to implode as illustrated in this sequence.

I've been accused on occasion of having a devious mind because I think about these things. But, this is how I deal with things. Rationalize, explain, and spew facts. It calms me down.

Oringinal post: http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/104782.html