rs
Dagobah Resident
One of the little bits that has not received enough attention IMHO is the specific details of how the aircraft that struck the south tower managed to do so.
If you recall from the endlessly played videos of the south tower hit, the plane was heading south along the Hudson River and made a sharp left hand turn to strike the tower just to the east of center.
The official story is that an inexperienced pilot had the throttle wide open and managed to get a commercial airliner to make a high G turn to score a direct hit on the tower.
This ignores a number of obvious issues:
1) While making this sharp left hand turn, the air speed would bleed off at a tremendous rate making both control over the turn as well as maintaining altitude difficult.
2) Without military experience, an inexperienced pilot would find the mechanics of piloting a plane under high G forces (such as must have been in play) to be at the very least a considerable distraction.
3) While initiating this turn, the pilot would have to bank at a sharp angle to hit an object that he most likely could not completely see, setting the bank angle at a precise enough value to guarantee tower intercept but not over-rotating and placing the plane into a tail spin. (If one recalls, the plane was nearly perpendicular throughout the trajectory and especially so at the point of intercept. An inexperienced pilot needed to be careful to not over-rotate that extra 10 or so degrees which would have placed this inexperienced pilot into a flight region he clearly was incompetent to handle.)
4) he had one and only one chance to get this right, so given his experience level and the confounding factors one can only conclude that striking the tower was actually random chance. What is the probability?
While none of these observations are new there is one little bit that bothered me when I saw it during the event as well as after. I have not read everything ever written about 9/11 but I do not recall any one pointing this particular factoid before. (Which doesn't mean they haven't, it means I am unaware of it.)
If you study the videos carefully, there is one angle of video where the camera is close to perpendicular to the south side of the south tower. This means that the vantage point gives an image where one is looking at the wings from their tail edge and the hull of the airplane is perpendicular to the plane of the image (more or less).
Watchingthis particular video in slow motion, at the last instant you can see the plane "jerk" just a few degrees (as I recall, it rotates even more perpendicular to the line of flight).
Now if you are piloting this plane and just instants away from receiving your 70 virgins from Mohammed and Allah himself, are you going to have the presence of mind to make an infinitesimal banking correction? Are you that focused on your job? Notice it is not that the bank angle starts to increase and increases without stopping until impact; it is that the bank angle slightly and abruptly changes. This would have required the subtlest of changes to the controls, under conditions of extreme stress and under high G forces.
What seems more likely is that the odds of intercept were greatly increased by having an auto-pilot make the turn and that last minute banking angle jog is the "smoking gun" that a machine was making the flight decisions, not a person. A machine that had no knowledge of the imminent impact nor did it lust after 70 virgins. It just "realized" that it was just a little east of the programmed trajectory and tried to make that last instant correction...
That little jog bothered me on that day and its bothered me ever since.
If you recall from the endlessly played videos of the south tower hit, the plane was heading south along the Hudson River and made a sharp left hand turn to strike the tower just to the east of center.
The official story is that an inexperienced pilot had the throttle wide open and managed to get a commercial airliner to make a high G turn to score a direct hit on the tower.
This ignores a number of obvious issues:
1) While making this sharp left hand turn, the air speed would bleed off at a tremendous rate making both control over the turn as well as maintaining altitude difficult.
2) Without military experience, an inexperienced pilot would find the mechanics of piloting a plane under high G forces (such as must have been in play) to be at the very least a considerable distraction.
3) While initiating this turn, the pilot would have to bank at a sharp angle to hit an object that he most likely could not completely see, setting the bank angle at a precise enough value to guarantee tower intercept but not over-rotating and placing the plane into a tail spin. (If one recalls, the plane was nearly perpendicular throughout the trajectory and especially so at the point of intercept. An inexperienced pilot needed to be careful to not over-rotate that extra 10 or so degrees which would have placed this inexperienced pilot into a flight region he clearly was incompetent to handle.)
4) he had one and only one chance to get this right, so given his experience level and the confounding factors one can only conclude that striking the tower was actually random chance. What is the probability?
While none of these observations are new there is one little bit that bothered me when I saw it during the event as well as after. I have not read everything ever written about 9/11 but I do not recall any one pointing this particular factoid before. (Which doesn't mean they haven't, it means I am unaware of it.)
If you study the videos carefully, there is one angle of video where the camera is close to perpendicular to the south side of the south tower. This means that the vantage point gives an image where one is looking at the wings from their tail edge and the hull of the airplane is perpendicular to the plane of the image (more or less).
Watchingthis particular video in slow motion, at the last instant you can see the plane "jerk" just a few degrees (as I recall, it rotates even more perpendicular to the line of flight).
Now if you are piloting this plane and just instants away from receiving your 70 virgins from Mohammed and Allah himself, are you going to have the presence of mind to make an infinitesimal banking correction? Are you that focused on your job? Notice it is not that the bank angle starts to increase and increases without stopping until impact; it is that the bank angle slightly and abruptly changes. This would have required the subtlest of changes to the controls, under conditions of extreme stress and under high G forces.
What seems more likely is that the odds of intercept were greatly increased by having an auto-pilot make the turn and that last minute banking angle jog is the "smoking gun" that a machine was making the flight decisions, not a person. A machine that had no knowledge of the imminent impact nor did it lust after 70 virgins. It just "realized" that it was just a little east of the programmed trajectory and tried to make that last instant correction...
That little jog bothered me on that day and its bothered me ever since.