Re: Analysis from a JHU CS Prof

["David Howe" <DaveHowe () gmx co uk>]

> 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...
> 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.