A chap named Nila Sagadevan believes that flying a real-life plane is so complicated, there’s no way the buffoons of September 11 could possibly have managed it on the evidence presented.
This conjecture is a more plausible than it first sounds: although I’ve been on BA’s 767 simulator and flown a virtual plane through a ravine at low altitude, I didn’t fly to the ravine. This would have involved flying blind (you can’t make out landmarks other than sea vs not-sea when you’re 12,000 metres up) and therefore understanding complex aircraft-specific navigational equipment, which the hijackers aren’t reported to have studied and which takes years to understand properly.
One thing that New York and Washington DC have in common, however, is that they’re both situated on the sea-vs-not-sea transition that you can see. To get from somewhere north of NYC to NYC, you just need to go east, turn south when you run out of landsouth, and descend in a spiral once you reach Manhattan. Flying to Washington DC is more of a challenge, but the Potomac is still big enough to be seen from the sky – so you can fly south along the east coast until you’ve gone over Delaware, then turn round and follow the river northwest.
But at the very least, the report is good news for people who live in tall buildings in Chicago.
(side note – the writer also says “[Flight 77 pilot] Burlingame would have instantly rolled the plane on its back so that Hanjour would have broken his neck when he hit the floor”. I thought that domestic airliners tended to fall apart if you pulled that kind of stunt on them?)
