Did I misstate myself? (VERY VERY Long)

EdFred

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I was asked by someone to give my opinion on some idjit's blog about the gov't covering up 9/11. I was then told this was "shown to a commercial airline pilot and he laughed for half an hour" Did I make any statements that were completely out of line?

The blog author (who claims to be an aeronautical engineer and a commercial pilot of "heavy aircraft" comments in plain, my comments in bold.

And if the aim is to navigate to a specific geographic location hundreds of miles away while flying at over 500 mph, 30,000 feet above the ground the challenges become virtually impossible for an untrained pilot.And this, precisely, is what the four hijacker pilots who could not fly a Cessna around an airport are alleged to have accomplished in multi-ton, high-speed commercial jets on 9/11.

Ok, this first call out here pretty much tells me that the author has no clue what they are talking about. Why? When you start your private pilot training, the first thing you are told to do when you get lost or disoriented is to climb. That's right. Climb. Why? Because you can see more from higher up and it becomes EASIER to recognize landmarks and features. And lets face it, finding Manhattan or DC is pretty easy from 10 or 15 thousand feet. Point number two: The planes were not at 30,000 feet, nor were the planes "hundreds of miles away" from their locations. From KBOS to KLGA is 160nm. Flying the coastline or flying to the coastline is fairly easy. Finding NYC on the coast is going to be a pretty easy task.

In order to operate a modern flight simulator with any level of skill, one has to not only be a decent pilot to begin with, but also a skilled instrument-rated one to boot — and be thoroughly familiar with the actual aircraft type the simulator represents, since the cockpit layouts vary between aircraft.

The author here is being deliberately misleading. These simulators are full motion simulators and there is no need for an instrument rating. I talked with 2 pilots last night who have been in these simulators. One had never been in the simulator before, and he was able to land, circle and take off without any previous experience. Granted he does have some experience in single engine aircraft, but then he told me of someone else who was there. There was a student pilot who had just recently soloed (I soloed at 13 hours so you see the experience is not very much) and this student was easily able to navigate and even landed in the simulator with no issues. The instrument rating would only be necessary if the plane were in the clouds.

Rule #1: Never take your eyes off your instruments, because that’s all you have. If you can’t read the instruments in a quick, smooth, disciplined, scan, you’re as good as dead.

This is true, however there is no need to watch your instruments when you aren't in the clouds. Does the horizon look flat? Then you are not turning. Does the horizon appear to be straight in front of you? Then you are pretty close to level. One would not need an instrument rating to do this. If you can see, you can fly. Two weekends ago, I took my mother up flying with me. I had to get something out of the back of the plane, I told her to take the controls, something she had never done, and watch the horizon. Make sure it doesn't go up or down, and make sure it stays level. Well, I'm still writing this so she obviously didn't crash the plane. Oh, and when I turned around to take control of the plane, she was pretty close to where she started: Level and not turning.

Let me place this in the context of the 9/11 hijacker-pilots.These men were repeatedly deemed incompetent to solo a simple Cessna-172 — an elementary exercise that involves flying this little trainer once around the patch on a sunny day.A student’s first solo flight involves a simple circuit: take-off, followed by four gentle left turns ending with a landing back on the runway. This is as basic as flying can possibly get.Not one of the hijackers was deemed fit to perform this most elementary exercise by himself.

All of this is true, if you are planning to take off and land. Anyone can fly enroute with little or no training. We aren't talking precision flying here. If you see it in your windscreen and it's not moving up, down, left, or right relative to your view you will hit it.

Hijacker Hani Hanjour rises from his seat midway through the flight, viciously fights his way into the cockpit with his cohorts, overpowers Captain Charles F. Burlingame and First Officer DavidCharlebois, and somehow manages to toss them out of the cockpit (for starters, very difficult to achieve in a cramped environment without inadvertently impacting the yoke and thereby disengaging the autopilot).One would correctly presume that this would present considerable difficulties to a little guy with a box cutter—Burlingame was a tough, burly, ex-Vietnam F4 fighter jock who had flown over 100 combat missions. Every pilot who knows him says that rather than politely hand over the controls, Burlingame would have instantly rolled the plane on its back so that Hanjour would have broken his neck when he hit the floor.But let’s ignore this almost natural reaction expected of a fighter pilot and proceed with this charade.Nonetheless, imagine that Hanjour overpowers the flight deck crew, removes them from the cockpit and takes his position in the captain’s seat.

I can not really comment on this since I was not in the cockpit. Maybe he had just a box cutter, maybe he had more than a box cutter. Maybe the copilot got up to use the head. I am not about to speculate on what transpired in the cockpit, because I, and frankly neither does anyone else alive know exactly what happened.

Although weather reports state this was not the case, let’s say Hanjour was lucky enough to experience a perfect CAVU day (Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited).

Evidently the author needs a refresher course in reading METARS (Meteorological Aviation Reports) - and makes me question their credentials. Why? Here's the METARs for KBOS, KLGA, and KDCA on Sept 11,2001:
Boston Logan
METAR KBOS 111054Z 32008KT 10SM FEW250 18/14 A3005
METAR KBOS 111154Z 32008KT 10SM FEW250 19/14 A3006
METAR KBOS 111254Z 33009KT 10SM FEW250 21/13 A3006
METAR KBOS 111354Z 35010KT 10SM FEW250 23/13 A3007
METAR KBOS 111454Z 32014G18KT 10SM FEW250 25/12 A3005
METAR KBOS 111554Z 35015G19KT 10SM FEW250 26/11 A3004

What does this gibberish mean? I will break down the first line and you should be able to figure out the other lines.
METAR - type of report.
KBOS - Airport
111054Z - the first 2 digits is the day. The remaining 4 are the time in Zulu time. (all aviation times are coordinated to UTC time - which is basically GMT.) So, on the 11th at 1054Z (subtract 4 hours for EDT - makes it6:54am)
32008KT - This is the direction and speed of the surface winds. The winds were from a magnetic heading of 320 (270 is west and 360 is north) at a speed of 8knots.
10SM - this is the visibility in statute miles. It says 10, but that is the maximum that it will report. Last weekend South Bend was indicating 10SM, but I could see the Chicago Skyline from 70 miles away. Basically, when you see 10 it means at least 10.
FEW250 - this indicates the cloud cover and the base of the clouds in hundreds of feet. FEW indicates that the cloud coverage was between 1/8 and 2/8th sky cover and the base of the clouds were 25,000 feet.18/14 - this is the temperature and dew point in degrees Celsius.A3005 - This is the altimeter setting in inches of mercury. 30.05" (29.92" is a standard day)

New York LaGuardia
METAR KLGA 111051Z 33008KT 10SM FEW250 19/14 A3011
METAR KLGA 111151Z 32009KT 10SM FEW250 19/14 A3011
METAR KLGA 111251Z 32009KT 10SM FEW250 20/14 A3013
METAR KLGA 111351Z 34009KT 10SM FEW010 SCT250 22/13 A3013 RMK AO2 SLP204 FU FEW010 FU PLUME SW DRFTG SE T02220133

We see something interesting in remarks (RMK) section the last line at LaGuardia. The A02 indicates the monitoring equipment, and the SLP204 indicates sea level pressure in millibars (1204mb) but here we see FU FEW010. This means smoke at 1000 feet, Plume is southwest of LGA drifting to the southeast. The T02220133 gives exact temperature and dewpoint at the time. (22.2C and 13.3C respectively) Guess what the smoke was from. Look at the cloud height and coverage. Instrument rating needed? Hardly.

Ronald Reagan Washington National
METAR KDCA 111251Z 35005KT 10SM CLR 21/14 A3021
SPECI KDCA 111341Z 33010KT 10SM CLR 23/14 A3022
METAR KDCA 111351Z 34009KT 10SM CLR 23/14 A3023
METAR KDCA 111451Z 32008KT 4SM HZ CLR 24/14 A3022
METAR KDCA 111551Z 33009G15KT 7SM CLR 26/14 A3021

Now on to Washington DC's Reagan which sits only a mile from the Pentagon. Looks very similar to what it was in Boston and NYC except instead of FEW at 25,000 what do we see after 8:51am (1251Z). CLR - which means clear. So guess what? They did have a CAVU day to execute their plan!

If Hanjour looked straight ahead through the windshield, or off to his left at the ground, at best he would see, 35,000 feet -- 7 miles -- below him, a murky brownish-grey-green landscape, virtually devoid of surface detail, while the aircraft he was now piloting was moving along, almost imperceptibly and in eerie silence, at around 500 MPH (about 750 feet every second).In a real-world scenario - and given the reported weather conditions that day - he would likely have seen clouds below him completely obscuring the ground he was traversing.With this kind of “situational non-awareness” Hanjour might as well have been flying over Argentina, Russia, or Japan—he wouldn’t have had a clue as to where, precisely, he was.

Oh really? What clouds? The aviation reports indicate clear skies, and at worst 1/8 to 2/8 coverage at 25,000 feet. Anyone could have navigated that area without ever looking at the instrument panel.

After a few seconds at 750 ft/sec, Hanjour would figure out there’s little point in looking outside—there’s nothing there to give him any real visual cues.

Only if you are blind. I hear 737s and 767s call the field in sight from 20, 30, and 40 miles away and they are given a visual approach into the field. They fly by sight the rest of the way in. Speaking of clues, this author needs to get one.

For a man who had previously wrestled with little Cessnas, following freeways and railroad tracks (and always in the comforting presence of an instructor), this would have been a strange, eerily unsettling environment indeed.

Yes, I can see how something like this would be unsettling to someone as clueless as the author. Credentials, my ass.

Seeing nothing outside, Mr. Hanjour would be forced to divert his attention to his instrument panel, where he’d be faced with a bewildering array of instruments. He would then have to very quickly interpret his heading, ground track, altitude, and airspeed information on the displays before he could even figure out where in the world he was, much less where the Pentagon was located in relation to his position!After all, before he can crash into a target, he has to first find the target.

Do you remember me mentioning that DCA was only a mile from the Pentagon? The display panels on the airliners show nearby airports. All you have to do is make sure the airport you want is in the 12 o'clock position on the screen and go. Anyone on this message board could do it.

It is very difficult to explain this scenario, of an utter lack of ground reference, to non-pilots; but let it suffice to say that for these incompetent hijacker non-pilots to even consider grappling with such a daunting task would have been utterly overwhelming.They wouldn’t have known where to begin.

Well, I know where to stop, and it is at this point. At this point I have to call the author a complete idiot or a complete liar, or both. I have read the rest of what s/he wrote, but s/he has demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge of everything up to this point, that I am not even going to bother refuting the rest.
 
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Part II (VERY VERY Long)

I was asked to comment further on the following, even though I said I was done.

According to FAA radar controllers, “Flight 77” then suddenly pops up over Washington DC and executes an incredibly precise diving turn at a rate of 360 degrees/minute while descending at 3,500 ft/min, at the end of which “Hanjour” allegedly levels out at ground level.

Well, that's really not that big of an issue, at least from my perspective. A "standard rate turn" we use when instrument flying is 180 degrees per minute. If you have ever been on an airliner that has been in hold it is most likely using a standard rate turn. If you hold your bank angle it is going to look precise, and holding the bank angle is not very hard at all. Holding altitude AND bank angle becomes harder. But of course he wasn't holding altitude with the descent. I would estimate he was probably in a 60 degree bank for this maneuver.

Planes really do almost fly themselves, so this maneuver that looks very precise may have just been luck. What I mean is that when a plane is trimmed for a certain airspeed, whether it is 50kts or 500kts it will always try to fly at that airspeed. So if I add power it will start to climb to maintain that speed, but it will recapture the speed it is trimmed for. If I pull the power, or turn the plane at any airspeed it is set for without adding any elevator (pitch) authority it will lose altitude, and maintain the speed in which it was trimmed for. If I pull the power in my plane (or any plane) and leave it at that power setting it will maintain a constant rate of descent once established, whether it be 700fpm or 3500fpm. This precise manuever may just be a product of what happened, and was not due to any planning on the part of the pilot. If someone were to say "perform a double standard rate turn and a 3500fpm rate of descent," he may not have been able to achieve it while trying. Sort of like the formation of a snowflake. There is no design behind it, it's just the product of the process.

Oh, I almost forgot: he also had the presence of mind to turn off the transponder in the middle of this incredibly difficult maneuver - one of his instructors later commented the hapless fellow couldn’t have spelt the word if his life depended on it.

I was on my way back from Rochester, Indiana on Saturday, and I flew directly over the airport in Kalamazoo, MI. Generally when I fly over an airport with radar, it is off center, or one end of the field. In this case I flew right over the radar station. When I was over the radar station Kalamazoo approach told me they had lost radar contact for me, meaning they were not reporting my transponder, even though it was still on. They told me to report 5 miles NE of the field. At 3 miles NE of the field they reacquired my transponder signal. I don't know where he was in relation to DCA's radar, but this could have been a possibility since the Pentagon is very close to DCA. Even so turning off the transponder is the push of a button ot the turn of a knob depending on the model. No more diffcult than turning off the radio in your car.

The maneuver was in fact so precisely executed that the air traffic controllers at Dulles refused to believe the blip on their screen was a commercial airliner.
Danielle O’Brian, one of the air traffic controllers at Dulles who reported seeing the aircraft at 9:25 said, “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.”
As I said above what looked to be precise may have just been a product of the inputs.
And then, all of a sudden we have magic. Voila! Hanjour finds the Pentagon sitting squarely in his sights right before him.
But even that wasn’t good enough for this fanatic Muslim kamikaze pilot. You see, he found that his “missile” was heading towards one of the most densely populated wings of the Pentagon—and one occupied by top military brass, including the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld.
Presumably in order to save these men’s lives, he then executes a sweeping 270-degree turn and approaches the building from the opposite direction and aligns himself with the only wing of the Pentagon that was virtually uninhabited due to extensive renovations that were underway
(there were some 120 civilians construction workers in that wing who were killed; their work included blast-proofing the outside wall of that wing).

There were 5 sides for him to hit. 20% chance of picking and hitting any one of them. Perhaps since he was unable to see anything on the ground like the author earlier claimed due to the extensive cloud cover it was pure luck that he picked the least populated wing. :)

I shan’t get into the aerodynamic impossibility of flying a large commercial jetliner 20 feet above the ground at over 400 mph. A discussion on ground effect energy, tip vortex compression, downwash sheet reaction, wake turbulence, and jetblast effects are beyond the scope of this article (the 100,000-lb jetblast alone would have blown whole semi-trucks off the roads.) Let it suffice to say that it is physically impossible to fly a 200,000-lb airliner 20 feet above the ground at 400 mph.

I'm glad he "shan't" get into it, because all I see is lots of noise and big words here from the author to make himself sound smart, but he's not saying much. Wake turbulence is behind the plane, and occurs on every take off and landing. All of this stuff would affect OTHER planes flying behind it, but not the plane producing it, not to the effect he claims.

The author, a pilot and aeronautical engineer (of what? paper planes?), challenges any pilot in the world to do so in any large high-speed aircraft that has a relatively low wing-loading (such as a commercial jet). I.e., to fly the craft at 400 mph, 20 feet above ground in a flat trajectory over a distance of one mile. Why the stipulation of 20 feet and a mile?
There were several street light poles located up to a mile away from the Pentagon that were snapped-off by the incoming aircraft; this suggests a low, flat trajectory during the final pre-impact approach phase.

If it is impossible, then what clipped off all the light poles for the mile? Surely someone would have seen workers cutting the tops of all these light poles off. A missile wouldn't have cut off these poles. Of course, maybe it was all the big words that he previously used that snapped off the poles.
Do you notice my irritation with this author and sarcasm directed towards him? :)


Further, it is known that the craft impacted the Pentagon’s ground floor. For purposes of reference, if a 757 were placed on the ground on its engine nacelles, with its gear retracted as in flight profile, then its nose would be almost 20 above the ground!
Ergo, for the aircraft to impact the ground floor of the Pentagon, Hanjour would have needed to have flown in with the engines buried 10-feet deep in the Pentagon lawn. Some pilot.

I'd have to go back and look at everything to see how accurate this statement is. I am not familiar with the floor heights of the Pentagon, or where exactly the nose hit supposedly hit. But it is possible that he nosed over at the point of impact which would have raised the tail and wings momentarily, before impact.

At any rate, why is such ultra-low-level flight aerodynamically impossible? ecause the reactive force of the hugely powerful downwash sheet, coupled with the compressibility effects of the tip vortices, simply will not allow the aircraft to get any lower to the ground than approximately one half the distance of its wingspan—until speed is drastically reduced, which, of course, is what happens during normal landings.

Blah, blah, blah. More noise with big words. It is entirely possible. If this premise was case I would not be able to fly my plane at 15 feet off the ground (which I've flown at 5 feet off the ground for distances of more than one mile - well, tecnically it was across a frozen bay) What he is talking about is ground effect, and in non-scientific terms basically allows the plane to fly slower than it normally would, due to a cushion of air. You can most certainly fly in ground effect and higher speeds, it is done all the time.

In other words, if this were a Boeing 757 as reported, the plane could not have been flown below about 60 feet above ground at 400 mph. (Such a maneuver is entirely within the performance envelope of aircraft with high wing-loadings, such as ground-attack fighters, the B1-B bomber, and Cruise missiles—and the Global Hawk.)

High wing loading has nothing to do with being able to fly in ground effect. It has to do with maneuverability. A 757 has a high wing loading. So if it is within the envelope of other high wing loaded craft, it certainly stands to reason that it would for a 757. For an aeronautical engineer, he certainly confuses the facts.

The very same navigational challenges mentioned above would have faced the pilots who flew the two 767s into the Twin Towers, in that they, too, would have had to have first found their targets. Again, these chaps, too, miraculously found themselves spot on course.

Not really. I already showed in the first post the weather and visibility were great that day, and Manhattan isn't exactly difficult to find. Look for the tall buildings and put them in your windscreen.

And again, their final approach maneuvers at over 500 mph are simply far too incredible to have been executed by pilots who could not solo basic training aircraft.

There was nothing that seemed overly difficult about putting a big prominent building in the windscreen and flying it until that's all you could see. The only difficult part about flying a plane is the landing, and instrument flying, neither of which were a factor on these flights.
 
Ed, why are you even concerned about what this evidently whacko person thinks?

You can't convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong - they just think you're in on it.
 
You may rest your case.

Interesting thing about many commercial (airline in particular) pilots I've talked with over the years is how difficult the flying is when they're young and middle age. Then, after they retire or otherwise get out of it and with no reputation to inflate, how easy and downright boring it was!

But this self proclaimed commercial pilot, this dude is simply at the very best, quite profoundly ignorant of many significant details of flight, WX, and the system.
 
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I just wanted to make sure I wasn't mistaken in what I said. The person that asked me about it had come across the blog and asked my opinion. I did not repsond directly to the blogger - even I know that is a lost cause.
 
Ed:
There are an aweful lot of self appointed experts out there that know NOTHING. Go to any city council meeting and if you weren't sure someone didn't know what they were doing before you arrived, all doubt will be quickly erased when they pontificate!!

Stay were the people are at least known quantities. I've had people argue with me about the stopping power of a .45 (I have shot the heck out of that weapon, carried one for years, and did a staff study for the Infantry School on them--interviewed several combat officers that shot folks with them).
The other party, well had shot one and read a lot, but had no lack of strongly voiced opinions--it's a free country ya know!!

Come on Ed, you're to good to be sucked into this. Shut that door!! I couldn't even finish the post. Life is too short! (and I've been short all my life!)

Dave
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Ed:
There are an aweful lot of self appointed experts out there that know NOTHING. Go to any city council meeting and if you weren't sure someone didn't know what they were doing before you arrived, all doubt will be quickly erased when they pontificate!!

Stay were the people are at least known quantities. I've had people argue with me about the stopping power of a .45 (I have shot the heck out of that weapon, carried one for years, and did a staff study for the Infantry School on them--interviewed several combat officers that shot folks with them).
The other party, well had shot one and read a lot, but had no lack of strongly voiced opinions--it's a free country ya know!!

Come on Ed, you're to good to be sucked into this. Shut that door!! I couldn't even finish the post. Life is too short! (and I've been short all my life!)

Dave
Smile, Ed. :yes:
 
Reputation points: I meant to give Ed some green stuff and it turned up red. How do I undo that?

Dave
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Come on Ed, you're to good to be sucked into this. Shut that door!! I couldn't even finish the post. Life is too short! (and I've been short all my life!)
Dave
ditto ... never wrestle with a pig. You get muddy and the pig enjoys it. I couldn't finish all of the second post, either.
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Reputation points: I meant to give Ed some green stuff and it turned up red. How do I undo that?

Dave
You can't, but we can, and I have.
 
Ed, now there's a reason for you to get your comm. Think of it as an impressive credential for when you ejudacate the masses. I was secretly hoping you'd get further into discussing ground effect. :)
 
Thanks guys. I was just trying to educate and persuade. I have a hard time backing down from a challenge. Maybe I am ready to get that CFI, eh?
 
N2212R said:
Thanks guys. I was just trying to educate and persuade. I have a hard time backing down from a challenge. Maybe I am ready to get that CFI, eh?
The first step is admitting it.
 
ED,
Just leave poor ole Charlie Sheen alone. He has had a hard life of privelage, drug abuse, and money. :rofl::rofl:

BTW Kennedy was killed by the US government
 
N2212R said:
Point number two: The planes were not at 30,000 feet, nor were the planes "hundreds of miles away" from their locations. From KBOS to KLGA is 160nm. Flying the coastline or flying to the coastline is fairly easy. Finding NYC on the coast is going to be a pretty easy task.

Ed,

That's the only thing I could find wrong with what you posted. The planes were headed for the west coast and were well on their way, near Cleveland, before they were turned around and headed for NY.

However, they supposedly had handheld GPS units purchased from Sporty's, and regardless of whether that's true they would have just had to pick a roughly easterly heading and find the shoreline and proceed from there.
 
The problem with these arguments is there's always one more non-fact they can throw at you for you to disprove. You cannot disprove a negative.

Prove that Sam's dog isn't talking to him.
 
Just goes to show how innacurate some of the stuff out there can be. I am curious to know if this person really thinks they're right or are they trying to mislead. ;)

Further, the overpowering of the crew is interesting. I'm interested in what the standard operating procedure was for hijacking prior to 9/11. It seems to me that people don't just sit quiet anymore and let the crazy guys do their stuff, whereas before you'd land and they'd be dealt with then. (could be wrong though)
 
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Sometimes the most simple explanation is really the right one. I think that the conspiracy theorists have too much timeo n their hands sometimes.

Why can't the worst case scenario be that a group of men had so much hate in their hearts that they stole an airliner and flew it into a civilian target thereby killing a bunch of people. That really is 'bad enough'.....

--Matt
 
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