Posted on 07/28/2015 9:18:05 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
I remember Mutual News...
When the first report came in on 9/11, I thought of this event. And thought the first crash was an accident.
Then came the report of the second.
Did they have Loose Change back then?
Not much damage; the building was concrete, and with much more fire protection (asbestos) than is allowed today.
Good thing it wasn’t made of steel. Fire melts steel don’cha know?
Hmm? Now imagine if the Japanese could have gotten some men in country to receive flight training in really big airplanes?
I thought about the B-25 incident on 9/11 as well but that was not the first event that came to mind. I recall the morning of 9/11 vividly.
I was in my youngest son’s bedroom helping get him ready for school when my wife came in and said “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.” The words out of my mouth were “What do those people have against those buildings?” My first thought was of the 1993 plot to blow up the World Trade Center by moslem terrorists.
I knew immediately what it was, and who was behind it. And when the second plane crashed, I was not only shocked and angered, but also marveled at the operation the terrorists had just pulled off. My response to the second plane was “You sons of bitches...”
One reason the AAC built most of it’s training bases in places like Nebraska was the number of days of clear weather, and because a crash would not likely occur over a heavily populated area. While the Empire State crash wasn’t a training flight, it proves the point. Of course the politicians who brought those investments back to their home states won big too. A few WWII training bases have been repurposed but most are derelict, with a few acres of concrete and the Norden bombsight storage building the most visible remains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_World_War_II_army_airfields
The Empire State Building is a steel skeleton clad in limestone.
You read my mind. I started reading about this and the story of the woman who was in the elevator. The plane cut the cables and the lady survived the fall and was in a body cast for more than a year.
A plane also once hit the similarly built Gulf Tower in Pittsburgh back in the day. Again, it barely made a dent.
I did too. Someone came into my office and said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and I immediately thought about this incident. I had no grasp of how bad it was at that point.
It was also mostly vacant until the 1950s.
Side bar story to the crash.
A Puerto Rican taxi cab driver was stopped at 34th St and Fifth Avenue, heard the crash. Thinking it was a bomb blast signaling the start of the revolution, jumped from his car and started firing his pistol into the air, all the while yelling, “VIVA LA REVOLUCION!”.
One of those strange historical facts that takes up permanent residence in the memory bank.
bump
That's just a guess though.
There is a huge difference between a WW2 era B-25 and a modern transcontinental Boeing 767 loaded with jet fuel.
Empty weight of B-25 — about 20,000 lbs.
Empty weight of a 767 — about 353,000 lbs.
20 times heavier.
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