One of our military aircraft accidentally flew into the Empire State building during WW2, killing several people.
Flight accidents happen. Buildings do get hit by accident. It was the 2nd plane that confirmed that 9/11 was no accident.
One of our military aircraft accidentally flew into the Empire State building during WW2, killing several people.
Flight accidents happen. Buildings do get hit by accident. It was the 2nd plane that confirmed that 9/11 was no accident.
That was 55 or so years previous, and if I recall in rain/fog conditions. 9/11 was a large, modern commercial airliner on a clear sunny morning. The odds of this happening accidentally are astounding.
"One of our military aircraft accidentally flew into the Empire State building during WW2, killing several people."
Ummm, still not control failure.
Saturday morning, July 28th, 1945, found New York City bathed in a thick fog. Visibility on the ground was bad enough, but up in the air that morning was Lt. Colonel William Smith, piloting a B-25 bomber over the city toward Newark where he was to pick up his commanding officer. The fog he found himself in was more like soup. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, Smith wound up over Municipal Airport (which is now LaGuardia) and asked the tower for a weather report. The controller instructed Smith to land, but the pilot made a serious blunder by insisting for clearance to continue to Newark. Municipal reluctantly gave the clearance, but the controller, still hoping to convince Smith of the seriousness of the situation, tried one more time, saying these final words to Smith: "From where I'm sitting, I can't see the top of the Empire State Building."
Regulations in Manhattan require all aircraft to fly no lower than 2,000 feet. Smith committed another blunder when he dropped under 1,000 feet to get out of the thickest part of the fog and take a peek at the ground, hoping to get his bearings straight. What he found was a forest of skyscrapers, the tops of which were all around him.
Skyscrapers do not get hit by accident by aircraft in clear weather. The pilot has too much control over the variables, and the odds of a Flight 800 type explosion or midair collision resulting in an impact on a skyscraper is not much greater than a meteor strike on a skyscraper.
True, but that was in the fog, not on a CAVU early fall day. Even if the autopilot (coupled to the INS or GPS system) went totally amok, the pilots would be able to disconnect it, in the extreme by pulling the circuit breaker. They wouldn't just let their aircraft fly into the WTC. The altitude was low enough that a pressurization failure would not have knocked them out, as has occurred at other times. For another thing, the terrorists had turned off the transponder beacon, but the ATC system was still tracking the aircraft via "skin return", if somewhat sporadically. They knew they had other aircraft with no transponder returns as well, even before the first aircraft hit the WTC.
It wasn't impossible that it was an accident, given only the weather and the fact of the aircraft hitting the building, but a deliberate act was much more likely, even before the second aircraft hit the tower.