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Maybe he was. And landing at the wrong airport still means landing at one with the weight capacity to handle the aircraft. Taking off is another thing, but no matter how much practice, the meteorological conditions at the time of takeoff can change. The book don't lie. If it gets hot that day, you'll need a runway stretcher to get off the ground. And that's for a plane and runway surface that weren't abused getting it in there in the first place.

You can takeoff with a load of 110,000# at sea level in about 45-4700 feet, at max gross, it takes 11,000 feet.

Landing the plane with almost no fuel and figure 260 souls onboard at 150#/apiece, with no cargo, you'd need between 42-4300 feet.

So you can land it on a shorter field than you can takeoff from with a useful load. Depending on the length of this phantom field, the target area for this plane to be a 'cruise missile' drops way down. Don't forget that passenger jets have to be high to get their forecast mileage. Low level ingress means even a smaller radius for an attack. If it does go high, it will need to spoof the air traffic monitoring that is now not just sitting on its collective ass.

Not saying it did happen. Just that with a flight simulator in his HOUSE, this guy could have practiced landing (and takeoff) that heavy at any airport of his choosing without anyone being the wiser.

The air traffic control monitoring wasn’t listening for weirdness yesterday. They were thinking the plane had crashed.

Question, is there any ways a plane can spoof something it isn’t? Like pretending to be a lear jet when it’s really a 777, for the purposes of ident to air traffic control?