Anyone who knows the techniques of Controlled Demolition, Inc., the world's leading firm that uses explosives to drop buildings in their tracks, knows that the Towers were designed to take the hit of an airliner into them. They were not designed to take a fire of 2,000 degrees, caused by a full load of aviation fuel.
The floor supports of the building (just each floor, not the entire building) are rated to survive at about 1,500 degrees. Beyond that, the floor supports fail and the building pancakes down, from the point of failure, taking whatever is above it, with it, and crushing whatever is below it. I've followed the career of Controlled Demolition, based in my former hometown of tiny Towson, Maryland. These terrorists did crudely, using fully-loaded transcontinental jet liners, what Controlled Demolition does precisely, using just a few pounds of shaped charges, precisely placed and precisely targetted.
The designer of the Towers confirmed this. Like the designer of the Titanic, when he saw how extensive the fires were, he knew the Towers were doomed. The result of dropping the Towers was planned, not accidental. The death toll was relatively low compared to what it could have been, because the steel holding the floors at the point of the impacts lasted almost an hour. That's why so few of the casualties were civilians, and so many were the firemen who were in there to clear both buildings.
I wrote this up in my column posted during my honeymoon in Las Vegas. Click below. This was written entirely from memory (no interactive Internet access). It is also entirely accurate.
The (More er Less) Honorable Billybob,
cyberCongressman from Western Carolina
Click here for Billybob's latest, "The Engineering (and Law) of War."
I don't think the WTC builders had counted on the sort of hits they got. They were expecting an accidental (likely indirect) airplane hit, not the piledriver slams the buildings took. And of course, not with full gas tanks.
My theory is that the terrorist pilots were ahead of schedule, and were supposed to have hit at 9:30 or 10:00 a.m., when the buildings, mezzanine below them, and plaza around them would have been filled with upwards of 150,000 people. But they couldn't wait, because they knew that if they waited until then, they would be shot down.
That theory explains why other terrorist cells were stuck on the ground, in planes at Logan and JFK that were cancelled, due to the news of the WTC hits.
See also:
I am throughly convinced that there was some very sophisticated engineers behind the planning of this attack. I do think the terrorist did hit the buildings at the desired height and speed.
In closing I would to say our strikes of retribution will kill some innocents. I much prefer killing their innocents than they killing ours. The goverment or goverments that gave support to these terrorists must be elimintated (killed) so that any other country that considers supporting terrorists knows they will be destroyed if found out.