My background in this subject is limited to ground school training in high school and a thankfully abandoned career interest in military and commercial flying.
Per the old joke: Flying is easy, it's landing (and taking off) that's hard. Once they were up and cruising, the tricky part was behind them. The controls work roughly the same in most aircraft, and barring mishap and bad weather, it's quite a reasonable scenario. And the pilots' trainers supposedly recalled that they displayed an inordinate interest in turning exercises over take-off and landing -- even experienced pilots are supposed to practise their touch-and-gos (briefly landing, then taking off, and repeating same).
As you suggest, navigation might be difficult. Then again, if you know what the flight's usual course is, and you know where you are when you take over, it's mostly a matter getting new heading. You could do it with a road map and hand compass. A large city, particularly Manhattan, is hard to miss from the ground, much less the air. It's hard to miss from NJ, right? ;-) Plus they'd have the coast to follow down. Granted that DC would be a bit harder.
This is what Salon's resident laid-off airliner pilot Patrick Smith had to say:
* The terrorist pilots lacked the skill and training to fly jetliners into their targets.
This is an extremely popular topic with respect to American 77. Skyjacker Hani Hanjour, a notoriously untalented flier who never piloted anything larger than a four-seater, seemed to pull off a remarkable series of aerobatic maneuvers before slamming into the Pentagon. The pilots of American 11 and United 175 also had spotty records. They should have had great difficulty navigating to New York City, and even greater difficulty hitting the twin towers squarely. To bolster their belief that the 19 skyjackers were Oswaldian pawns, the conspiracy-mongers invoke impressive-sounding jargon and fluffery about high-tech cockpits, occasionally trundling out testimony from pilots.
Reality: As I've explained in at least one prior column, Hani Hanjour's flying was hardly the show-quality demonstration often described. It was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation's capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with help from the 757's autopilot. Striking a stationary object -- even a large one like the Pentagon -- at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon's lawn.
It's true there's only a vestigial similarity between the cockpit of a light trainer and the flight deck of a Boeing. To put it mildly, the attackers, as private pilots, were completely out of their league. However, they were not setting out to perform single-engine missed approaches or Category 3 instrument landings with a failed hydraulic system. For good measure, at least two of the terrorist pilots had rented simulator time in jet aircraft, but striking the Pentagon, or navigating along the Hudson River to Manhattan on a cloudless morning, with the sole intention of steering head-on into a building, did not require a mastery of airmanship. The perpetrators had purchased manuals and videos describing the flight management systems of the 757/767, and as any desktop simulator enthusiast will tell you, elementary operation of the planes' navigational units and autopilots is chiefly an exercise in data programming. You can learn it at home. You won't be good, but you'll be good enough.
"They'd done their homework and they had what they needed," says a United Airlines pilot (name withheld on request), who has flown every model of Boeing from the 737 up. "Rudimentary knowledge and fearlessness."
"As everyone saw, their flying was sloppy and aggressive," says Michael (last name withheld), a pilot with several thousand hours in 757s and 767s. "Their skills and experience, or lack thereof, just weren't relevant."
"The hijackers required only the shallow understanding of the aircraft," agrees Ken Hertz, an airline pilot rated on the 757/767. "In much the same way that a person needn't be an experienced physician in order to perform CPR or set a broken bone."
That sentiment is echoed by Joe d'Eon, airline pilot and host of the "Fly With Me" podcast series. "It's the difference between a doctor and a butcher," says d'Eon.
at <http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/index.html>
... Tompkins writes of Hani Hanjour, alleged pilot of the 757 that struck the Pentagon:
"Hanjour had been deemed inept even in a small aircraft by flight school instructors in Arizona and Maryland and just weeks before the attacks. When the time came, however, he handled the doomed 757 like a fighter jet, swooping down and clipping light poles before T-boning the Pentagon at high speed."
I had to chuckle because Hanjour's show-quality aerobatics have been a topic of some conversation among the conspiracy set. In his essay "The Enemy Within," Gore Vidal quotes retired U.S. Army veteran and West Point professor Stan Goff, whose similar-sounding skepticism includes this:
"Now the real kicker: a pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddlejumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas ... brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460 knots."
"When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddlejumper school began to lose ground, it was added that [Hanjour] received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by buying her a video driving game."
No, it isn't. What it's saying is he needed some luck, and got it. As I wrote in a column several weeks ago, hitting a stationary target from above at high speed -- even a large one with five beckoning sides -- is very difficult. To make it easier, the hijacker did not come directly in at a steep angle, but "landed" into the building as obliquely as possible. If he had flown the same profile 10 times, half of them he'd probably have ended up a tumble of wreckage short of the target, or else would have overflown it entirely. You may or may not care to learn that I'm not exactly buying the party analysis of the 2001 attacks (where are those flight recorders, by the way, and what was on them?). But Vidal's and Tompkins' provocations are little more than caricature.
at <http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/col/smith/2003/08/01/askthepilot51/index1.html>
-- Andy