coordinate such an operation are all just an exhibition of what I call the "GSP Syndrome" -- the Generic Smart Person Syndrome. The GSP thinks about it for a minute and thinks: hey, wait: isn't this _hard_ to do? What do I know about it? I can Google some things, I know how to read, I know how to form an opinion, I know how to attack things from logical standpoints, I know a contradiction when I see it ... and soon they have a whole 'theory' about what did and what didn't happen.
[WS:] I am basically on the same page where you are on this, but I do not think this phenomenon has anything with being smart or even a smart aleck. This is related to a very common tendency that my former professor at Rutgers Eviatar Zerubavel calls "cognitive splitting" - and its opposition "cognitive lumping." The basic idea here is that people tend to perceive things that are supposed to belong to different classes as being more different than they actually are, and things that are supposed to belong to the same classes as more similar than they actually are.
In this particular case, cognitive splitting occurs between perceptions of the attackers' skills and abilities and the difficulty to fly commercial jets. The enemies are often being perceived as dumber than they actually are - quite a common perception indeed. Operating a complex machinery is often perceived as more intellectually demanding than it actually is - a result of a common confusion between the skill required to build a machine and the skill required to operate it. It seems that learning to fly jets is not as difficult as many think. After all, there hundreds of thousands if not millions of pilots around the world.
Wojtek