<div>On 8/21/06, ravi <<a href="mailto:gadfly@exitleft.org">gadfly@exitleft.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I have a question for those of you who dismiss doubts about the accepted notion of events on 9/11. I am hoping you will help me figure this out: how is it that a bunch of guys who don't seem to be all that bright and well-trained, managed to fly large, sophisticated planes into towers, getting it right not once, but twice? What am I missing? Are these planes easier to fly than I think? Is navigating your way in three dimensions to a place that you cannot even see, easier than I think? I am not being facetious here. I do not much believe in the alternate theories of 9/11. But I am curious about why the simplest (and most plausible) explanation has giant holes (at least for me).         --ravi </blockquote><div> Ravi, It would be best to ask a pilot.  I once asked my brother-in-law (who used to fly and train pilots for TWA) some of these questions and he said that the hardest thing to do with a jet is land and take-off.  The problem of finding one's way from Boston to New York, without a good navigator, is the problem of finding the Hudson River and following it down to Manhattan.  It is also the problem of turning the jet, keeping up speed and flying low.  As long as you can do all of these things anyone can find their way to New York.  This is the way pilots used to navigate.  The biggest problem after that is making a u-turn and straightening out the plane as the 9/11 pilots seem to have done.  If you can do that then you can aim the jet at a building the way you can aim a car at a lamp post.  In other words, I am told, if you can make the u-turn then aiming a jet at a big building is not the hard part but actually getting low enough without getting too low that you crash.   But let me emphasize -- I don't know for sure, and neither does anyone else.  What the hijackers on those jets did and when they did it is largely speculation and anyone who tells you otherwise is pretending to knowledge where there is none.  In what the 9/11 conspiracy narrativists call the "official story," there is often this pretense to knowledge.  In other words the conpiracy story-tellers and the powers that be often assume knowledge where all that we have are relatively better and worse guesses.  As far as I am concerned people such as Rumsfeld have every reason to puff themselves up and lie through their teeth about what great and brave men they were during 9/11.  But on the whole, what seems most likely, from all of the evidence I have seen, is that the planes were hijacked and the hijackers flew the planes into the towers.  The reason I bring this up is to point out, that just because I think that most of what the 9/11 conspiracy storytellers say is bogus, there is also no reason to conclude that those in power have much reason to reveal much of the truth.  Much of what is in the official version assumes knowledge where there is no knowledge.  </div> Again though Ravi, in order to satisfy yourself, you should find a reasonable jet pilot, who will think about the basic questions and ask him.  That is what I did. Jerry <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> -- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA:       <a href="http://www.peta.org/">http://www.peta.org/</a> GreenPeace: <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/">http://www.greenpeace.org/</a> If you have nothing better to do: <a href="http://platosbeard.org/">http://platosbeard.org/</a> ___________________________________ <a href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk </a> </blockquote></div> --