I remember people after 9/11 saying "Who would ever have thought a plane could be used as a weapon?" and thinking that it had been a key plot point in a bestselling Tom Clancy book...

Want something a lot weirder? Watch the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen (the X-Files spinoff), which aired six months before the attacks:

> Foreshadowing a number of conspiracy theories which would arise in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the plot of the March 4, 2001 episode depicts a secret faction within the US government plotting to hijack a Boeing 727 and fly it into the World Trade Center by remote control. The stated motive was to increase the military defense budget by blaming the attack on foreign interests.

A lot of rally around the flag was going on around that time.

There was also a lot of talking up the amazing organizational skills of the hijackers. Meanwhile I'm thinking, um, let me get this straight... the amazing skill some stuffed suit is referring to is ... buying airline tickets?

All part of the big lie security theater.

Well, (this is a phrase that has never popped out of my mouth) in fairness to the hijackers, they planned for over a year. They flew enough to be top-tier elite frequent flyers, planned out which flights would have the fewest people and the most fuel, arranged their seats such that they could properly control the most real estate, and so on.

So, while I agree that security theater is everywhere, in the case of the hijackers, they actually planned and developed their process very carefully.

To say little of getting the training necessary to fly an airliner. It may not be the hardest thing in the world, but it's hardly easy.

Its very easy if you're not pushing the performance envelope or trying to financially optimize. Its very hard to avoid crashing, although if your intent is to crash, no biggie.

I never soloed but got close and I've got friends with their ATP ticket working for minors and I assure you that 99% of flight training is "this is how not to get killed".

If they trained to do an instruments approach to the towers during a thunderstorm with a partial panel and an engine out, I'd be impressed. What they actually did, from a piloting perspective, eh. What minimal training they did, eh.

So if the pilot is out of the cockpit and its just you, and engine #2 experiences fuel starvation, and the lights are out (who cares why) the exact switches you need to flip to cross feed fuel and the exact gauges you need to look at with your flashlight to determine if its an engine problem or a fuel problem are ... and the exact procedures you follow depending on which it is are ... and you need to answer this instantly or fail your flight check. Or you're on an IFR approach in thunderstorms with one engine out and the primary VOR out now what do you do it doesn't handle the same and you're "uncomfortable" with alternate instruments. Also they test the pilots to destruction basically with distractions, in a simulator you lose cabin pressure and cabin lighting and engine 1 and the controls are feeling weird and there's a fire warning light and hydraulic caution so now what. Fire warning on APU #1 now what? OK now electric bus B just tripped off.

Its much more a damage control job than like being a perfect precise ballerina. Although if your flight maneuvers aren't as smooth as reasonably possible they're going to be pissed after you land, unless your a hijacker so you don't care...

Flying an airplane straight & level in good weather that's already up in the air is fairly easy - and from what I've read about it, they still did a poor job of that. Airliners are designed to be easy to fly, with minimal input. I.e. they are stable, and if you just take your hands off the controls they'll fly straight & level.

What's hard are takeoffs, landings (especially landings), flying in bad weather, emergency conditions, etc.

There are many cases of people with no flight training whatsoever being able to successfully take off and fly, but are unable to land.

"There are many cases of people with no flight training whatsoever being able to successfully take off and fly, but are unable to land."

I would agree with that and this strikes me as the kind of thing that isn't resolved by anecdotes but via someones first five minutes with a PC flight simulator. Anything beyond arcade level.

Some of the more outlandish claims I've read about flying pretty obviously come from people who's shadow has never darkened a keyboard of a PC running MS FS or X-Plane, or even talked to someone who has flown a plane or even played a PC flight sim. I did a ton of PC sim work to wrap my brain around navigation concepts (like the to/from VOR flag, and how approaches "feel" at speed while under cognitive load) and PC flight sims help a lot with nav, but latency combined with lack of feedback and weird controls made it not so useful to replace actual flight time.

As for straight and level that depends on having been properly trimmed, but its really not all that much harder than driving. I don't think an aircraft can be FAA certified if its not stable in at least some axes. I know several exotic research x-planes were not stable in some axes at some parts of the flight envelope and some .mil planes were (are?) not. If a plane is stable, hands off it'll more or less smoothly point to some velocity vector and nose direction (first noob pilot discovery is those two need not be pointed the same way, and almost never are... planes are in an eternal skid, sorta, unlike a car). That 3-d velocity vector might not be where you want, not at all, but it'll smoothly stabilize there unless you adjust the trim tabs.

Um, your ground vector won't match your nose direction if there's a crosswind, but I can't quite make that fit into "planes are in an eternal skid, sorta, unlike a car". Any stable aircraft in a genuine skid will quickly weathercock until the nose is pointing forwards again, and if you hold it in a skid with the rudder it'll eventually raise a wing to bank in the direction the nose is pointing (and if you hold that wing down with aileron you'll gradually change course as your engine(s) pull(s) you around until you've flown in a large and stomach-churning flat circle).

Incidentally, do they teach that you should crab into a crosswind for your entire final approach nowadays?

Bad word choice on my part as I was thinking of "skid" like a car as in aircraft spend about zero time at zero angle of attack on the airfoil, not skid as in poor rudder use during turns.

I donno about crabbing all the way into the ground now a days but if you're crabbing when you hit the ground I suspect thats very hard on non-castering gear and/or its ground loop time.

Well, the hardest thing is landing, followed by taking off. Although I guess certain in-flight emergencies would really be the hardest - mainly during landing or take off. The hardest thing they had to do was fly them straight and low enough to hit the buildings.

Most airplanes will take off pretty much by themselves if you just point them down the runway and open the throttles.

Sure, if you don't have a crosswind. They'll take off, just they won't necessarily stay in the air.

Airplanes are designed to be stable if you let go of the controls.

Relative to the air it's flying through, yes. Relative to the ground? Not so much. And that's what matters most when transitioning from or to being a ground vehicle (takeoff/landing).

Though, IIRC, in the book the pilot of the plane was an actual airline pilot: hard to defend against an "inside job".

I credit my realistic view of politics and military to my military background and life experience coupled along with a metric-shit-ton of non-fiction reading.

There were other books before his that used commandeered airplanes as weapons. Clancy was just a much more adept and educated thriller writer than most in the field.

If you can get the audio, he was actually interviewed about that on 9/12. It is the most bizarre interview with him sounding both scared and mad.

Possibly not the same one, but here Wolf Blitzer treats Clancy like a jerk. Clancy seems to handle it quite well. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0308/12/se.05.html

It was the day after, I do think it was CNN and the anchor was a jerk, but I pretty sure it wasn't this one.

I also grew up reading both Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton and it greatly shaped the way I look at the world. It's sad to see them go and I've yet to find someone who writes in a style either of these men that can compare lately.

Let's also remember the fantastically silly geopolitical predictions that he made in that book. How's our big rivalry with a nuclear armed Japan looking?

Tom Clancy can be somewhat spot on with "predicting" the future of Geopolitics. In the 2006 Ghost Recon game: Advanced Warfighter (took place in 2013) was about heavy US entanglement in Mexico. Mexican mafia are getting pretty strong these days in RL....

> even plots that seemed fantastic (a plane crushing into the Capitol) almost happened later

I'm surprised actual terrorist plots similar to Rainbow Six have not happened yet. I was drawn to the book by the game, and while the latter is a landmark in tactical shooters, it's a mess in terms of delivering the actual story.

Are you referring to the game being a mess at delivering the story? In fairness, that games aren't supposed to be replicas of the book, but rather set in the same style (tactical anti-terrorism and hostage recovery). If the game was supposed to deliver the same story as the book, you're right that it completely failed. I've played almost every game in the series and I've never seen the connection.

Rainbow Six is one of my top-ten favorite books.