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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

From the thread:

> Now this is weird, since last week was the first showing of that X-files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" in Austalia. The plot of the first one was that some government group was going to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. Life imitates art?

Eee... WHAT? I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.

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The scale of the September 11 attacks was greater than most predictions (given that no terrorist attack in history had ever been that destructive) but planes into buildings and terrorist attacks on the WTC were frequently predicted events.

The Empire State building has been hit multiple times by planes including a serious incident involving a B-25 in 1945:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-25_Empire_State_Building_cras...

and the WTC had been the subject of multiple previous bombings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing

Planes attacking buildings – especially the World Trade Center – is certainly something that had been imagined.

I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.

There were two aspects to 9/11 which surprised people. First, that it was four planes which were hijacked: For security screeners to allow one armed hijacker onto a plane may be poor luck, but for armed hijackers to get onto four planes looks like carelessness. (With apologies to Oscar Wilde.)

Second, while the prospect of planes crashing into towers had been considered -- and in fact all modern skyscrapers are designed to survive such an impact -- the aftermath of 9/11 was the first time the prospect of aircraft fuel being used to bring down a skyscraper was ever widely contemplated. If the two planes which hit the WTC hadn't been carrying enough fuel to reach LAX, the fires would not have burned for long enough to bring the towers down.

It was nothing to do with security screening, it was a philosophical attack. The hijackers knew that SOP in the event of a hijacking was everyone sit tight and let the negotiators deal with it. Everyone thought that the only reason to hijack a plane was to take hostages. The "weapons" they used were blades less than an inch long. The passengers that did react, overpowered them quickly (tho' by the time it was too late).

"Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers." -- Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com/news-072.html)

It's telling that every post-9/11 security incident I've read about, from "person gets drunk and agitated" to "person attempts to light bomb in underwear" have been defeated by a door or a passenger.

I suspect in some dark, obscure corners, ghastly scenarios far worse have been conceived and considered for contingency purposes. But given supposed reasonable assumptions, many such scenarios are filed somewhere between the circular bin, and long term storage in an nondescript, largely forgotten warehouse, much to the same affect.

The most unfortunate thing about this whole mess is that doubt about otherwise reasonable assumptions has been magnified. It is akin to running continuous integration tests for things such as disk space and basic standard output ... things that normally should be allowed to be taken for granted and should not require such extensive devotion of resources to largely unproductive activities.

Nope. For another example, see Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor

The Japanese used suicide pilots in the 40s. The leap to airliners is not so big.

For something in the terrorism realm, check out Air France 8969. It was hijacked with the intent of using it to destroy the Eiffel tower (either by crashing into it or by blowing up the plane over it). It never happened because the French discovered the plan while the plane was on the ground and attacked it.

Operation Bojinka in the mid 1990s, involving Ramzi Yousef and KSM himself, was a similar plot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot

"The Path to 9/11" has a few historical inaccuracies but it provides a good dramatization of the key events in the 90s that led up to 9/11. It's well worth watching.

Clearly they meant the general public thought it was outside the realm of things that would actually happen, as opposed to realistic seeming (yet safely 'impossible') things of fiction.

For example Tom Clancy's Debt of Honour wraps up with a Japanese airliner flying into the Capitol Building killing off the majority of the US Government.

No, I believed that it was outside the realm of imagination, that the concept of flying a passenger plane into a building as a form of suicide attack never entered the collective mind of the society. I stand corrected though, thank you and shepardrtc for the Tom Clancy reference. I guess one gets to learn something new every day ;).

You may also be interested to see the originally intended album cover for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music that was planned for release in september 2001.

Terrorist plots aside, there's also this:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-08-22-sept-1...

It aired in the US 6 months prior and 13 million people watched the episode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)

The "no one ever imagined" line is put forward by DC insiders to cover for the fact that they never planned for a well known attack vector. Reporters spend a lifetime building connections to senior civil servants and have no problem running with lines like that if it will help their contacts keep their jobs.

(writing this as a comment since I'm past the edit window for the previous one)

Thank you all for those references. I learned a lot today.

Except it had already been attempted by Bin Laden in 1993, albeit without planes

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