A Night Time 911 WTC Hit

WI the aircraft had impacted the WTC at night? With both Towers being virtually empty, although the pyrotechnics would be spectacluar, New Yorkers would wake to find a Ground Zero in which only a few poor night watchmen had died. With less outrage, would the impetus to oust the Taliban & then Saddam have been insufficient? ie might they both still be in power?! What would have been Bush's reaction to a body count of less than 50?

Dunash said:

WI the aircraft had impacted the WTC at night? With both Towers being virtually empty, although the pyrotechnics would be spectacluar, New Yorkers would wake to find a Ground Zero in which only a few poor night watchmen had died. With less outrage, would the impetus to oust the Taliban & then Saddam have been insufficient? ie might they both still be in power?! What would have been Bush's reaction to a body count of less than 50?

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Do American Airlines fly at night ? I do wonder if their deviant flight paths would have been more or less noticed ? Especially one could expect the aircraft that OTL had that Todd 'let's roll' bloke on it to be more docile, meaning that either it hits something (Camp David ?) or it gets shot down.

Bush will emerge better too - unless he's at Camp David, lol ! No one will see him fly round the country in a panic

Grey Wolf

Dunash said:

WI the aircraft had impacted the WTC at night? With both Towers being virtually empty, although the pyrotechnics would be spectacluar, New Yorkers would wake to find a Ground Zero in which only a few poor night watchmen had died. With less outrage, would the impetus to oust the Taliban & then Saddam have been insufficient? ie might they both still be in power?! What would have been Bush's reaction to a body count of less than 50?

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The Lone GunMan series had an episode about this.

Well--first--the body count won't be so low. Aside from the poor bastards in the planes and the cleaning crews and security guards (and the occasional workoholic staying late) in the buildings themselves, you'll still end up with the hundreds or so of dead cops and/or firefighters when the buildings collapse--maybe not so high as OTL cause they know there aren't that many people trapped in there (trying to rescue 5000 people motivates you to do more riskier moves than trying to rescue 50) but it will still be pretty high. Nobody expected the buildings to collapse so quickly, which was why so many died. Same thing will happen here. I'm thinking ballpark figure of 500 or so in total all told.

Sure--maybe it's not as spectacular a figure as 3000+ but it's still a scary figure for a terrorist attack and you've just lost two symbols of corporate america along with a chunk of mahattan and a bunch of brave emergency personnel. The Oklahoma city bombing in 1995 killed 168 and look how nuts people went there. There will be retribution.

Whether they'll go after the right people responsible is a different story...

Grey Wolf said:

Do American Airlines fly at night ?

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Eh? Haven't most airplanes been able to fly at night just fine since the invention of radar, etc?

Grey Wolf said:

Bush will emerge better too - unless he's at Camp David, lol ! No one will see him fly round the country in a panic

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I really don't understand why people insist on believing Bush 'ran around in a panic'. All or most highly-placed officials almost certainly have some kind of disaster plan that goes into effect in case of what, at that time might have been seen as a large-scale attack on the nation. The 'running around' was a misdirection tactic to keep anyone from offing the President. What is so damn hard to understand about that?

If a plane was flown into Buckingham Palace, would the PM insist on staying in London (or wherever he happened to be), making himself a potential target for whatever unknown enemy force just destroyed a national landmark? NO!!!

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As far as Dunash's actual question goes, if the idiots had flown at night, I agree with Doctor What as far as how things would pan out.

Well, most nations have laws preventing airlines flying between certain hours at night so as to prevent noise pollution. Obviously the aircraft could fly, but these were scheduled passenger services so the question was whether they would fly

Regarding Bush, it was the most uninspiring leadership in the world to go and hide at an old SAC base. It wasn't just that he retreated to a safe location, but that he went on a magical mystery tour, removed himself from the eyes of his people when they needed reassurance and looks the complete knob-end for doiing it

Grey Wolf

Grey: Inspiring or not (and let me be blunt, I wonder if you would have found the identical behavior in another president so uninspiring...), this was and remains SOP for presidents when large-scale attacks on civilian population (and that is what it was categorized as for at least the first 12-16 hours) have occurred. Given that at least one of the planes was scheduled for the White House (Bush wasn't there, but the hijackers didn't know this), it strikes me as a most practical precaution. The whole process of playing shell games with the POTUS dates back to the cold war, when the incoming attackers might be nuclear, and the president sat at the center of the entire retaliatory apparatus.

Two other points:

1) We have discussed in another thread about the probability of the US retaliating differently for WTC if the death toll had been much higher. I said it there, I will repeat it here...the casualty count is largely irrelevant. The symbolism of the attack is what matters, and the US response would likely have been unchanged.

2) As for the spectacular pyrotechnics. I was dazzled by the ones that we got...and I devoutly hope never, EVER to see them again, or see 'better' ones...

Symbolic

Given that the Attacks were Symbolic, The actual death toll is irrelavant, as IMHO is the Targets. Once The Terrioists won the PR war they had been waging for 50 years to provoke a Military reponse, The follow thru was predicable. [Except to the Terrioists, or they would have tried so hard to win]

It was this episode of "The Lone Gunmen" which eerily presaged 911
http://www.geocities.com/x_files_lone_gunmen_911/

The Towers really shut down (more or less) at night? I was under the impression that they were more or less open 24/7, so there would bound to be quite a few people inside, just "burning the midnight oil". By the way, what about the Pentagon?

Grey Wolf said:

Regarding Bush, it was the most uninspiring leadership in the world to go and hide at an old SAC base. It wasn't just that he retreated to a safe location, but that he went on a magical mystery tour, removed himself from the eyes of his people when they needed reassurance and looks the complete knob-end for doiing it

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Whaaaaa??? Are you serious? Even friends of mine who are extreme Bush-bashers understand what happened with his moving around that day - see Scott R.'s post for a succinct explanation.

I actually think Bush might've been dumb enough to immediately return to DC from Florida; it was most likely his handlers who said, 'Uh, no, that's not what we do here'.

Alasdair Czyrnyj said:

The Towers really shut down (more or less) at night? I was under the impression that they were more or less open 24/7, so there would bound to be quite a few people inside, just "burning the midnight oil". By the way, what about the Pentagon?

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I was always under the impression that the Towers were essentially glorified office buildings (although there was a restaurant on the top of one of them--anybody have any ideas what its operating hours were?). Like most huge office buildings, technically they're open 24/7 (hence the need for lobby security guards to check for ID) but 99% of the workers are out the door come 5pm. I also seem to (vaguely) recall that they shut them down to tourists around this time as well. Still --20000 workers in each building and only 0.1% of them being lunatic workoholics staying late still gives you 20 people in each building, not counting the ubiquitous cleaning crews, security guards, maintainence people, etc wandering around. Many of the offices were law firms and advertising companies, so I can see that percentage being a bit higher than 0.1%

But--as been pointed out by DuQuense--it's symbolic. Remember the truck bomb in the WTC parking garage that killed a 'whopping' 7 people? Remember how nuts people went then? How chaotic the city got? How much press and media attention it got? All the dark mutterings about 'bombing some arabs' for revenge? Now you've got TWO hijacked planes AND completely destroyed towers. Even if it was a ridiculously low casualty figure of, say, 5 people or so, people will still be screaming for blood. Hell--they'll be saying stuff like 'What if these idiots had attacked at 9 am instead of 9pm? Why, there would have been thousands dead! Let's make sure they don't do a repeat performance..."

As for the pentagon--aren't military buildings 24/7?

Windows on the World restaurant

http://www.artrepublic.com/wow/travel/new_york/restaurants_moderate.asp

operating hours
Mon-Thu 5pm-10:30pm;
Fri-Sat 5pm-11:30pm;
Sun 11am-10pm.

So tack on a bunch of restaurant employees and customers on the casualty list as well.

Damn--all this gloom and doom is depressing me--I'm outta here....

Half way down the list at this link is an interesting video
clip from the suspiciously cancelled after only 13 episodes "Lone Gunman" series presaging a conspiratorial radio controlled takeover of a 727 flying into the WTC at night, made six months before 911
http://www.freedomfiles.org/movies