alternatehistory.com

I was at my local mall the other day, and I began reminiscing internally about when I worked there, in the very early 2000s after graduating high school. I thought back to when I was starting out in music and Sega's last console before the conglomerates and jocks took over video games, the Dreamcast. But what really made things really different then from now was the Twin Towers still stood in NYC, as opposed to just the Freedom Tower. My brain rather callously minimized this down to "two towers at the World Trade Center instead of one", excising all of the death, destruction, and misery the attacks and their aftermath caused...

But anyways, I got to thinking, what if instead of both planes directly hitting the towers, one of them missed, grazed the side*, or never took off/was brought down like Flight 93? The death toll would still have been fairly high and our collective cages would've rattled after thinking we were more or less untouchable, but there wouldn't have been quite as much damage as there was in OTL...would this have really affected the impact/aftermath that much or am I underestimating things?

*this would likely have sent the plane spiraling out of control to crash elsewhere in the city, if not hit another iconic structure, so the death toll could still be as bad is it was in OTL or possibly even worse (I don't remember the exact trajectory of the planes, so I could be way off here)
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