Twin Towers did not collapse on September 11th 2001

Cook

Banned
Could the South Tower have been saved if the passengers on flight 175 had mobbed the terrorists?
Yes, possibly the same as flight 93. But that changes the sequence of events for the day and the basis of the thread was ‘all events for the day took place’.
 
Could the South Tower have been saved if the passengers on flight 175 had mobbed the terrorists?

The problem is before 9-11 almost all airline hijackings had been with the purpose of gaining ransom money in some way or another. The passangers were probably thinking along the lines of, "great, I'm gonna be late for my meeting but at least I'll have an interesting story to tell the grandkids"

Flight 93 passangers were able to mob the hijackers because other planes had impacted and there had been times for friends and family to send them calls or text messages informing of them of what was going on. After the first tower was hit a lot of people thought it was just a terrible accident... until the second plane came in.
 
I don't know how you keep the towers from falling and still have the planes impact them squarely. I just don't think it could be done. IF both planes had struck glancing blows, then MAYBE they can still stand. BUT there's still going to be massive damage and death.

And then there's the terrible problem of figuring out whether the towers are still structurally sound enough to repair. If not, NYC has a HUGE, HUGE problem. How the hell do you take the towers down without causing basically as much damage as happened in reality? I can imagine a way, but it would be insanely expensive and would take years and years.
 
I don't know how you keep the towers from falling and still have the planes impact them squarely. I just don't think it could be done. IF both planes had struck glancing blows, then MAYBE they can still stand. BUT there's still going to be massive damage and death.

And then there's the terrible problem of figuring out whether the towers are still structurally sound enough to repair. If not, NYC has a HUGE, HUGE problem. How the hell do you take the towers down without causing basically as much damage as happened in reality? I can imagine a way, but it would be insanely expensive and would take years and years.

we had a thread on them being damaged beyond repair but not destroyed a while ago

one can't implode them; too built up around there and too much underground shit right below them that would be fucked up by shock damage in an implosion

what would need to be done, is a shitload of ultra high lift equipment (probably from dubai, china etc) would have to be brought in, along with every piece of american equipment to start taking the building apart from the top down... IMO such a project with NY/NJ labor (just based on how insane the freedom tower is going); assuming the planes hit somewhere in the 70-85 floor..... 3ish years to dismantal to the effected areas 10 additional years to reduce the rest of the buildings 15 years more to replace them with something
 
On the plus side, you'd be employing a hell of a lot of the construction industry for quite some time.

nah, too many delays and work stoppages and red tape; the freedom tower hasn't done that... it took ny 25 years to add 1 hov lane each direction for 35 miles on the long island expressway... when you see an ny construction crew of about 15; you would be lucky to see 2 actually doing anything... the old addage here is that construction is white welfare, the day crew digs a whole and the night crew fills it in... rinse and repeat :-D
 
Why the **** would the pilot do that? Remember, suicidal attacks using a jet liner was only something out of a Clancy novel until 9/11, so there would have been no reason to endanger the passengers from the pilots pov.

Not entirely. On Christmas 1994 the algerian terrorist group GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé) hijacked Air France Flight 8969, an Airbus A300 with 220 passengers on board, with the intention to crash it into the Eiffel tower in Paris. Their scheme was thwarted when they had to refuel in Marseille and demanded the aircraft to be refueled with the multifold amount of fuel necessary to reach their destination. The french authorities began to suspect some sort of suicide attack in which the aircraft might be used as a bomb and ordered the GIGN, an intervention group of the French Gendarmerie to storm the plane and liberate the passengers. The operation turned out to be a complete success with all of the terrorists and none of the passengers killed. When I was watching the 9/11 events on TV and the reporters kept on babbling that something like that had never been attempted before over and over again I called the responsible news desk and recommended them to check their own archives. It still took more than half a day before they finally mentioned Air France Flight 8969 at least once.

The decision to repair the towers might not be a matter of pure economics though; I could easily see there being a lot of public pressure to keep the towers standing just to deny the terrorists any credit for destroying them.

Even if the Twin Towers had not collapsed on their own, the sustained damage would have been so severe that the structural integrity would have been compromised beyond repair. The responsable construction supervisory board would have above any reasonable doubt had no option but to order the demolition of both the towers. When I was watching the events unfold, I was wondering how the hell they are going to tear those structures down without damaging a good portion of lower Manhatten, at least until WTC 1 and 2 came down on their own.
 
I get that from an economic and construction standpoint, trying to fix the towers would be a bad idea, but I still can't help but think that a fairly large chunk of the American public would want to see some effort made to keep the towers standing for symbolic reasons.
 
I get that from an economic and construction standpoint, trying to fix the towers would be a bad idea, but I still can't help but think that a fairly large chunk of the American public would want to see some effort made to keep the towers standing for symbolic reasons.

if the fires roll down the stairlwells and make the buildings unsafe down to their core then there honestly isn't anything that be done except take them down... like i said, top down deconstruction; it would be an amazing (though slow) process

plus the buildings where full of asbesto's and lead paint a great deal of which would have burned in different parts of the building even if they don't fall down; you can't put people back into a space with those particles on the surface, and cleaning it up is relatively asb
 
Let's say that in 1971 asbestos was not banned from being used on the crossbeams throughout the structures and so they did not fail from the jet fuel fires in 2001. After the attacks, there would be some people that would argue that the buildings should not be used again and should become memorials. Or they should be torn down because other attacks may be tried and future safety can not be made certain.

Or a foreign country would buy the property and promise to do something with the buildings that would be tasteful.
 
I don't know how you keep the towers from falling and still have the planes impact them squarely. I just don't think it could be done.

The towers could easily handle jets of that size crashing into them. No problem. But what the towers could not handle were the fires from the jets full fuel tanks.
 
The towers could easily handle jets of that size crashing into them. No problem. But what the towers could not handle were the fires from the jets full fuel tanks.

In my scenario, I had the jets clipping the towers with their wings, limiting the amount of jet fuel they were doused with, lessening the fires. The shock impact removed the fireproofing that made the fire more effective. Lessen the impact and lessen the amount of fuel that caused the fire to superheat and you have a good chance of the towers surviving.

Torqumada
 
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