WI: The World Trade Center didn't collapse

So let's say that the 9/11 Attacks still happened, but for whatever reason the two towers never collapsed due to it. Would this have a significant impact on the future?
 
I'm pretty suite that they would have had to come down anyway because the damage was so bad. Of there's a way you could get the planes to hot at a different angle I could see it. As for affects I imagine that the us would do the same thing it did in '93 when they attacked the towers the first time, in other words nothing. New York would still have those ugly things as their tallest buildings too.
 
some engineer in a top secret government facility would be fired for his incompetence in carrying out this false flag attack. (/trolling)

Seriously, you would need to reduce the speed of the planes so less energy has to escape. Additionally, you would need to hit the tower at it's strongest point. Let's imagine that the plane struck too high, then it may be possible for a tower to stand.

The death toll gets reduced from a couple thousand to a couple hundred, America is still mad and will avenge the deaths. There will still be chemicals released into the air, infrastructure underground won't be damaged.

Less deaths may mean that the population will turn against Bush sooner.
 
Obviously, you could have the planes miss the towers due to retaliation from the passengers. Maybe then it could crash land in the Hudson river, kinda like what happened a few years ago with Captain Sully.
 
Obviously, you could have the planes miss the towers due to retaliation from the passengers. Maybe then it could crash land in the Hudson river, kinda like what happened a few years ago with Captain Sully.

No, because 9/11 was a game changer. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were for political statements or money. There was never an incentive for passengers to rise up because generally you would survive by obeying the hijackers. So, the passengers and crews on those particular aircraft don't know that they are better off trying to stop the hijackers.

It wasn't until after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that the equation changed. From Flight 93 on, passengers now assume hijackers are suicidal and will overwhelm the hijackers because the passengers are now fighting for their lives
 
Would be nice not to have to listen to the Conspiracy nutballs.

It seems like the Towers coming down was a combination of factors, if just a few of them are changed then maybe one or both of them would remain standing.

Just off the top of my head, small scale aircraft collisions were considered in the engineering of the buildings. (Which is actually what I though when I opened my Yahoo page that morning and saw 'Plane Hits Twin Towers', then I opened the link. :mad: ) They just never considered LARGE aircraft collisions, especially those of a fully fueled jet liner. In most crashes, fuel is low either through the pilots dumping it before crashing to reduce fire risk or because they happen near the end of the flight.

It would still be a tragedy and a fairly large loss of life, certainly cause for the war in Afghanistan. But if they stay up, if they're not on the news for weeks and months, would the runup to the Iraq war be slowed? I would hope so, but we can't be sure.
 
No, because 9/11 was a game changer. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were for political statements or money. There was never an incentive for passengers to rise up because generally you would survive by obeying the hijackers. So, the passengers and crews on those particular aircraft don't know that they are better off trying to stop the hijackers.

It wasn't until after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that the equation changed. From Flight 93 on, passengers now assume hijackers are suicidal and will overwhelm the hijackers because the passengers are now fighting for their lives

This is very true, usually the hijackers would demand that ransom be paid so most passengers just waited it out. It wasn't until people got phone calls (I think it was phone calls) on Flight 93 did they realize they were on a flying bomb and heroically fought back.
 
No, because 9/11 was a game changer. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were for political statements or money. There was never an incentive for passengers to rise up because generally you would survive by obeying the hijackers. So, the passengers and crews on those particular aircraft don't know that they are better off trying to stop the hijackers.

It wasn't until after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that the equation changed. From Flight 93 on, passengers now assume hijackers are suicidal and will overwhelm the hijackers because the passengers are now fighting for their lives

Then why haven't I heard of any other Flight 93's? Seems to me, that when ever I hear about a hijacking, the passengers just do as they always did pre-9/11

Or am I wrong? HAVE there been cases of passenger uprisings since 9/11?

BTW? No Iraq War.:mad:
 
Then why haven't I heard of any other Flight 93's? Seems to me, that when ever I hear about a hijacking, the passengers just do as they always did pre-9/11

Or am I wrong? HAVE there been cases of passenger uprisings since 9/11?

BTW? No Iraq War.:mad:

Have there been many big plane hijackings since 9/11?
 
It seems like the Towers coming down was a combination of factors, if just a few of them are changed then maybe one or both of them would remain standing.

I agree with this. Prior to 9/11 very few serious engineers would have agreed that such collisions would make a modern skycraper collapse, at least that fast. It is quite likely that even the planners of the attacks didn't expect that - it has been said that Bin Laden was surprised that the Towers actually fell.

I think the unlikely event of the attack (that the aiming of the pilots was so spot-on and that both Towers promptly fell) and the mainstream discussion of it really constitutes a so-called black swan event:

Nassim Nichols Taleb said:
  1. The event is a surprise (to the observer).
  2. The event has a major effect.
  3. After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data were available but unaccounted for in risk mitigation programs. The same is true for the personal perception by individuals.

That is, psychological factors and rationalization make many people think that that the 9/11 attacks were bound to play out as they did and the Towers would necessarily fall, while in reality it wouldn't taken big changes to the OTL that one of the buildings at least would have been left standing - just a slight change in the final flight path of one of the two aircraft might have achieved that, say.


Just off the top of my head, small scale aircraft collisions were considered in the engineering of the buildings. (Which is actually what I though when I opened my Yahoo page that morning and saw 'Plane Hits Twin Towers', then I opened the link. :mad: ) They just never considered LARGE aircraft collisions, especially those of a fully fueled jet liner. In most crashes, fuel is low either through the pilots dumping it before crashing to reduce fire risk or because they happen near the end of the flight.

In 1945 a B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building, which - obviously - was left standing, and just the next year 40 Wall Street was struck by a Beechcraft C-45. As I understand, these accidents led to several new safeguards against possible aircraft collisions being implemented in planning and building high-rise buildings during the following decades. I have no idea if the possibility of really big planes with very big fuel loads hitting buildings was ever considered, or if it was thought that it would be such a rare occurrence anyway that contingency planning for that would have meant wasted time and money. I wonder where one could find information about the evolution of building codes and plans in regards to the idea of plane crashes, that could be an interesting read.
 
9/11 Twin towers don't collapse. (What happens if the attack is 2 hours later ?)

The second aircraft to hit the South tower hit it lower and the 2nd tower fell first lasting around an hour. The first tower hit higher up lasted nearly twice as long. Had the planes fuselage gone through a corner of the building and thereby released a lot of the stored fuel outside the building then it is possible one or even both of the buildings might have withstood structural collapse. It is generally agreed that the pool fire onto exposed Steel trunnions supporting the pre cast floors initiated structural collapse once the steel turned to chocolate and the load exceeded the reduced tensile stress brought about by high temeprature. (If you can remove large quantities of the fuel (by a poorly aimed aircraft) then a structural collapse might be avoided. I suspect however that there will still be 1500- 2000 fatalities from trapped people, and falling debris. (Not as many NY fireman get killed). Does the US go to war over 1500 people? Probably yes so Iraq and Afganistan are still played out as per the OTL.
A very powerful and effective attack that if executed a couple of hours later and 30 -40 floors lower could have seen 10-15 times as many fatalities from the two buildings. Now what would the US do with 40,000 dead people in New york on their hands?
 
Given the extremely high airspeed which the aircraft impacted and the relatively poor training of the pilots, in hindsight, it remains rather incredible that the attacks were so effective, yet they were.

Still, though, even if the planes merely clipped the towers with their wings, you have two large Boeings laden with fuel coming down in the middle of Manhattan -- and still yet another attack on the Pentagon and Flight 93. Even then, you're going to have a rather large death toll -- and what was indisputably an attack on the United States.

So, I doubt the aftereffects and response would have been all that different. The collapse of the towers had a large symbolic importance, but their remaining standing wouldn't have affected the ultimate response of going to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq.
 
IIRC the Pentagon attack itself didn't go off quite as planned, the plane hit the ground in front of the building and bounced up didn't it?
 
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