Insteon now or wait?

It IS pretty awesome having that B-747 entry tucked in with all those C-172 entries. Having flown over the Big Apple and Washington DC as a passenger at FL360 on many occassions, I can tell you that the WTC, the Empire State Building and the Pentagon are quite identifiable on a clear day such as 9/11 was. I don't think it would be impossible to do it although your theory that the pilots were forced to at least bring the planes to altitude makes sense. When I flew the 747 sim, I did two TO's and landings at LAX, once around at SFO and then again at KaiTak Hong Kong. It was all night flying and for the run into KaiTak and just to make my last landing more interesting, the Chief Pilot turned off the navaids and cleared me for a VFR approach. If you ever had the pleasure of landing at KaiTak you know it is, shall we say, a unique approach. Even then I was able to locate the airport at night without navaids. So, with some training, I do believe the hijackers _could_ have done it themselves.

Approach to KaiTak: Fly base and ignore the admonitions from the radar altimeter to Pull Up as you cross over Stonecutter's Island, then make a

90 degree right turn and dirty up the plane real quick with flaps and gear to get down to the runway. Don't forget to smile and wave at the people in their apartments as you fly by at eye level along the curved approach to the runway.

The most adventerous approach I've experienced has been into Jackson Hole. Wyoming: Fly down into the valley on downwind, turn directly into Grand Teton Mountain on base, and turn final just as the mountains fill the windshield. Flying gliders in those same mountains is my best personal logbook entry.

Annnnyyyway.

Thanks for the notes. It's nice to hear a small plane pilot's opinion on flying a big one.

>

I had to post this link to the gruesome details of the his divorce. Crikey! Charlie's lost some credibility points with me!

That boy's got issues that transcend Building 7's fate, that's for sure!

reading all of these articles and watching the videos, and mostly have come

Today's Washington Post talks about the coverup by the military:

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon

. . . "We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . .

The commission agrees. They believe the lies told were to cover up the incredibly slow response to the crisis. The military was apparently still "tracking" one plane long after it had crashed:

" . . .audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center."

This jibes with some ANG pilots I know who confirm that there just wasn't ever enough time for jets to respond to the threat, let alone shoot down any of the suspect planes. It turns out that Iraq's "no fly zone" had way more protection than our own country from air threats like the hijacked planes.

I still believe that one should never attribute to conspiracy that which can be easily explained by stupidity. It still burns me that El Al learned to lock airplane cockpits over 20 years ago. It took a lot of dead people for us to get the message.

-- Bobby G.

"E. Lee Dickinson" wrote in news:eaoto3$q37$ snipped-for-privacy@solaris.cc.vt.edu:

Great, but please don't do it in the Insteon thread.

I was in Spain when my younger son called me to tell me to turn on CNN. I obeyed to find they're showing an unrealistic King-Kong-like program with a plane flying into the WTC and other such nonsense ... took a moment to reach my other son in Manhattan on his cell as he was walking to his office at the WTC... < numbness, cold sweat, slo-mo >. So I learned that he was OK within *seconds* (Technology takes away; Technology gives back.) and a couple of minutes before almost all the phones went down. I called my wife who was at a meeting in Italy and left a message to tell that her that our older son was OK. She calls back half hour with "Why wouldn't [he] be OK? Why are you bothering me at a meeting ....) I told her to turn on CNN ...

My son lived in the area that was initially closed off. And was personally 'touched' by the Manhattan anthrax death a block from his home in a way that I don't choose to describe here.

That's a long-winded way of explaining why I've had more interest in the particulars of the second (2001) WTC attack than even the first.

But I find nothing particularly perplexing or inexplicable in the analyses offered by responsible folks. We should be surprised that the military covers up its inadequacies ? (LOL ;-). Ask the Athenians.

There is a certain amount of chaos in even the most tightly controlled experiment or situation, so it doesn't surprise me one whit that there are some pieces that take longer to understand than others. In my experience, folks what can't get past that part of reality tend to become paralyzed trying to predict turbulence and vortexes that -- however striking when they appear -- end up dissipating into nothingness.

On the other hand, the story that is just now emerging about how one Power Line Control manufacturer in China conspired to manipulate their supply chain of TRIACs such that mean gate threshold voltage on devices used by another manufacturer of ... .

... Marc Marc_F_Hult