Mr. Moore's Neighborhood

Andrew Sullivan points to a recent Michael Moore interview in which he promotes his latest "bumper sticker," and speculates in his best imitation of a Kindergarten teacher:

MOORE: I'd like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack.

But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I'd like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation. I'm sorry, but my common sense has never allowed me to believe since that day that you can learn how to fly a plane at 500 miles per hour. And you know, when you go up 500 miles an hour, if you're off by this much, you're in the Potomac. You don't hit a five-store building like that.

You don't learn how to do that at some rinky-dink flight training school in Florida on a little video game with PacMan buttons. I'm sorry. I just don't buy that.

Back when the only decent home computer you could acquire other than an Apple II was a Commodore 64 someone came out with a nifty program called Flight Simulator, and one of the great things you could do with it was to fly a simulated plane between the two towers of the World Trade Center. You had to roll the plane briefly so that the wings were perpendicular to the ground in order to make it through. Well, it was pretty difficult, but after about a half-dozen tries I got the hang of it. Now, it's true that this simulated plane was only going about 200 mph, which is way slower than 500, but I found it all too easy to crash into the towers. That was no problem at all. The trick was to miss them.

Now, I don't know how difficult it would've been to transfer that experience to a real plane... but when I was about 10 years old my Dad and I flew to a lake in northern British Columbia in a Navion that belonged to a friend of my Dad's. And during the long flight both myself and another kid took turns flying the plane for brief periods, which wasn't much more difficult than flying that Flight Simulator on the C-64. So I'm pretty sure that even as a kid I could have, fairly easily, hit the broad side of a barn if I'd had half a mind to do so. And a barn is a lot smaller than the Twin Towers.

Now, granted, I couldn't have taken off or landed. But with a bit of practice I think I could have even done that, and it was fairly easy to learn *how* to do it in the Commodore. And as for navigation, I often take my GPS on the plane with me nowadays. So homing in on a waypoint programmed with the coordinates of the Twin Towers, would have been easy as pie. The GPS had some trouble with altitude, but only because it was determining altitude from barometric pressure inside a pressurized plane. Reading an altimeter on a plane isn't hard though, and the GPS without the barometric altimeter can still determine altitude to within 300 feet. So even if I'd been unable to read instruments I'd really have had no problem navigating to the Towers, if I knew the rudiments of flying the plane itself.

You can mock this if you like, but my gut tells me we're talking here about a task that may seem extraordinarily difficult, but in reality just requires some basic competence. I mean, it's certainly easy enough that someone with the engineering savvy of Atta could have managed it without much trouble. And it's also reasonable to assume that flying a large passenger jet is actually somewhat easier than flying a Cessna or a Navion at half the speed, because the controls on a large plane are much more forgiving, and the plane itself is inherently more stable. There is no mystery that requires the sort of hypothesis Moore tosses out.

[And, of course, as Zachary points out below, Moore's comment wasn't really about the WTC attack directly, but about the Pentagon attack. It's hard to imagine that the plane flown into the Pentagon would have been a DOD or IDF (CIA or Mossad?) project, while the WTC attack wasn't. So the case would presume that the more difficult scenario better sorts out the potential culprits of all four attacks. Fair enough. And, in that light, CJC is right to observe that the Pentagon attack did, in fact, miss. (And the Whitehouse attack missed by a lot more, which is difficult to explain if you assume it was conducted by a competent military unit.) Moreover, the Pentagon *is* a lot bigger than a barn. It is, in fact, one of the largest buildings in the world. And it'd only be a difficult target in the vertical dimension, which is the dimension in which the shot did miss. Even more significantly the pilot didn't manage to target the inner side of the ring, which is far more vulnerable than the outside. Surely a well-seasoned military pilot would have been able to do that if he'd wanted maximal dramatic effect? And visually sighting the Pentagon from the air would, of course, be child's play. There aren't too many other five-sided buildings the size of six football fields. And by the way, never mind that recruiting a team of armed forces personnel for a suicide attack on their own command/control center is a bit of a stretch. We ask our military to do some difficult tasks, but there isn't much of a history of outright suicide missions, Pickett's Charge notwithstanding. As a general rule such "suicide missions" are military blunders.]

So what really concerns me isn't any sort of silly notion that Muslims couldn't manage the complex circumstances of setting up and coordinating a terrorist action on a grand scale, or that university educated professional engineers couldn't fly a plane into the towers. They could and did. What concerns me is the apparently desperate need to sew any disparaging belief, even the utterly preposterous notion that only a capitalist-serving, or Zionist-serving military could have performed such an act. And you'll note that Michael doesn't actually say he believes it. He just speculates in a suggestive way. The way a Tom Metzger might speculate about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while maintaining plausible deniability that he was inciting anyone to violence. You have the desperate need to believe anything other than that the WTC attack marked a fundamental shift in our perception of what people other than the "usual suspects" are capable of. Because Marxism really does have, as a basic tenet, that mankind is benign except as motivated by greed. Hatred is only a problem if it's exploited by the powerful, and people are just peachy, otherwise. And make no mistake, such desperation will not stop at street marches and Usenet diatribes. This is pretty raw mental and emotional sewage, thrown into the mix with a little knowing elbow jab. But there are people who'll treat it like manna from heaven.

"I'd like to ask the question..." wink, wink, nod, nod, saynamore, saynamore.

Comments

[Zachary Braverman]

I agree that Mr. Moore is a flaming idiot. What does he know about learning how to fly an air plane?

For accuracy's sake, however, he is talking about the difficulty of flying into the Pentagon, whereas you are talking about flying into the WTC. There is a difference.

[cjc]

One thing to note about the plane that hit the Pentagon and the difficulties of hitting a five-storey structure: the plane actually did "miss" in the sense that it crashed into the ground just short of the Pentagon. But if you're throwing a gigantic hunk of metal and fuel moving at 500 MPH towards a building, you don't have to be perfect.

[zacek]

I wish Moore had been asked if he suspected the Iraqi military trained tthe 9/11 hijackers.

[Randal Robinson]

I'm a private pilot and in my thirteen years as an aircraft dispatcher I spent hundreds of hours in the cockpit jumpseat of commercial airliners. Michael Moore is an idiot. Flying a jet is easy if you don't have to worry about takeoffs, landings, FAA regulations, aircraft systems, or maintaining precise enroute altitudes, airspeeds, and navigation. 9/11 was a severe clear day in which the WTC could be seen from many miles away. Navigating there would take little more than being able to read a compass and any idiot could learn to smash a jet into a building using Microsoft Flight Simulator. It's not hard.

What a buffoon.

[Scott (to Zachary)]

"For accuracy's sake, however, he is talking about the difficulty of flying into the Pentagon, whereas you are talking about flying into the WTC. There is a difference."

Thanks Zachary, point well taken. I'll make a change to the post to reflect that situation.

[Randal Robinson]

The Pentagon would be moderately more difficult to hit than the WTC but nothing that requires military precision or training. I've written more extensively about it here: http://www.rsrobinson.net/archives/000081.html.

Basically Moore doesn't know what he's talking about.

[Scott (to Randal)]

Randal:

Thanks, I agree. The link doesn't seem to work though.

[NANCY REYES]

The world trade towers were not in central Manhatten, but on the South end of the island. There were no nearby large buildings. So it would be an "easy" target to hit (as opposed to the empire state building or the Chicago Sears tower, both of which have almost as high skyscrapers nearby). I never saw the towers landing in NYC: The airports are furthur east, but the towers would be easy to spot from the air, and on a clear day like 911, once you found the way back to NYC, you could do it using visual flight rules....When I used to drive up the Jersey side of Manhatten, that islans seemed to be a ship, with the center sticking up, and then lower buildings, but the towers standing high and proud at the prow of the ship.

Similarly, as anyone who has flown into washington National airport knows that
to hit the Pentagon, you follow the Potomac river low and the Pentagon is right there off the river..

Indeed, all the hype about the Pennsylvania plane going for the white house is unlikely...it's hard to see from the air. However, if you aim down the Potomac, the Capitol building sticks right out...so was probably the final target...

[Anticipatory Retaliation]

I was under the impression that the target of the third plane was the White House and that the Pentagon was a secondary target based on the fact that they were unable to identify the White House from the air. If memory serves, the plane made a fly-over before opting for the Pentagon.

Furthermore, to be terrible about things, the WTC target selection was lousy. First, they needed to hit about 10:30 - 11:00 for higher occupancy. Additonally, the attacks would have been far more effective if they had been able to hit much further down on the buildings, as the vast majority of casualties were from those in floors above the crash.

I am perplexed by the notion that the supposedly military hijackers were unable to fend off a rush on the cockpit by a collection of motley passengers on plane 4.

Finally, in the end analysis, if it had been an "inside" job, why was the scope relatively limited. This was a large effort on the part of a loosely affiliated terrorists, but I imagine that any Special Operations or Intelligence outfit of any size could have done something with more aircraft, better target selection, or with a smuggled Russian nuke. Or at least brought guns on board the planes.

[Scott (to AR)]

AR:

"I was under the impression that the target of the third plane was the White House and that the Pentagon was a secondary target based on the fact that they were unable to identify the White House from the air. If memory serves, the plane made a fly-over before opting for the Pentagon."

To be honest I don't know, and it's all speculation anyway. My point was that there was a fourth plane that went down in PA, and that this failure is somewhat inconsistent with the notion of a crack military operation. But, of course, the WHOLE THING is inconsistent with such a theory, which won't stop Moore from making those suggestions in the least. And the larger issue is that for persons desperate enough to come up with a bevy of quite insane theories, it is unlikely that they will stop with a few raucus demonstrations or a little name-calling. A subset of these people aren't merely anti-Bush, they're pro-terrorism. Every once in awhile the facade drops and you can see it. (Although I see that the item below, which called for the assassination of George Bush, has been deleted.)

http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@225.qQeGbeJsHXV.0@.685ea08b

[Rich]

I'm confused. Michael Moore thinks that it is a long and difficult process learning to fly a plane. Moore also claims certified jet pilot G.W. Bush is stupid and was AWOL during most of his National Guard training.