[JamilD]

Not quite an answer to your question, but in the 60s and 70s hijackings were quite common (86 hijackings in 1969) and weren’t seen in the way they are now. The common understanding was that the hijackers wanted to re-route the plane somewhere else, and that everyone would end up alive but inconvenienced.

It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.

[kolanos]

> It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.

Sadly this is mostly a myth. It is a little known fact that there were five separate U.S. military war games being run simultaneously with 9/11 and three of them involved airliner hijacking scenarios, including flying airplanes into buildings. Worse, these war games involved simulated inputs into NORAD and FAA radar systems, resulting in mass confusion. There is an excellent documentary that covers these war games, including actual NORAD, FAA and EADS audio [0].

[0]: https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/

[jazzyjackson]

I thought I remembered the plot to the 1996 film “executive decision” as being a debate whether to shoot the passenger jet out of the sky because the plane was going to be used as a missile, but i just read the plot again and they were going to detonate a nerve agent bomb on board the plane while over a us city, so, similar but not quite a prediction of the predicament.

[JamilD]

I just started watching the historical footage from CNN; it's interesting to hear the commentary in between when the first and second planes hit the tower.

"Was the plane having any difficulty flying?" "Yes, it seemed to be rocking back and forth" "Was this a navigational error?"

An announcement in the South Tower immediately after the crash instructed people to stay in their offices.

Even after the second tower was hit, the immediate reaction was that it was a second explosion in the North Tower caused by the fuselage of the plane.

4 minutes after the second plane hit, when it was clear that two planes were involved: "was it possible a navigational error directed two planes into the World Trade Center?"

It's incredible to think just how much our attitude and perspectives changed after realizing what exactly had happened.

[7952]

It must be so difficult to do command and control in a situation like that. So many different agencies with diffetent expertise and patchy data.

Maybe large buildings should have cameras pointed at them with IR modes. Feed it to a national control centre that has experts on staff and links to other agencies. And make those kind of judgements thats will seem obvious in hindsight.

[garaetjjte]

That depends on the channel though. On one labeled "NEWSW" they said "I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture. " immediately after second hit.

[trothamel]

(Spoilers)

The end of Tom Clancy's 1994 book "Debt of Honor" featured a 747 being crashed into the Capital, which is about as close as fiction gets.

[anonymousab]

A bit closer is the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, where a March 2001 episode featured a plot to crash an airliner into the world trade center and blame it on terrorists to justify a new war.

Obviously 9/11 wasn't some government conspiracy to purposely spark new wars, but the other details are eerily similar.

[strogonoff]

A plot one of the stages of which included potentially crashing an airplane into WTC[0], among other targets, was uncovered (mostly, it appears, by accident) and thwarted in the mid-nineties. The Lone Gunmen plot coincidence is less curious considering that plot could have served as an inspiration, although the means of hijacking were very different in the series.

The sad thing is that uncovering that plot didn’t help prevent the actual attack based on it a few years later…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot#Phase_III:_CIA_pl...

[mlcrypto]

Wow 86 hijackings and nobody in intelligence could ever conceive of how that could go horribly wrong

[rtkwe]

Most people survived them though so there wasn't a huge reason to do anything particularly drastic, using planes as a suicide missile was basically entirely new. Even on the day of there was speculation about why the planes 'messed up' and flew into the WTC buildings which shows just how unusual it was. Most hijackings were essentially mass kidnappings for ransom to get money, release prisoners or get promises of policy changes and ended with a negotiation or storming the plane.