Page 27 | 9/11 - what happened to the planes?

myyve · 2023-09-12T10:48:35+00:00

Thinking on from that awful day after the anniversary yesterday, one thought has come to mind. What happened to the planes and those onboard, once they were flown into the twin towers? I know this probably does sound silly and I'm so sorry if it comes across as ignorant, but I truly do not know, and the internet doesn't mention anything, either.. Did they come to a crash landing afterwards? Or did they continue flying? What actually happened to the plane and those poor souls on board?

crumblingschools · 13/09/2023 11:03

@newnamethanks have you read any of the responses on here, especially by @Elleherd. Some have been very detailed, if grim reading. Some have been ignorant both in tone and answers (saying plane and passengers all vaporised).

OP may have not worded her original question in the best way but many posters on here will have learnt more by her asking the question.

NeunundneunzigHorseBallonz · 13/09/2023 11:19

@myyve The only things you did wrong here was ask a loaded question on mumsnet. Absolutely not the right herd for this one.

Meanwhile, allowing yourself to be dissuaded from education because of strangers on an Internet forum is fucking nuts. You should have access to online libraries and you need to use them instead of human “recall” and guesswork anyway.

Allthestories · 13/09/2023 11:22

@neveragainagain thank you so much for your considered reply. Mumsnet at it's finest. And thank you @myyve for asking the question. The serious responses have answered some questions i had too

enchantedsquirrelwood · 13/09/2023 11:25

MonicaPluto · 12/09/2023 22:27

@Nanaof1

It's not that I minded the question. I minded the fact that a 24-year-old who obviously got through school could not have thought the question out to its logical conclusion or at least asked the question in a more mature and thoughtful way.

There's nothing wrong with how she asked, and I don't think you're one to talk about asking in a mature and thoughtful way, because there's nothing mature or thoughtful about you joining a pile on of a 24 year old.

Yes I agree.

I've learnt a lot from this thread and would have missed that if MNHQ had gone with the knee-jerk reactions of the sanctimonious know-all lobby.

enchantedsquirrelwood · 13/09/2023 11:27

If you strongly suspect something is an ignorant question, don't ask. Look it up. If you can't find an answer anywhere on the entire of the internet, that's probably because the question is too stupid, or too obvious

No, there is no such thing as a silly question. Lots of people would do much better in life if they'd admit they didn't know things and ask.

Of course, asking the opening hours of the local takeaway when its website states them clearly is a bit lazy. But as I have said here and on other threads, if you don't like a thread scroll on by. Nobody makes you read it or comment on it.

AutumnCrow · 13/09/2023 11:38

There also such a thing as faux innocence and MN (esp AIBU, Chat and F:S&GD) sees an awful lot of it unfortunately, and people who have previously given their time and energies in good faith sometimes - and understandably - feel a bit jaded.

HorseyHorsham · 13/09/2023 11:39

FastAndLast · 13/09/2023 10:55

If all of that is accurate, especially the sections on plane debris being found in multiple locations, that somewhat justifies the OP asking what happened to the planes

DID THEY COME TO A CRASH LANDING AFTERWARDS? OR DID THEY CONTINUE FLYING?

Doesn’t really justify asking those questions imho.

I would disagree, it was obvious (to me) that she meant Flying from their residual momentum, and that by Plane she meant “large recognizable chunks, primarily the fuselage”

FastAndLast · 13/09/2023 11:52

it's hard to envision something of that size not just gliding through and out of the other end of the building

there is little to no communication as to if the plane actually traveled through the building and emerged on the other side, before plummeting.

I don’t believe the OP did mean “large, recognisable chunks”.

fashionqueen1183 · 13/09/2023 11:58

MissConductUS · 13/09/2023 10:55

The WTC had five floors below ground, so the 4th underground floor would have been just above where the jet fuel accumulated.

I'm not sure exactly what was on the fourth underground floor. The whole underground complex was shops and restaurants. I bought a pair of shoes there once.

Show quote history

Wow I didn’t realise it went so far down.

Athenas · 13/09/2023 12:05

neveragainagain · 13/09/2023 08:51

I have researched 9/11 in some significant depth. There are quite a lot of errors by PP on this thread that I just wanted to post about as well as informing the OP.

There is only one known video of the first plane (American 11) hitting the North Tower. The angle allows only to see it from the side that got hit. It was going over 400mph. Some parts of the plane were found up to half a mile away on the other side of the plane, having been blown out by the explosion. Some body parts were also seen on the ground immediately after impact. These were subsequently obliterated in the building collapse.

With the second plane to hit - United 175 into the south tower - one angle does show that the nose of the plane actually did go through the entire tower and come out the other side (just the nose). The plane then exploded with most of it still embedded in / travelling though the tower across 8 floors. This all happened within one second. Again, parts of the plane were found up to half a mile away on the other side of the impact. The hijacker pilot of this plane had climbed very fast to almost 40,000 feet before putting the plane into an alarmingly fast dive. The plane was going about 540mph when he hit, which is the speed at that low height at which the plane risked breaking up. He tilted his wing before impact. This meant that although the plane travelled through the tower and the nose came out the other side for milliseconds before it all exploded, stairway A remained intact from top to bottom. This allowed some people to escape from the impact zone and this was different to the North Tower in which all three stairways were severed on impact. Witnesses explain that they felt the whole top part of the tower move alarmingly to the Hudson River when the plane hit: they were used to some movement as the towers were designed to move in high winds, but these witnesses said they felt it was more than five metres movement and it was incredibly scary to experience before the tower righted itself; so the towers did initially cope with the impacts, despite the huge impact.
99% (about 20,000) of the people who were below the impact zone of both towers did successfully escape.
Not everyone on the two planes into the towers was 'vaporised' unfortunately (although most were, or were blown apart). The witnesses in the tower who escaped subsequently told of being told by firefighters "don't look left" (at the plaza or other areas) as they escaped on ground level. Those people explain that they then felt compelled to look left. They saw hundreds of severed body parts, some of which by that stage would have been from jumpers or fallers. But some of which were from plane passengers. One British witness who was just below the impact zone said immediately after impact she saw what she thought were briefcases falling past her window. Then she found out these were suitcases from the planes. One witness explained that he saw aircraft seats with passengers still strapped in them on the plaza (ground level between the two towers) but the bodies strapped into the plane seats had missing body parts and limbs. This was awful to me to learn. It's dreadful. When the towers collapsed this area was all obliterated along with its grim evidence.
The Twin Towers did not comply with building regulations. This is fact, not conspiracy theory which I don't subscribe to. Under the 1960s code, there should have been six stairways per tower. The code changed just before the towers were built, but there still should have been four stairways and fire chiefs strongly recommended they were more spaced out. The decision not to do this was very likely to have caused over 1000 deaths in the North Tower alone above the impact zone as there was no intact escape route and no escalators were working either as the three escape stairways in each tower were all central.

The design of putting the central supports all in the centre also proved fatal: when the planes exploded, the sprayed-on fire protection on horizontal beams was blown off across multiple floors. And although we were all told that the planes were designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, crucially nobody considered the impact of airplane jet fuel then exploding and burning with that study.

With the planes that flew into the towers, they were bigger than a 707 and their fuel weighed more than a fully-laden double decker bus. The fuel exploded and this severed all the sprinkler pipes in the towers at or above impact zones. (They only worked lower down where it wasn't initially needed). The spray on fire retardant was blown off the horizontal support beams. And the subsequent fires at very high temperatures caused the internal structure in the centre of the towers to ultimately fail. The outside structure of the tower was designed to be much more lightweight and although it did successfully adjust to some extent to the failing central support, ultimately it failed. The fire department knew they couldn't actually put the fires out at that height, but most did not know that the towers would collapse. Studies show that it was the fires that caused the towers to ultimately collapse rather than the physics of a plane flying into them. I do wonder to what extent the terrorists knew this; did they exploit the design weaknesses of the buildings?

American 77 flew into the Pentagon. It was going extremely fast and was only a few feet off the ground when it hit, killing all on board and over 100 people in the building.
United 93 had been delayed. This meant that when passengers called their loved ones, their relatives were able to tell them what the terrorised were doing; it was unheard of for terrorists not to return to an airport for their demands - flying them into buildings as suicide attacks was new and unthinkable. The passengers launched a fight back, aided by the fact that there were only four hijackers on board compared with five in the others (because one man had been stopped from entering the USA a few weeks before). United 93 was put into a huge dive and also flew upside down before impact. It must have been terrifying - as well as impossible for the passengers to stay on their feet to continue the fight back. It hit very soft ground of a former coal mine near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, so buried itself in the ground and most passengers were unfortunately vaporised in the impact, although investigators did find fragments in the ground and surrounding woodland of most passengers.

I hope nobody is offended by my descriptions here; they are the known facts of what happened and I've done a lot of study into it, including in the past month. I find it fascinating, horrifying and important to learn about.

May I ask why you have researched it to this level of depth?

HuwEdwardsBottom · 13/09/2023 12:31

TBF at the time a lot of the media reports said that the victims were vapourised. It was a word that was used a lot. As more witnesses came forward we found it wasn’t the case, maybe the correct terminology would’ve been ‘no identifiable remains’ or something like that? Either way I don’t know why some posters are taking such offence?

TBOM · 13/09/2023 12:39

FastAndLast · 13/09/2023 11:52

it's hard to envision something of that size not just gliding through and out of the other end of the building

there is little to no communication as to if the plane actually traveled through the building and emerged on the other side, before plummeting.

I don’t believe the OP did mean “large, recognisable chunks”.

Give it a rest, will you? You're contributing nothing to what is largely a really interesting thread, apart from rudeness.

FastAndLast · 13/09/2023 12:42

TBOM · 13/09/2023 12:39

Give it a rest, will you? You're contributing nothing to what is largely a really interesting thread, apart from rudeness.

Show quote history

No, I won’t. You’re contributing nothing yourself.

TBOM · 13/09/2023 12:54

This reply has been deleted

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.

FastAndLast · 13/09/2023 13:00

😂 you got me.

HuwEdwardsBottom · 13/09/2023 13:16

There’s a very good book about 9/11 called ‘102 Minutes’. That’s all it took, from hijacking’s to the towers collapse. Shocking really. Some of the eye witness accounts make for grim reading. I didn’t realise people survived at the impact zone in the South Tower and manage to get out, they got into a lift the doors closed and the plane hit at that moment. They then had to get out and climb over rubble and human remains. I also didn’t know that the NYPD and FDNY didn’t work together and in fact there was bad blood between them. They didn’t communicate or work together at all during the attack. A police helicopter was circling the towers and the crew could see the buildings looked unsafe and thought they may collapse. They radioed for the information to be passed on to the fire brigade so they could be aware and evacuate but it wasn’t passed on. Many fire fighter lives could have been saved if this had happened.

FastAndLast · 13/09/2023 13:22

A police helicopter was circling the towers and the crew could see the buildings looked unsafe and thought they may collapse. They radioed for the information to be passed on to the fire brigade so they could be aware and evacuate but it wasn’t passed on. Many fire fighter lives could have been saved if this had happened.

Wow that’s shocking, I’ve never heard of that before 😣

Elleherd · 13/09/2023 13:25

Fashionqueen118
Technically there where seven basement levels including what was known as the bathtub which was built to prevent flooding. If I remember correctly I believe they were allocated as follows: 1st and 2nd levels had concessions etc, as well as NYC Subway trains (and possibly some restricted parking) 3rd had PATH trains and some maintenance access and restricted parking. 4th included pumps, specific maintenance rooms and the American Maintenance Company office. I believe below that was two layers of structural equipment and then the 'bathtub.'
However TTBOMK The freight shaft ended at level 4, putting the AMC office at the bottom rather than above.

One of the biggest issues in trying to pick apart what happened is humans aren't reliable witnesses as it is in our nature to fill in gaps or ascribe reasons to things ie an assumption that a bang must be a generator exploding.
or, if the floor that housed the security center suffered a fire it must have been intentional.
We know there are testimonies from good people that totally contradict each other.
There are claims that there where explosions in the sub basement levels prior to the plane hitting.
There are a number of unresolved mysteries about exactly what happened, and how much weight can be given to eye witnesses, especially when they say opposing things. In the end you look for what does correlate and what adds together, and accept this may be it, or it may be correct but may not be the full story.

As far as what happened to the actual planes, we do have a pretty conclusive understanding, but a student trying to research it for the first time would probably be overwhelmed by all the different sources and especially if they looked in the wrong places.

CaveMum · 13/09/2023 13:39

@Elleherd you’re right about humans being unreliable witnesses, though not through any malice. There are a large number of people who genuinely believe they saw the first tower hit on tv but that never happened- there’s only one piece of known footage of the first impact (the aforementioned French documentary makers) which was not discovered until after the event. But people will swear blind that they saw it.

They did some research into false memories around 9/11 and the number of people affected was very high.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accuracy/

How Accurate Are Memories of 9/11?

Recollections of the circumstances of how we first heard of the 2001 terrorist attacks may feel extraordinarily vivid and true, but they are flawed

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accuracy/

HuwEdwardsBottom · 13/09/2023 14:04

It amazes me how many people claim they saw the second plane strike live, but unless they were watching Sky News that wouldn’t have happened. The BBC didn’t break into programming until that days episode of Neighbours had finished about 2.20pm BST which was was after the second plane struck and the realisation it wasn’t a tragic accident.

AnIndianWoman · 13/09/2023 14:27

HuwEdwardsBottom · 13/09/2023 14:04

It amazes me how many people claim they saw the second plane strike live, but unless they were watching Sky News that wouldn’t have happened. The BBC didn’t break into programming until that days episode of Neighbours had finished about 2.20pm BST which was was after the second plane struck and the realisation it wasn’t a tragic accident.

Sky News was free and a really popular news channel back then - bigger than BBC News

Russcoll · 13/09/2023 14:31

This reply has been deleted

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.

MonicaPluto · 13/09/2023 14:37

newnamethanks · 13/09/2023 10:56

Youu need to work a bit harder on your research OP. There are countless hours of 9/11 footage showing quite clearly what happened to the planes and passengers. Countless articles by relatives and witnesses. Why you feel its appropriate to ask on here is unfathomable to me. I'm sure 'ask mumsnet' isn't the first answer when you Google your question.

Nope, Work smarter, not harder.

If you don't know the answer to something and it's slowing you down and you're wasting time on it then ask other people (as OP did). Makes no sense to keep trawling through 'countless' hours of footage when she was already confused by it.

Why you feel like it's inappropriate is unfathomable to me. There's nothing wrong with the question.

MeadAndPie · 13/09/2023 14:39

It amazes me how many people claim they saw the second plane strike live, but unless they were watching Sky News that wouldn’t have happened.

I actually don't remember what we saw it in or if it was live - was in IT office on-line news sites all kept going down and everyone was trying to bring different ones up and TV in main meeting room was just on though suspect that would have been terrestrial channels.

Our management heard very quickly - half our offices were in USA and they were in work - and they'd been in a early phone/video conference with the american parent company and they had people on one of the planes who our managers knew - so we were looking for information very quickly and remember first reactions with first plane some terrible accident.

Russcoll · 13/09/2023 14:41

This reply has been deleted

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.