Reddit alerts us to the existence of an unsettling thread on aviation site airliners.net dated November 30, 2000, in which forumers debated whether or not the World Trade Center “could survive an 767-300 impact.”
Several commenters chastised the original poster for asking such a morbid question, but there are some eerily prescient responses in the thread: While the general (though not unanimous) consensus was that the WTC would stay standing, but with heavy damage, and most (though not all) repliers took the question as referring to an accidental crash rather than a terrorist attack, they predicted the danger to people on the ground as well as in the buildings and in the plane.
The most haunting response comes from someone called Meister808: “This scenario is really hellish… I think the flight disaster record (Tenerife, 1977, 582 dead) might get reset by a lot. You would easily have 1500 or more, since you would have a 200 in the plane, at least 500 in the building, and a real s*itload on the ground. If the building managed to fall, there might be 5 or 6 thousand dead. Oh well. That’s why they put a/c lights on buildings…”
See also: Phil Bump‘s piece on 9/11 remembered in old screengrabs from news sites.
(airliners.net via Reddit)
