Amanda Angelika wrote:

In news:e7glrq02u5p@news3.newsguy.com,
Cardinal Chunder <cc@foo.no.spam.xyzabcfghllaa.com> typed:

Anyone with a few hours practice could have managed it. Flying an
airborne aircraft is not difficult. These guys even took some flight
lessons and had instruction manuals. It would have been relatively
straightforward to steer the aircraft and control its speed in the way
they did.

Of course I'm over generalising, because some people appear to believe
that simple hand / eye coordination is beyond anyone's capacity.

Well actually you have to rely on large amounts of technology to fly a
modern passenger jet. simple hand eye coordination plays very little part in
it. In fact in most modern aircraft there are no mechanical linkages between
the flight deck and the actual flight controls. everything is electronic.

Bullshit. All manned passenger aircraft have some kind of control stick or column for controlling pitch & roll, pedals for rudders and a throttle for power. Turning an aircraft is as easy to do as moving the stick. Changing the speed is as easy as moving the throttle. All aircraft contain this same basic aircraft instrumentation even if some FBW systems. The 767 definitely does.

If you have no intention to land, drop the gears, raise flaps, following flight plans or anything else then you can learn all you need to know in a few lessons.

And fly-by-wire is irrelevant for a number of reasons, not least because 767s are not fly-by-wire.

This is why one is not allowed to use a mobile phone in an aircraft because
the spurious emissions from a mobile phone could potentially interfere with
electronic circuitry that controls the actual plane, so obviously presents a
safety hazard.

Bollocks. Its more for the benefit of mobile networks base stations confused by large numbers of phones ripping over their network. Phones pose such a "threat" that many airlines are looking to install micro cells on their aircraft.

But the main reason why hand eye coordination isn't enough is because they
travel at high speed and require relatively large distances to manoeuvre.
Distances that exceed human perceptual capabilities.

Complete and total bollocks. Hundreds of commercial and military pilots from WWI, WWII, Korea onwards would disagree with you. Do you think jet pilots in 1949 used sophisticated computer systems? Do you think they used *any* computer systems?

In saying that however GPS technology is available on some mobile phones,
PDAs and laptop computers and I dare say aircraft also have such technology
on board. GPS would have made it relatively easy to navigate.

Whether the terrorists used GPS or simply looked out of the window for the extremely recognizable Manhattan skyline is totally irrelevant.