It was morning on a nice clear day...I bet New York and the WTC stood out pretty well.
This something that has always intrigued me as I have played around with Fs2002 and my couple of hundred hours PPL to work out how to hit a building with fast jet airliner (my head office
). Seems easy enough to do it visually, as some have said, using the autopilot mostly (no need for the FMC).
The question I have always wondered about is the weather limits they required to do this. Presumably this took a lot of planning, even for all flights to happen together, and they must have been reasonably sure that the weather would be suitable. In that event, were they capable of finding a building and hitting it in poor visibility and with a fair amount of low cloud? (i.e UK weather)
Does this make the UK a bit safer, given the unpredictablity of the weather? Even on nice days there is usually a lot of low cloud - you tend to notice these things when you are a mere PPL.
If they could do it in poor weather, I would have thought that this would make the experience you can get on FS2002 much more significant. But trying to find a building at low level (below cloud) at airliner speeds would require a lot more than FS2002 could give you.