Remote controlled aircraft
 

HI guys,
I'm a commercial pilot and i'm in a course of collision in an Italian Forum about the 9/11 events discussion. Those people say that the aircraft could have been diverted and controlled to the target by somebody on the ground becouse the terrorist would not had the skill to modify the route on the FMC and fly direct to the target.
i think that after 260 hours , MEP CPL IR , and 30 hours on the 737 sim, is not impossible to direct a 757 to the WTC even flying erratically.
But most important i never heard about the possibility to control an aircraft from the ground. I'm talking about a commercial Jet in a normal pax operation.

Can some thech person please tell me if this aircraft remote control from the ground is somethink that actually exist ?

Thank you ,

Franco

Remote controlled aircraft (designed as such) exist. There is a well-known video of one used for crash testing at NASA Dryden (Edwards AFB).

The suggestion that the 9/11 aircraft could have been remotely controlled is held only by wild and ignorant conspiracy theorists, and you are on the wrong forum for such a discussion.

Try JetBlast.

(Speaking hypothetically in the case of WTC and the Pentagon - )

There are a couple of "remote control" methodologies - the most primitive being the one used by RC modelers 50+ years ago. The "pilot" had to have eye contact with the RC plane and its environment, and operated the controls surface(s) directly through his transmitter.

Add a forward viewing video camera and you can aim it pretty effectively - remote controlled bombs work like this. There's good bombs-eye video of a RR bridge in Yugoslavia being hit with one.

Stability augmentation - steering via autopilot - makes it easier to control.

Finally, you can have an autonomous UAV like Global Hawk - you program it with an objective, and a base for recovery, and away it goes on its own. :eek:

But there's no good evidence any of this applied on 9/11.

I looked at some of the conspiracy videos and pages on the net a while after 9/11. While there are one or two tiny weeny pieces of info that bear slightly more than a passing thought, most of the conclusions they come up with are total rubbish. They exhibit a complete misunderstanding of flight control, explosives and flying ability.

For instance they suggest that the 757 that hit the pentagon couldn't have done the manoeuvre that it did - well as a 757 pilot I can tell you that it can - although I've never actually done such a thing. I have however flown an aircraft with the same rate of descent they said was "impossible" and turned in a similar radius, both in the aircraft and the sim.

The only piece of 9/11 myth that bears the slightest thought is the damage to the pentagon - I would have expected more but then I wouldn't be surprised if the pentagon was built much stronger than your average building. At the time it was reported as a truck bomb, then revised to an aircraft. This is the only bit that bears a bit of thought - and I'm not saying the conspiracy people are right - but I would ignore the rest of it as complete supposition, misunderstanding and hype.

There were also quite a few eye witnesses who saw the plane and the impact...

http://whatreallyhappened.com/911_pe...witnesses.html

Try Jet Blast
 

As Fitter2 points out, this is a forum for flight testing.
As for controlling aircraft remotely, of course this is possible, albeit difficult, in fact I find flying aircraft 'in situ' much easier than remotely.
As to whether this was the case on the 11th of September is a discussion for another forum.

A Predator B UAV operated by the US Customs and Border Protection Agency crashed on 25 April 2006 after the 'ground pilot' tried to re-establish control using a backup control station when the primary control station 'locked up', something which it had done on 16 previous occasions in 4 months! The crash occured due to an inadvertant engine shutdown whilst it was in a 'safe' holding pattern.