Have seen this number several times now and it's still dumbfounding that only 5-6000 people are missing/persumed dead, not to take away from the rescue effort, but perhaps the perceived notion that all New Yorkers do is work is not true and lots of them don't start work till later in the morning.
quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That is an amazing 99.5% survival rate. In addition, the plane seems to have come in too low, too early to affect a large portion of the building. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have seen this number several times now and it's still dumbfounding that only 5-6000 people are missing/persumed dead, not to take away from the rescue effort, but perhaps the perceived notion that all New Yorkers do is work is not true and lots of them don't start work till later in the morning. Umm, the figure you quoted was describing the Pentagon, not NYC.
I read a few days ago that the "missing" estimate may actually be overstated, and the final toll will be closer to 3,000 dead. Hopefully, that is true. The relative emptiness of the planes isn't surprising -- supposedly, the terrorists intentionally picked flights that would be mostly empty in order to make the hijackings more manageable. And, of course, they wanted the largest possible planes because they carried the most fuel, so those goals would combine to produce a high percentage of unfilled seats. An ironic bit of good luck is that the first plane to strike hit the building so high up, making it easier for the vast majority of the employees to evacuate before it collapsed. The plane that hit the second tower crashed closer to the middle of the building, so I guess a lot of the employees in the top half must have been smart enough to bail out when the first tower was attacked. Did anyone from the upper floors actually manage to descend past the crash-site floors in either building (i.e., did a stairwell survive intact for at least a brief time)? I haven't been morbid enough to try and find out.
It is virtually impossible to plan when a flight will be empty or full. I've been bumped off of flights in the past that were nowhere near full; it is very possible for a flight to fill up in minutes, even an hour or less before it is scheduled to take off. They were lucky.
