The planes used as weapons in the 9/11 attack

I was trying to find out more about the actual weapons used in 9/11.

Do we know how many passengers were on each plane? Well, yes. I was unaware of how many people must have been killed in the planes when they crashed. It seems 232 passengers and crew? died. All the planes were really empty on those flights.It could have been far, far worse. I wonder if all the passengers were eventually identified?

This article is worth archiving here on my alien planet blog

The planes of 9/11

Flying weapons.

• 1 Comment

• By Eric Benson 
• Published Aug 27, 2011

P4: The Fleet

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American Airlines Flight 11 was a Boeing 767-200ER built in 1987. The “ER” stands for “extended range”; the plane could fly from New York to Beijing nonstop.

United Flight 175 was also a Boeing 767-200ER, built four years earlier, in 1983. The 767 had debuted the year before.

American Airlines Flight 77 was a Boeing 757-200 built in 1991, four feet shorter and four feet slimmer than the 767-200ER.

United Airlines Flight 93 was also a 757-200, built in 1996. The model was discontinued in 2005.
Illustrations by Martin Ansin

The first of the four planes [P4] to depart was American ­Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767-200ER. It was 159 feet and two inches long, with a sixteen-foot-six-inch-wide body that allowed for two aisles. The plane made daily flights between Boston and Los Angeles, and when it took off at 7:59 a.m. on the morning of the eleventh, it carried only 81 passengers in its 158 seats. Forty-seven minutes later, it crashed into the North Tower at 440 mph, carrying 9,717 gallons of jet fuel, 14,000 gallons under capacity.


United Flight 175, also a Boeing 767-200ER, was the second. Like American Airlines 11, it was scheduled to fly between ­Logan and LAX. When United 175 took off at 8:14 a.m., it was even lighter than the American flight: Only 56 out of 168 seats were occupied. When it crashed into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m., traveling 540 mph, it had 9,118 gallons of fuel in its tanks.


American Airlines Flight 77 was the third plane to take off that day, a Boeing 757-200. AA77 left Washington, D.C., at 8:20 a.m. bound for Los Angeles. It was two-thirds empty, with 58 passengers in its 176 seats, and its tanks were 4,000 gallons under its 11,500-gallon capacity. It crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., ­flying 530 mph.


The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was also a 757-200. It was delayed for 42 minutes past its ­scheduled 8 a.m. departure from Newark bound for San Francisco. When it finally took off, it carried only 37 ­passengers—its capacity was 182—and it was loaded with a little over 7,000 gallons of fuel. It crashed at 560 mph into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m.


The two models—the 767 and the 757—were introduced within a year of one another in the early eighties, when Boeing was fighting lackluster sales, dwindling cash reserves, and a surging European rival, Airbus. The company marketed the planes to airlines as cost-savers, emphasizing their fuel efficiency and their modified cockpits, which allowed two pilots to do the work of three. Crews testing both aircraft gave them high marks for precise handling.