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There was an article in last week's WSJ (I think the day after the crash) about other planes and other buildings.....a bomber in 1945 into the Empire State Building, in Miami, and some other cities. No mention of SF.

mk

I've seen news station's copters and planes flying over SF all the time. But they rarely go close to the buidings in the financial district.
With 1Rincon as high as it'll be and with it's relative isolation from the other highrises, could it be at higher risk for an accident?

Not to forget the blue angels.

I'm a pilot, so I think I'm quite qualified to respond.

It's quite possible to fly small planes over SF, and I do it often. But one hard-and-fast rule, which was clearly broken in the NY case, is that over a congested area, you can't fly any lower than 1000 feet above the highest obstacle within a 2000 foot radius of the airplane. So there's really no way a NY-style incident can occur in SF unless somebody is really breaking the rules (and a pilot doing so would probably lose his or her license to fly.)

I won't go into speculation (of which I have plenty) about the New York accident, but it boils down to a complete lack of preflight planning and major stupidity, in my opinion.

buildings are not designed for an airplane crash. we're not talking about nucelar plants here. they are designed for gravity load, wind load, and seismic load. these will exceed the impact of a small plane, not withstanding the effects of fires.

The media loves to stir people up with the idea that small planes could be used by terrorists. The reality is that small planes are only able to carry a small amount of weight (most small planes have a "useful load" of less than 1000 pounds, and that includes fuel, which is usually 30-40% of that.)

It would be far more efficient, and a lot easier, for a terrorist to load up a U-Haul truck or even a Nissan Sentra with explosives; each can carry far more weight than a typical small plane. And you can drive right up to just about any building in town without attracting any attention at all.

The few examples we've seen of small planes running into buildings shows that they basically bounce off with minimal damage. There may be a fire, of course, but nothing on the scale of 9/11.

The previous poster is entirely correct that the impact of a small plane is not going to bring down a big building.