The photographer, for a start, has to be out in the street: no-one inside a building would be able to both see the plane and discern its direction, in time to capture it; someone on a rooftop might, but would that be a credible story? Filming from above the streets — in a helicopter, perhaps — might be a possibility, but that might also look just as suspect as being on a roof. The black arrow shows the approximate path of the plane as it flies over the Western Union Building (C) towards the North Tower (G); anywhere west of this can be ruled out as involving filming towards the sun, even if only momentarily or in panning past it. Areas in the distance — say, beyond A (the AT&T Building), which is three quarters of a mile away — can also be excluded because the plane would be too small: to be identifiable as one, it would have to be filmed through a zoom lens, which would be too risky. West of the arrow is out; beyond A is out; inside a building is out; flying is out; what does that leave us?

In the previous section, six streets appeared — from maps — to be candidates; this photograph suggests that three of those — Cortland Avenue, Lafayette Street and Centre Street — can actually be forgotten about, since they are apparently hidden behind buildings on their west sides and in other streets; they are difficult, if not impossible, to make out in the photograph. Even Broadway (3) is barely visible — you can only infer its presence from the buildings along its sides. The only streets that are clearly visible in the right area — east of the plane, and reasonably near the tower (and these are the only streets — there are no lanes between them longer than one block) are both north-south.

This visibility aspect also applies in reverse: if you can't see the street from the Trade Center, you can't see the Trade Center from the street — which eliminates virtually all east-west streets — and a lot of north-south ones, unless the photographer is on the right side, or in the middle of the street, which tends to be dangerous — to most folk. And this view, remember, is from more than 1,300 feet up (Floor 107) — higher than Flight 11's actual impact — and taken from the South Tower, so even some of the areas visible in the photograph might have only a limited view of the North Tower. Building B in Map 1, the Tribeca Grand Hotel, is missing from this photograph because it was only built in the late 1990s; likewise, E, the Tribeca Tower, was only built in 1991; but the only effect of adding these two to the picture would be to even further restrict the filming options.

From where else in this photograph could the plane have been filmed, to make it look plausibly accidental? There are effectively only two streets available — West Broadway (1) and Church (2). But West Broadway is too obvious, for reasons given in the previous section. Who would believe a shot from directly ahead of the tower, showing only one of its faces? Nobody would accept that as an accident. Moving even one street away — because these streets are so wide apart — would show two faces, and would make it look as if the photographer was nowhere near the tower, away on the other side of the city somewhere — especially when you could only see the top third of the building. One street to the east of West Broadway is Church Street. And if Church Street is the only remaining candidate, can we narrow the choice down to a specific place along its length?

Yes, we can — time and distance would suggest somewhere near the Canal Street end, on the east side of the street — because as the photograph proves, you can't see the Twin Towers from the west side (or vice versa). Narrowing down even further, what we need is a large building — not necessarily enormous, but big enough to act as a filming prop, to hide the plane until its last two seconds, and catch it from behind, avoiding having to track its flight. Fortunately New York is littered with large buildings, and the largest one in this area is the one marked A in the picture, with the point where Naudet and his firemen friends "just happened" to be hanging around marked as a red spot to the right of it. This spot is overwhelmingly, in several different ways, the best place he could have filmed the plane — and it's absolutely precisely where he did film it. What produces a result like that? Can anyone seriously believe it was luck? Or do we not now have a far better case that it was planning?

Go to Part 7