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3. is really unlikely. Where would you land a Boeing 777 without anybody noticing? The aircraft is too big to land on an improvised or remote runway. And runways which could be used are usually at active airports, near towns, or on military installations.

And why didn't the hijackers contact the authorities by now?

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Do you have any sort of special knowledge here? I've read numerous stories which quoted people with aviation knowledge who suggested that a 777 could be put down on a wide variety of surfaces including but not limited to hard dirt and stretches of highway. The latter, of course, might attract some attention unless the highway was abandoned, but I imagine there are any number of hard, flat surfaces of greater than 3000 feet in length in the world, for example in the Kazakh steppes, that may be remote enough to make a covert landing mostly under the cover of night.

We've been told in ideal conditions, low weight (fuel mostly gone from burning or dumping it) and about sea level altitude a generic 777 can land on an 800 meter/2,600 foot strip. Add weight and/or altitude and the length goes up, but not impossibly.

We also don't have to assume a successful landing, just an intent of one, e.g. the plane could have crashed before then or the landing could have been ugly.

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