The Really Offensive Thing About the Viral 9/11 Math Problem Is It Gets 9/11 Facts Wrong

This was an actual high school math assignment from Newburyport High School in Massachusetts that’s drawing fire.

‘Flight 175, one of 9/11 planes, was traveling at 586 miles per hour when it hit the World Trade Center. It had traveled a distance of 440 miles before impact. How many minutes was the plane in the air?’

Naturally there is outrage. I’d certainly agree that a math problem about a hijacking and terrorist attack — without any additional context — is in poor taste. However a math problem as part of learning about the event strikes me as something that could be useful.

Unfortunately here it does not appear that there was context. But more importantly it’s also teaching wrong history and wrong math.

Here’s the flight path of United 175. That’s not 440 miles. (A direct path from Boston Logan to New York LaGuardia is 186 miles.) My best guess is the teacher simply got confused, since I’ve seen reports that American Airlines flight 11 — which was first to impact the World Trade Center — did so at a speed of 440 miles per hour.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Second the cruising speed on a Boeing 767-200 is going to be lower than 586 miles per hour (at least 10% lower). While the impact speed of the aircraft when it hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower has been reporting to be 590 miles per hour it simply wasn’t flying that fast for most of its journey. That’s just not how fast a 767-200 flies.

Going with the math problem for a moment, traveling 440 miles at a constant speed of 586 miles per hour would take 45 minutes.

United flight 175 was scheduled for an 8 a.m. departure. It pushed back at 7:58 a.m. and took off at 8:14 a.m. Impact was at 9:03 a.m. So the plane was in the air for 49 minutes. It didn’t travel 440 miles in that time, because most of its travel was at lower speeds.

By all means teach what happened on 9/11. Offer context for why it happened, and what the response to the attack was. And use math problems to engage directly in the learning.

But if you’re going to do that please start with getting facts right. Otherwise it really is just a math problem with random numbers with a story of mass murder attached.

About Gary Leff


More articles by Gary Leff »


  1. Idiots.

    Soon we will be seeing physics problems asking to calculate the force needed to saw off an infidel’s head.

  2. They were white terrorists acting as Muslims. Republicans Whites wanted a pretext to kill Muslims and steal their oil.

    Send all whites back to Europe. Ban them.

  3. Even more disturbing it was unclear if the teacher would be punished. If this happened in my district I would want a teacher like this fired. The total lack of judgement shows the person is not fit to be a teacher not to mention they don’t even know what they are talking about. What was the next question? Figuring out how many jews were killed by nazis with a gas chamber per hour? Would never want this teacher at the head of a class with my children.

  4. @Credit has someone who lived through the 9/11 attacks in NYC and went to ground zero in the immediate aftermath shut your mouth with that garbage.

  5. the president is a troll and so is credit.

    Gary, you wrote a post month’s ago soliciting reader feedback about banning consistently off-topic, annoying, trollish contributors. Seemed like most people felt that you should better moderate the comments, so WTH didn’t you take action?

Leave a Reply
