I’ve heard that Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) started thinking about spontaneous order because of an incident in the Great War. Austrian forces were routed in a battle in Italy, and fled leaderless through the mountains; and far more of them got home safely than were expected to.
This says thousands of people at the WTC survived because they ignored advice from on high.
I would go farther than that and say that distributed communications (mostly via cellphones) hae been considerably more helpful than official communications, not only in the WTC case, but also in the more recent Katrina disaster.
In the WTC case the effect of (unautorised) use of cellphones was to get the word out hat something was wrong and that, I believe, is what caused the failure of the 4th hijacking event. Once the word got out the trick became useless…it could never be pulled off again and the airport security measures since then have had nothing to do with the fact that there have been no further attempts. (I don’t want to get started on a rant about how intrusive and lame those measures really are.)
In the Katrina case I found myself thinking about all the time and money they were wasting scouting the area in choppers looking for survivors…If those survivors had communications they would be in a much better position to identify themselves.
Emergency services radio systems all over the country are currently being redesigned for interoperability. None of this redesign will give access to the public who have been able to make the best use of the technology.