1978: When Men Were Men and Crash Physics Were Crash Physics

Though watching this, you can see why they faked the 9/11 crashes! Two reasons-- first, here the building doesn't completely blow up, and second this kind of (realistic) crash leaves too much plane debris on the outside of the building. Both of these would have been undesirable for 9/11.

I'm not sure how they did the special effects here-- the burned out building they show with plane debris being carted away almost suggests they had a real plane (a 747 no less) crash into a building! But I imagine they used models-- plus the explosion looks fakish-- I think it's hard to scale down something like a massive fiery explosion.

Ahh-- this link says they used models:

I also worked on the Richard Burton and Lee Remick film THE MEDUSA TOUCH, where a jumbo jet crashes into a tall building. We had three models of the jumbo jet, one four foot long and one tiny kit about ten inches long. Whenever actually had to make them, just paint the fictitious airline details on the side. If you know the film, Richard Burton looks at this jumbo jet and uses telekinesis to make it crash into the building, which was supposed to be Centre Point. Well, Centre Point's no good for anything else, is it? A company in Feltham made the building. We wanted a shot of the four-foot model approaching the camera for dramatic effect, and guess who got the job of standing by the camera holding his hand out to stop the plane hitting it. We were literally twenty feet up on a gantry. The plane flew down the wires on the first shot, I put my handout, and when the model hit my hand all the wires broke, and the model fell. Brian Johnson ran across the studio and caught it as it went down, and it was perfectly all right. Well done! Brian. He got a round of applause.