A 10-lb sledge hammer dropping 1 story or 10-ft creates a force of 10,000-lbs. That is 1,000 times the force the it took just to hold the hammer static in the air. The same goes for the building. The tower was built to hold less than 20 times its static downward force load at a given height. Now dropping a portion of the building 10-ft increased the downward force by 1,000 times. The aircraft took out 3 floors, So that initial collapse impact was likely after a 30 foot drop.
On top of that for every crushed floor the moving mass gained weight & mass. This kept on increasing the force as the building fell. So a building built to hold 20 times it's weight will give very little resistance to slow a force of 1,000 times it's weight.
A one pound hammer can dent 60,000 psi steel because it hits with a force greater than 60,000 psi.
A hammer is a force amplifier that works by converting mechanical work into kinetic energy and back.
In the swing that precedes each blow, a certain amount of kinetic energy gets stored in the hammer's head, equal to the length D of the swing times the force f produced by the muscles of the arm and by gravity. When the hammer strikes, the head gets stopped by an opposite force coming from the target; which is equal and opposite to the force applied by the head to the target. If the target is a hard and heavy object, or if it is resting on some sort of anvil, the head can travel only a very short distance d before stopping. Since the stopping force F times that distance must be equal to the head's kinetic energy, it follows that F will be much greater than the original driving force f — roughly, by a factor D/d. In this way, great strength is not needed to produce a force strong enough to bend steel, or crack the hardest stone.
Effect of the head's mass - The amount of energy delivered to the target by the hammer-blow is equivalent to one half the mass of the head times the square of the head's speed at the time of impact (E={mv^2 \over 2}). While the energy delivered to the target increases linearly with mass, it increases quadratically with the speed.