Latest revision as of 19:55, 27 June 2012
One question frequently raised about the 9/11 attacks is whether the alleged pilots, particularly (although not only) Hani Hanjour, had the skills to carry out their tasks. Nila Sagadevan uses the following quotes by way of illustration:
Looks like a compelling case, right? But as usual, it pays to find out more about where these quotes have come from.
The comment about Atta, for instance, dates back to October of 2000. He undertook months more training after this, and qualified for a commercial licence, so it’s perhaps unreasonable to use this old quote as a summary of his flying on 9/11.
Googling for the Al-Shehhi quote returns only references to the Sagadevan article, which doesn’t explain where it came from originally.
Khalid Al-Mihdhar was not one of the pilots according to the official account, neither was Salem Al-Hazmi, so any assessment of their abilities seems irrelevant.
Some of the quote about Hanjour is correct (“I'm still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all”). This comes from a “former employee” at JetTech, a flying school Hanjour attended in January and February of 2001. The rest of the quote didn’t originally refer to Hanjour, though: it’s somehow been assembled from a comment about Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi:
To see whether old quotes are really relevant, it might be worth considering the training the pilots received. Take Atta and Shehhi, for instance, as reported in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Atta started flight instruction at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, and both Atta and Shehhi subsequently enrolled in the Accelerated Pilot Program at that school. By the end of July, both of them took solo flights, and by mid-August they passed the private pilot airman test.
Page 224, 9/11 Commission Report
A reasonable start, although there were problems later.
In mid-September,Atta and Shehhi applied to change their immigration status from tourist to student, stating their intention to study at Huffman until September 1, 2001. In late September, they decided to enroll at Jones Aviation in Sarasota, Florida, about 20 miles north of Venice. According to the instructor at Jones, the two were aggressive, rude, and sometimes even fought with him to take over the controls during their training flights. In early October, they took the Stage I exam for instruments rating at Jones Aviation and failed. Very upset, they said they were in a hurry because jobs awaited them at home. Atta and Shehhi then returned to Huffman.
Page 224, 9/11 Commission Report
Jarrah was making progress in the meantime.
Jarrah obtained a single-engine private pilot certificate in early August.
Page 224, 9/11 Commission Report
And Atta and Shehhi had more success later in 2000, while Jarrah moved to simulator training.
Atta and Shehhi finished up at Huffman and earned their instrument certificates from the FAA in November. In mid-December 2000, they passed their commercial pilot tests and received their licenses.They then began training to fly large jets on a flight simulator. At about the same time, Jarrah began simulator training, also in Florida but at a different center. By the end of 2000, less than six months after their arrival, the three pilots on the East Coast were simulating flights on large jets.
Page 227, 9/11 Commission Report
Not perfect or the best pilots, then, but maybe the term "flight school dropout" is a little misleading here.
Of course the more realistic target for these claims is Hani Hanjour. Here's one comment.
The site quotes this NewsDay article:
Even the 9/11 Commission Report joins in:
For his flight training in Arizona with his two friends, see ibid. (Feb. 24, 2000, entry citing 265A-NY-280530-IN, serial 4468). Hanjour initially was nervous if not fearful in flight training. FBI letterhead memorandum, investigation of Lotfi Raissi, Jan. 4, 2004, p. 11. His instructor described him as a terrible pilot. FBI letterhead memorandum, interview of James McRae, Sept. 17, 2001.
Page 520, 9/11 Commission Report
Read these quotes alone, though, and you might be mislead. The first seems to suggest that he hadn't learned to fly by August 2001, however he'd actually obtained both a private pilot and commercial license some time earlier.
In 1996, Hanjour returned to the United States to pursue flight training,after being rejected by a Saudi flight school. He checked out flight schools in Florida, California, and Arizona; and he briefly started at a couple of them before returning to Saudi Arabia. In 1997, he returned to Florida and then, along with two friends, went back to Arizona and began his flight training there in earnest. After about three months, Hanjour was able to obtain his private pilot's license. Several more months of training yielded him a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 1999...
Settling in Mesa, Hanjour began refresher training at his old school,Arizona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties because his English was not good enough.The instructor advised him to discontinue but Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa.An instructor there found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing.Again, Hanjour persevered; he completed the initial training by the end of March 2001.
Page 225/227, 9/11 Commission Report
Hanjour continued his training with Jarrah throughout at least some of the summer. Again, there were problems in both cases, but they persisted.
Jarrah and Hanjour also received additional training and practice flights in the early summer.A few days before departing on his cross-country test flight, Jarrah flew from Fort Lauderdale to Philadelphia, where he trained at Hortman Aviation and asked to fly the Hudson Corridor, a low-altitude "hallway" along the Hudson River that passes New York landmarks like the World Trade Center. Heavy traffic in the area can make the corridor a dangerous route for an inexperienced pilot. Because Hortman deemed Jarrah unfit to fly solo, he could fly this route only with an instructor.
Hanjour, too, requested to fly the Hudson Corridor about this same time,at Air Fleet Training Systems in Teterboro, New Jersey, where he started receiving ground instruction soon after settling in the area with Hazmi. Hanjour flew the Hudson Corridor, but his instructor declined a second request because of what he considered Hanjour's poor piloting skills. Shortly thereafter, Hanjour switched to Caldwell Flight Academy in Fairfield, New Jersey, where he rented small aircraft on several occasions during June and July. In one such instance on July 20, Hanjour--likely accompanied by Hazmi--rented a plane from Caldwell and took a practice flight from Fairfield to Gaithersburg, Maryland, a route that would have allowed them to fly near Washington, D.C. Other evidence suggests that Hanjour may even have returned to Arizona for flight simulator training earlier in June.
Page 242, 9/11 Commission Report
Even Hanjour wasn't exactly a "flight school dropout", then. He had a private and commercial pilots licence, and a not insignificant amount of flying experience, including some simulator work (although on 737's). And while there are no shortage of scathing quotes about him, they're not always as they seem. Here's one, for example:
So does that mean he couldn't fly? Here's another story on the same person:
Here she's talking about his skills in English, and expresses no doubt whatsoever that Hanjour could have been involved.
An early instructor isn't quite so damning:
One 9/11 Commission footnote (to Chapter 7) is relatively positive.
170. FBI report, "Summary of Penttbom Investigation," Feb. 29, 2004, pp. 5257. Hanjour successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by an instructor at Congressional Air Charters of Gaithersburg, Maryland, landing at a small airport with a difficult approach.The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation. Eddie Shalev interview (Apr.9, 2004).
And as Marcel Bernard pointed out, the hijackers wouldn't have required all the skills of a regular pilot:
People will still say that the Pentagon attack was too difficult for Hanjour to have pulled off, however other articles quote pilots saying that isn’t the case.
New American included comments from pilots in a general piece on "9-11 Conspiracy Fact & Fiction":
...In Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, Eric Hufschmid says: "I would say it is absurd to believe an inexperienced pilot could fly such a plane a few millimeters above the ground. The flight path of this plane is enough to convince me that no human was in control of it. I think only a computer is capable of flying an airplane in such a tricky manner. If terrorists flew the plane, they would qualify as the World's Greatest Pilots since they did tricks with a commercial aircraft that I doubt the best Air Force pilots could do."
Ralph Omholt's "skydrifter" website claims: "No pilot will claim to be able to hit such a spot as the Pentagon base under any conditions in a 757 doing 300 knots. As to the clearly alleged amateur pilots: IMPOSSIBLE!"
"Impossible"? "No pilot will claim...?" Well, we did not have any difficulty finding pilots who disagreed. Ronald D. Bull, a retired United Airlines pilot, in Jupiter, Florida, told The New American, "It's not that difficult, and certainly not impossible," noting that it's much easier to crash intentionally into a target than to make a controlled landing. "If you're doing a suicide run, like these guys were doing, you'd just keep the nose down and push like the devil," says Capt. Bull, who flew 727s, 747s, 757s, and 767s for many years, internationally and domestically, including into the Washington, D.C., airports.
George Williams of Waxhaw, North Carolina, piloted 707s, 727s, DC-10s, and 747s for Northwest Airlines for 38 years. "I don't see any merit to those arguments whatsoever," Capt. Williams told us. "The Pentagon is a pretty big target and I'd say hitting it was a fairly easy thing to do."
According to 9/11 "investigator" Dick Eastman, whose wild theories are posted on the American Patriot Friends Network and many other Internet sites, Flight 77 was part of an elaborate deception in which a remote-controlled F-16 "killer jet" actually hit the Pentagon, while the 757 swooped over the Pentagon and landed at Reagan National Airport! "With its engines off," says Eastman, Flight 77 silently "coasted" in to the airport and blended in with other air traffic. "There would be few people to see Flight 77 come through, and those who did would doubtless assume that it was yet another routine flight over Reagan National," he claims.
"That's so far-fetched it's beyond ludicrous," says Capt. Williams. "I've flown into Reagan [National Airport] hundreds of times and you can't just sneak in and 'blend in' without air traffic controllers knowing about it and without other pilots and witnesses noticing."
Besides, as Capt. Ron Bull points out, the Eastman scenario would require piloting skills far beyond what it would take to hit the Pentagon. "I've flown into Reagan National many times and my first trip in a 757 was no picnic," he says. "I had to really work at it, and that was after 25 years of experience flying big jets. Any scenario that has the 757 [Flight 77] taking a flight path over the Pentagon and landing at National unobserved is proposing something that is far more difficult � and far more difficult to believe � than flying the plane into the Pentagon. It's just not credible."
The New American
And Salon's "Ask the Pilot" also commented on the issue:
As I've explained in at least one prior column, Hani Hanjour's flying was hardly the show-quality demonstration often described. It was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation's capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with help from the 757's autopilot. Striking a stationary object -- even a large one like the Pentagon -- at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon's lawn.
It's true there's only a vestigial similarity between the cockpit of a light trainer and the flight deck of a Boeing. To put it mildly, the attackers, as private pilots, were completely out of their league. However, they were not setting out to perform single-engine missed approaches or Category 3 instrument landings with a failed hydraulic system. For good measure, at least two of the terrorist pilots had rented simulator time in jet aircraft, but striking the Pentagon, or navigating along the Hudson River to Manhattan on a cloudless morning, with the sole intention of steering head-on into a building, did not require a mastery of airmanship. The perpetrators had purchased manuals and videos describing the flight management systems of the 757/767, and as any desktop simulator enthusiast will tell you, elementary operation of the planes' navigational units and autopilots is chiefly an exercise in data programming. You can learn it at home. You won't be good, but you'll be good enough.
"They'd done their homework and they had what they needed," says a United Airlines pilot (name withheld on request), who has flown every model of Boeing from the 737 up. "Rudimentary knowledge and fearlessness."
"As everyone saw, their flying was sloppy and aggressive," says Michael (last name withheld), a pilot with several thousand hours in 757s and 767s. "Their skills and experience, or lack thereof, just weren't relevant."
"The hijackers required only the shallow understanding of the aircraft," agrees Ken Hertz, an airline pilot rated on the 757/767. "In much the same way that a person needn't be an experienced physician in order to perform CPR or set a broken bone."
That sentiment is echoed by Joe d'Eon, airline pilot and host of the "Fly With Me" podcast series. "It's the difference between a doctor and a butcher," says d'Eon.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060916205041/http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/index_np.html/
Experienced pilot Giulio Bernacchia agrees:
In my opinion the official version of the fact is absolutely plausible, does not require exceptional circumstances, bending of any law of physics or superhuman capabilities. Like other (real pilots) have said, the manoeuvres required of the hijackers were within their (very limited) capabilities, they were performed without any degree of finesse and resulted in damage to the targets only after desperate overmanoeuvring of the planes. The hijackers took advantage of anything that might make their job easier, and decided not to rely on their low piloting skills. It is misleading to make people believe that the hijackers HAD to possess superior pilot skills to do what they did.
Read more in a piece he kindly contributed to this site, “File:Another Expert.pdf”