Boundary Conditions for the 9/11 Hijackers, Part 2: The Pilot Hijackers

     In the first part of this four-part series, I mentioned the boundary conditions faced by the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.  The plan called for four pilots when not even one pilot was available.  Instead of altering the plan, which is what most strategists would do, this strategist recruited four young men who had never sat at the cockpit of even the smallest of airplanes.

     What follows is the training they received, supposedly in hopes that it would be enough to qualify them to fly complex and difficult maneuvers from the cockpits of Boeing 757 airliners.  Judge for yourself whether Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Hani Hanjour, and Ziad Samir Jarrah met the boundary conditions for a successful completion of their respective operations.  Bear in mind that, unless stated otherwise, all the information in this article came either from 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 7, from Wikipedia articles, or from other established sources.

     Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi (the alleged pilot hijackers of AA11 and UA175, respectively) arrived in the United States in June 2000 and took flight training on small airplanes at Huffman Aviation from July 6 through August 7, 2000, as part of Huffman's "Accelerated Pilot Program."   The term is misleading, because their training was exclusively on a Cessna 172, for which they received instrument ratings in November.  On December 29, they went to Opa-Locka Airport, also in Florida, and practiced on a Boeing 727—not 757—simulator. That, apparently, was the extent of their flight training.

     Between the two of them, Atta was clearly the pilot. Huffman Aviation witnesses told the 9/11 Commission that they’d never seen Marwan al-Shehhi at the controls of an airplane. Huffman Aviation employee Anne Greaves said in an interview, “It was always Atta.”

     Here’s what Wikipedia, the Readers Digest of the dot-com generation, says about Hani Hanjour, the alleged hijacker pilot of UA77:

     “[I]n January 2001, Arizona JetTech flight school managers reported him to the FAA at least five times because his English was inadequate for the commercial pilot’s certificate he had already obtained. It took him five hours to complete an oral exam meant to last just two hours, said Peggy Chevrette. Hanjour failed UA English classes with a 0.26 GPA and a JetTech manager said “He could not fly at all.” His FAA certificate had become invalid late in 1999 when he failed to take a mandatory medical examination. In February, Hanjour began advanced simulator training (for a Boeing 737) in Mesa, Arizona.” 

     Here's what History Commons has to say of Hani Hanjour's training on the 737-200 simulator:

     "9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour practices on a Boeing 737-200 simulator for a total of 21 hours at the JetTech International flight school in Phoenix, Arizona. Hanjour also attends ground school and pays just under $7,500 for the training. Despite only completing 21 of his originally scheduled 34 hours of simulator training, according to the FBI this is the best-trained of the four hijacker pilots (see Spring-Summer 2001). However, an instructor comments: 'Student made numerous errors during performance… including a lack of understanding of some basic concepts… Some of the concepts involved in large jet systems cannot be fully comprehended by someone with only small prop plane experience.' [US DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA; ALEXANDRIA DIVISION, 7/31/2006 ] The school contacts the FAA to warn it of Hanjour’s poor English and flying skills (see January-February 2001)." (emphasis added) (link)

     In August 2001, only a few weeks before the 9/11 hijackings, Hanjour tried to rent a single engine Cessna 172 from Freeway Airport in Maryland. He was declined when they saw that he had difficulty controlling and landing the plane. (link to source)  Bear in mind that Hani Hanjour was alleged to have executed a perfect 380-degree turn during a steep dive and flown a Boeing 757-200 barely twenty feet above the ground for over a mile before crashing into the first floor of the Pentagon without messing up the neatly manicured lawn.

     Ziad Samir Jarrah didn’t require any flying skills to crash a plane into a few square miles of open field in Pennsylvania. I could have done that myself, and probably would have, though not intentionally. Still, let’s not leave out his pilot training.

     Jarrah took flying lessons at Florida Fight Training, not far from Huffman Aviation, from June 2000 until January 2001. Even today, Florida Flight Training’s fleet of airplanes range from the Cessna 152 to the Piper Turbo Seneca II.  

     Now I ask you the question I asked in the first part of this series, and ask you one more question:

1. If you were planning the most sophisticated terrorist act in history—one that required superb abilities in piloting a Boeing 757—would you have picked as your pilots people who didn’t know how to fly, and try to train them to fly a Boeing 757 in time for the operation to succeed?

2. Given what you now know about the alleged 9/11 hijacker pilots, do you think they had the skill to handle Boeing 757s as described in the official version of events?

     If your answer to either of those questions is, “No,” then the official version of events is a lie. The terror attacks on September 11, 2001, were an inside job.

     A person looking back on historical events tends to see them as though they were inevitable. One may therefore argue that Osama bin Laden had to "make do with what he had."  In reality, though, that's not the way successful projects are planned and carried out. Every successful project takes boundary conditions into account.

  As I pointed out in the previous article in this series, boundary conditions are conditions that must exist for a project to succeed. Boundary conditions may also be seen as the conditions that influence whether a project can succeed.  If your resources fail to meet even one of the boundary conditions, you must either alter your plan or abandon it altogether.

     In the official version of 9/11, Osama bin Laden needed pilots for the project to succeed. He didn't have pilots. In fact, many of the boundary conditions for the official version of the 9/11 attacks simply did not exist. Most of the boundary conditions for events that we know of that day, such as NORAD standing down for over an hour, were completely outside bin Laden's control.

     In any area of research into the events of 9/11, ask yourself two questions:

1. What were the boundary conditions?

2. Who had control over the boundary conditions?

     Answer those two questions and you'll know who was responsible for the events of September 11, 2001.

Part 1: Boundary Conditions, Overview
Part 3: Boundary Conditions for the Muscle Hijackers
Part 4: Boundary Conditions, Aftermath
Other September 11, 2001, articles in this blog