Hani Hanjour: 9/11 Pilot Extraordinaire

Hani
Hanjour as a Cessna 172 pilot

Cockpit of a Cessna 172

At Freeway Airport in Bowie, Md., 20
miles west of Washington, flight instructor Sheri Baxter
instantly recognized the name of alleged hijacker Hani
Hanjour when the FBI released a list of 19 suspects in
the four hijackings. Hanjour, the
only suspect on Flight 77 the FBI listed as a pilot,
had come to the airport one month earlier seeking to rent
a small plane.

However, when Baxter and fellow instructor Ben Conner
took the slender, soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs
during the second week of August, they
found he had trouble controlling and landing the
single-engine Cessna 172. Even though
Hanjour showed a federal pilot’s license and a log book
cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief
flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a
plane without more lessons.

In the spring of 2000, Hanjour had asked to enroll in the
CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., for
advanced training, said the center’s attorney, Gerald
Chilton Jr. Hanjour had attended the school for three
months in late 1996 and again in December 1997 but never
finished coursework for a license to fly a single-engine
aircraft, Chilton said.

When Hanjour reapplied to the center last year, “We declined to provide training to him
because we didn’t think he was a good enough student when
he was there in 1996 and 1997”
Chilton said. [Newsday]

National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
Outline of the 9/11 Plot

[Excerpt]

On December 12, 2000, [Nawaf al Hazmi and Hani
Hanjour] were settling in Mesa, Arizona, and Hanjour was
ready to brush up on his flight training (Brush up?
He could barely fly a Cessna). By early 2001, he was
using a Boeing 737 simulator. Because his performance
struck his flight instructors as sub-standard, they
discouraged Hanjour from continuing, but he persisted.

Hani
Hanjour as a Boeing 757 pilot

Cockpit of a Boeing 757

At a speed of about 500 miles an hour, the plane was
headed straight for what is known as P-56, protected air
space 56, which covers the White House and the Capitol.

“The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he
turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us
experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a
military plane,” says O’Brien. “You don’t fly a
757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.” [NATCA]

But just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide
mission into the White House, the
unidentified pilot [Hanjour] executed a pivot so tight that it
reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver. The
plane circled 270 degrees to the right to approach the
Pentagon from the west, whereupon Flight 77 fell below
radar level, vanishing from controllers’ screens, the
sources said.

Less than an hour after two other jets demolished the
World Trade Center in Manhattan, Flight 77 carved a hole
in the nation’s defense headquarters, a hole five stories
high and 200 feet wide.

Aviation sources said the plane was
flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely
that a trained pilot was at the helm, possibly one of the
hijackers. Someone even knew how to turn off the
transponder, a move that is considerably less than
obvious. [Washington Post]

Why didn’t the
USAF intervene in the aerial acrobatics of Flight 77?

Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:38a.m., therefore it
was ignored for 13 minutes as it headed toward the heart of the US
government.

Another
example of a hijacked jet being flown with
extraordinary skill on 9/11…

Live Film
Footage of United Airlines Flight 175’s
Long Range Approach to World Trade Center