3. The obfuscation of the evidence that Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner into the Pentagon (21-22). The Report addresses the four hijacker pilots’ training in Chapter 7: The Attack Looms from page 223 to 231.
Regarding Hani Hanjour it mentions:
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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. (p225-226)
The Report further states:
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Settling in Mesa [Arizona], 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. (p.226-227)
At no point does the Report suggest that Hani Hanjour lacked the necessary skills to pilot AA77 into the Pentagon.
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The claim inherent in the allegation is that Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner into the Pentagon.
This particular claim first emerged shortly after 9/11, during an ABC News interview with air traffic controller Danielle O’Brien. O’Brien was a controller at the Dulles Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) Centre on September 11, and was the first controller to locate AA77 after it vanished from Indianapolis Centre’s radar screens at 0854EDT.
During the interview O’Brien comments on the way the radar contact was moving:
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"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."
Conspiracy Theorists often use this quote as evidence that it was not AA77 that hit the Pentagon. However they are dishonest with their quoting, leaving out the important “You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.”
Another common person cited is Marcel Bernard, the chief flight instructor at Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland. Hani Hanjour went to Freeway in August 2001 to rent a Cessna 172, however he showed such poor flying skills that they declined to rent him an aircraft.
The Conspiracy Theory film Loose Change has an interview with Bernard.
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BERNARD: Hello, my name is Marcel Bernard and I'm the chief flight instructor here at Freeway. Hani Hanjour, well basically what happened with him is... he showed at the airport and wanted to get checked out in the aircraft you see, he was already certified, he didn't come to us for flight training. Yeah, he already had a pilot's license. He already earned a - it was private, instrument, commercial at a school in Arizona - I don't remember the name of the school. He already had certificates in hand and we sometimes occasionally have pilots who come to us that don't want flight training, but just want to rent our aircraft.
INTERVIEWER: Which is the case of Hani Hanjour?
BERNARD: This was the case of Hani, he wanted to get "checked-out" as we call it to rent our aircraft. And our insurance requires that he flies with one of our instructors to be found competent to rent. And that was the process that he was going through. And consensus was, he was very quiet, average, or below average piloting skills, English was very poor, so, that's about the best description I can get, give you for his demeanor. At that time very uneventful from my perspective.
In this interview Bernard is not asked if he thought Hanjour could not have hit the Pentagon – somewhat surprising given this is precisely what the filmmakers who interviewed him were proposing in their film Loose Change.
Perhaps they did ask him, and didn’t like the answer. In an interview with Newsday, Bernard gives his opinion:
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Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said.
Certainly both the 9/11 Report and David Ray Griffin seem to be in agreement that Hani Hanjour was not an especially gifted pilot – indeed the 9/11 Report indicates that he barely managed to pass any of his certifications, and that his instructors universally considered him a very poor pilot.
But Dr Griffin is claiming more than this. He is claiming that Hanjour’s skills were so poor he could not have flown AA77 into the Pentagon. Conspiracy Theorists will often make statements such as this one:
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It is doubtful that the best trained fighter pilots could have executed the maneuver that supposedly crashed a 757 into the Pentagon. It required making a tight 320-degree turn while descending seven thousand feet, then leveling out so as to fly low enough over the highway just west of the Pentagon to knock down lamp posts. After crossing the highway the pilot had to take the plane to within inches of the ground so as to crash into the Pentagon at the first-floor level and at such a shallow angle that an engine penetrated three rings of the building, while managing to avoid touching the lawn. And he had to do all of this while flying over 400 mph. Quite a feat for a flight school flunky who had never sat in the cockpit of a jet!
The heart of this matter, then, is not so much determining the level of skill Hani Hanjour had, but determining just how difficult the manoeuvre made by AA77 was.
The above quote makes a mistake that Conspiracy Theorists repeatedly fall for. The alleged precision of the aircraft’s flight relies on the assumption that it was the pilot’s intention to perform precisely as actually occurred. This is, of course, nonsensical. There is no reason to assume the hijackers had any intention other than to hit The Pentagon somewhere. The location of impact and movement of the aircraft prior to impact are not important objectives. Indeed, as we will see, various aspects of the aircraft flight suggest a lack of expertise by the pilot.
The crucial stage of AA77’s approach is the final manoeuvre in which the aircraft descended from 8,500ft to ground level while making a wide circle south of the Pentagon.
At 0934EDT AA77 was approximately 10km west of the Pentagon, headed directly for it, at an altitude of 8,500ft. At 09:34:01 the FDR records the beginning of a manual flight control input to the right, banking the aircraft to starboard and beginning a slow turn. At this point the aircraft’s heading was 88.6o – almost directly east. It was travelling at 339KT (ground speed) at the time.
A full 198 seconds later, at 09:37:19EDT, AA77 levelled out at 2,200ft at a heading of about 60o, and with a ground speed of 318KT. It completed nearly an entire circle, making a circuit that covered 330o. The circle of AA77’s flight was about 8km across. The manoeuvre was performed at a fairly constant speed around the 300KT mark, and the aircraft’s average rate of descent was about 1,900ft per minute.
In contrast, AA77’s FDR records that the flight’s initial climb out of Dulles International to 29,000ft was achieved in 13 minutes with an average rate of ascent of 2,200ft per minute.
Given that a high rate of descent is much easier than a high rate of ascent, due to the benefits of gravity, it is clear that the aircraft’s rate of descent in its final turn, while rapid, could not by any standard be considered “aerobatic”. The pilot typically maintained between 20o and 30o of bank angle, with a one to two second peak of 41o of bank angle.
Certainly such a manoeuvre would not be comfortable for passengers, however given the ultimate fate of the flight, it can be assumed that whoever was at the aircraft’s controls was not concerned with passenger comfort.
Much more extreme manoeuvres can easily be performed in large airliners when passenger comfort is not a concern. For example these two videos below:
Boeing 707 (an older larger airliner than the 757) test pilot Alvin “Tex” Johnson heralds the dawn of the Jet Passenger age by performing a barrel roll at Seafair, August 6, 1955 above a stunned crowd.
A Boeing 757-200 (same model as AA77) of No.40 Squadron, Royal New Zealand Air Force performs a high speed (350KT) low level (100ft) pass followed by a 45 degree climbout to 7,500ft.
A critical component of airframe survivability while manoeuvring is how much g-force is applied. During a turn, g-force is the force that pushes you to the outside of the circle, such as how you will tend to lean to one side as you make a sharp turn in a car. The tighter and faster the turn, the higher the g-forces. 1 g is equal to the force of earth’s gravity. So at 4 gs everything will feel four times as heavy.
Aircraft designed for high-g manoeuvres such as fighter aircraft have to be made very strong, otherwise the forces acting on them can tear them apart.
The g-forces applied to AA77 during its descending turn can be calculated fairly easily using a simple formula:
A = v2 / r
Where r = the radius of the turn and v = velocity during the turn.
As previously stated, AA77’s turn was approximately 8km across, and the turn was completed at around 300KT. As the speed varied somewhat we will use a higher value of 350KT. A higher velocity will result in higher g-forces.
Converting to international units we get a velocity of 180ms-1 and a radius of 4,000m.
A = (180x180) / 4,000 A = 8.1
A represents the constant acceleration that the turning object experiences due to centripetal force.
Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8ms2, thus we can determine that the average lateral g-forces experienced by AA77 during the descending turn were 0.82 gs.
In comparison, on January 22nd, 2002 Icelandair Flight 315 (a Boeing 757-208) was involved in a serious incident during approach to Oslo airport Gardermoen. During a go-around due to an unstable initial approach, the aircraft entered an extreme manoeuvre which exceeded the aircraft’s maximum g-limits. Although passengers were alarmed, the aircraft landed safely.
According to the report into the incident:
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At this time the First Officer called out “PULL UP!” - “PULL UP!”. The GPWS aural warnings of “TERRAIN” and then “TOO LOW TERRAIN” were activated. Both pilots were active at the control columns and a maximum “up” input was made. A split between left and right elevator was indicated at this time. It appears the split occurred due to both pilots being active at the controls. The pilots did not register the aural warnings. During the dive the airspeed increased to 251 kt and the lowest altitude in the recovery was 321 ft radio altitude with a peaked load factor of +3.59 g’s.
The final part of AA77’s approach is often described, as we saw above;
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leveling out so as to fly low enough over the highway just west of the Pentagon to knock down lamp posts. After crossing the highway the pilot had to take the plane to within inches of the ground so as to crash into the Pentagon at the first-floor level
There’s a number of problems with these sorts of summaries, however. As we know from AA77’s FDR, the aircraft did not level out of its descent near to the ground, but at 2,200ft. At this point AA77 was 7.5km from the Pentagon. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)’s AA77 Flight Path Report:
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At the end of the turn, the aircraft was at about 2000 feet altitude and 4 miles southwest of the Pentagon. Over the next 30 seconds, power was increased to near maximum and the nose was pitched down in response to control column movements. The airplane accelerated to approximately 460 knots (530 miles per hour) at impact with the Pentagon. The time of impact was 9:37:45 AM.
This produces a rough average descent rate of 1m for every 11m of horizontal distance covered in the final approach to the Pentagon. Or to put it another way, the aircraft descended at a rate of 22m for every second. Although this descent rate would not have been constant, it’s very clear that the aircraft did not spend any significant period of time “within inches of the ground”.
Most people would expect an inexperienced pilot to crash an airliner within moments of coming so close to the ground. On 9/11 this is precisely what happened.
Moreover, on its final seconds of approach AA77 struck multiple tall highway lamp posts and a large generator; further evidence of poor flying on behalf of the pilot.
Some have asserted that the low approach of AA77 was in fact aerodynamically impossible, due to something called “ground effect”. One such person is Nila Sagadevan, an aeronautical engineer and qualified pilot.
He wrote a paper refuting the notion that the poorly trained hijackers could have pulled off the September 11 Attacks. He mentions in the paper:
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I shan't get into the aerodynamic impossibility of flying a large commercial jetliner 20 feet above the ground at over 400 MPH. A discussion on ground effect energy, tip vortex compression, downwash sheet reaction, wake turbulence, and jetblast effects are beyond the scope of this article (the 100,000-lb jetblast alone would have blown whole semi-trucks off the roads.)
Sagadevan’s paper is full of factual errors, far too many to delve into here (for example he claims those killed at the Pentagon were construction workers doing renovations, however renovations for that section had been completed, the offices were fully staffed, and a high proportion of those killed and injured by the impact were military personnel, as indicated by their rank). However a number of other aviation experts have stated that the attacks were well within the capabilities of the 9/11 hijackers.
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"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.
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.
Again: lift from "the ground effect" happens at low, not high, airspeeds and high, not low, angles of attack. At high speeds, flow across a wing tends toward laminar, and spanwise flow is functionally negligible. Ground effect mitigates lift loss when the ground breaks up wing tip vortices from turbulent and spanwise flow over a wing caused by high angle of attack, low speed flight regime.
The final word is perhaps best presented visually, in the form of an animation the NTSB produced depicting the final manoeuvres of AA77.
The inter-titles and text have been added to the animation by Conspiracy Theorists. Note the unsteady movement of the aircraft, with constant control inputs, corrections, and over corrections. These are sure signs of poor flying ability.
Additionally, a number of amateurs have made attempts to replicate AA77’s flight using highly accurate commercially available flight simulator software.
The evidence strongly suggests that AA77’s final doomed flight was well within the capabilities of someone with only the most minimal flying capabilities, and well within the skill level of Hani Hanjour who just managed to scrape through an FAA Commercial Pilot’s License.
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The inherent claim that Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner into the Pentagon is rejected.
