“To hit something with an airplane is easy only if you have been flying for 20 years.”
- Boeing 767 pilot quoted in the Boston Globe

“The conspiracy apparently did not include a surplus of skilled pilots.”
- The Washington Post

by Shoestring  source: 9/11 Blogger    July 13, 2011

In the days after 9/11, numerous pilots and aviation experts commented on the elaborate maneuvers performed by the aircraft in the terrorist attacks, and the advanced skills that would have been necessary to navigate those aircraft into their targets. The men flying the planes must have been “highly skilled pilots” and “extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators,” who were “probably military trained,” these experts said.

And yet the four alleged hijackers who were supposedly flying the aircraft were amateur pilots, who had learned to fly in small propeller planes, and were described by their instructors as having had only “average” or even “very poor” piloting skills. But on their first attempt at flying jet aircraft, on September 11, 2001, these men were supposedly able to fly Boeing 757s and 767s at altitudes of tens of thousands of feet, without any assistance from air traffic control. Three of them were apparently able to successfully navigate their planes all the way to the intended targets, which they hit with pinpoint accuracy.

For such poor pilots to carry out such skilled flying would surely have been extremely unlikely, perhaps impossible. And yet this is what is claimed in the official account of 9/11.

EXPERTS SAID HIJACKERS ‘MUST HAVE BEEN EXPERIENCED PILOTS’
Numerous experts commented that the hijackers who flew the aircraft in the 9/11 attacks must have been highly trained and skillful pilots. Tony Ferrante, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration’s investigations division, spent several days after 9/11 carefully piecing together the movements of the four aircraft targeted in the attacks. According to author Pamela Freni, Ferrante’s “hair stood on end when he realized the precision with which all four airplanes had moved toward their targets.” Ferrante said, “It was almost as though it was choreographed,” and explained, “It’s not as easy as it looks to do what [the hijackers] did at 500 miles an hour.” [1]

Darryl Jenkins, the director of the Aviation Institute at George Washington University, told the New York Times that the men who carried out the attacks “knew what they were doing down to very small details.” He said, “Every one of them was trained in flying big planes.” The Times reported that a “number of aviation experts agreed” with Jenkins and had said that “the hijackers must have been experienced pilots.” John Nance, an airline pilot, author, and aviation analyst, said that “the direct hits on the two towers and on the Pentagon suggested to him that the pilots were experienced fliers.” Nance pointed to the “smooth banking of the second plane to strike the towers,” and said that “precisely controlling a large jet near the ground, necessary for the Pentagon attack, also required advanced skill.” Nance concluded, “There’s no way an amateur could have, with any degree of reliability, done what was done” in the 9/11 attacks. [2]

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