The Events of 9/11 From a Professional Pilot's point of view

As some of my GLP family knows I have been a commercial pilot for 30 years now. I have been in aviation management for 25 of those years.

In 2001, I was Chief Pilot and Check Airman for a small charter airline (5 B737 aircraft) based in the western US. In September of that year I had just hired a new class of 8 pilots and, having already trained them in their basic indoc and ground portion of the airline training syllabus, had flown them to Phoenix for their simulator training.

On the morning of Sep 11th I was in the middle of training session 3 with an upgrading Captain and a new-hire First Officer. We had come out of the simulator for our mid-session break to piss, have a cup of coffee and swap seats when we saw the pilots that were training in the other simulator (who were also on their break) huddled around a TV set in the briefing room. One of the pilots turned around and, with a solemn look, told us that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Behind him on the TV was the smoking tower with a frantic commentator rambling about whether or not it was terrorism.

I won't bore you with the rest of the details, but suffice it to say that I knew that there would not be any new class of pilots hired. They knew it too.

Because I (the airline) had already paid for the simulator time, and there was no way to fly everyone back home because all the air traffic was grounded, I decided to continue their training sessions for the rest of that week. I would then sign off their training and immediately furlough them - eventually hiring most of them back months later.

The next day as we were finishing up the 4 hour simulator session #4, I positioned the aircraft virtually on the runway at Boston Logan airport. I told the crew that we were going to try an experiment. I asked the more experienced of the two; the upgrading captain, to take off, fly to New York City and hit one of the towers. This was a very well-qualified upgrading pilot that had thousands of flight hours and hundreds in the right seat of a 737.

He took off and visually made his way to NY for the roughly 30 minute flight. In order not to waste time, I put the simulator on double-speed during the cruise portion. He then identified the twin towers - they are not hard to see - and headed straight for them...

AND HE MISSED! He muttered something about how hard it was to line up on them and asked me to back him up so he could try again. And AGAIN he MISSED! After several attempts, he was able to hit one of them by slowing way down to almost landing speed - flaps and gear down.

I subsequently tried the same exercise with all of the pilots and they all had trouble hitting such a narrow target at high speed. The new pilots didn't even come close. When they slowed way down, they were more successful but still commented on how challenging it was.

Now, bear in mind, these were very experienced professional pilots.

So tell me how did a bunch of Arabs with very little training perform such a feat? We all knew then that we were not being told the truth about the events of that day!

I have since told this story to many people. I have had several radio interviews about my experience and help found Pilots for 911 Truth. Below is one of the interviews I gave a couple years later.

Capt Dan