American Airlines Flight 11 departed from Boston as a regular passenger flight. Soon after the departure, it was officially hijacked by five Middle Eastern terrorists, one pilot familiar with small planes and four "muscle hijackers". The terrorists killed some crew and passengers, and in a combined act of murder and suicide they directed the airplane into the WTC North Tower.
This "official" version of what happened on September 11, 2001, has been challenged by many people. Here is a short and incomplete list of objections, most of them still not addressed by officials responsible for the clearing up of the crime:
The sheer amount of unexplained contradictions has inevitably led to the development of alternative scenarios for Flight 11, usually embedded in a scenario for the whole 9/11 attacks.
The story of Flight 11 as I present it here avoids the numerous weaknesses of the official version and is empirically better grounded than the existing alternative versions. It is not a scientific, but a criminalistic approach, meant to stimulate researchers to look at new, promising traces left back by the perpetrators of the attacks.
The article consists of two parts. Part I is a comprehensive timeline for Flight 11. In Part II, the timeline will be explained and discussed in more detail.
Part I - The Timeline
Normal letters indicate commonly acknowledged, generally well documented facts. Italic letters indicate comments, conclusions and conjectures to create a lucid picture of the story of Flight 11. All times are EDT.
The embarking of the "hijackers"
September 10, Boston Logan Airport
3:43 p.m. -- American Airlines Flight 196, coming from L.A., arrives at the gate. The airplane's tail number is N334AA. The next day, it will achieve sad prominence as Flight 11. BTS data base
4:25 p.m. -- A white Mitsubishi Mirage is recorded by surveillance cameras while entering the parking lot.
In the evening of the next day, this car will towed away by the FBI for examining. They will find flight manuals in arabic language, a koran copy, and an airline crew tag. Boston Globe, 9/23/01 There are three persons from Middle Eastern descent in the car, the driver and the two coming pilots of Flight 11, hereafter refered to as "thieves".
4:45 p.m. -- The thieves embark on N334AA as usual passengers, which is scheduled to leave at 5:10 p.m as Flight 197, with destination San Franciso.
5:05 p.m. -- After having said goodbye to his fellows, the driver leaves the airport. The Mitsubishi is recorded again by a security camera. Boston Globe, 9/23/01
5:12 p.m. -- N334AA pushes back from the gate. BTS data base
The preparation flights
September 10/11, Boston, San Francisco, and in between
11:47 p.m. -- N334AA arrives in San Francisco. It has just a short stay. BTS data base
12:43 a.m. -- N334AA departs for Boston as Flight 198. BTS data base The thieves are still aboard. Somehow they manage to stay in the cabin - maybe they hided somewhere (not likely), maybe they presented an explanation to the crew why the had to fly back immediately. It's also possible that one of them was in the cockpit on the jump seat, a common service of the airlines for foreign pilots.
6:03 a.m. -- N334AA arrives at Gate 32, Terminal B, Logan Airport. About 40 passengers and the crew disembark form the plane. Karen Booth The thieves stay. Like in San Francisco, the question is how did they do this, and the possible answers are the same.
The departure
September 11, Boston Logan Airport
Between 6.03 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. -- After the thieves are sure that they are the only persons left on N334AA, they prepare for the unusual flight that lies before them. One thing they do is to disable ACARS, a system used for data communications with the airline. That's why the departure data don't appear in the data base of the Bureau for Transportation Statistics (BTS) which gets this information via ACARS. Gerard Holmgren
7:45 a.m. -- The thieves ask the tower for departure clearing and push back a few seconds later. New York Times, 9/16/01 They pretend to work on a normal passenger flight.
7:45 a.m. -- Al Filipov, passenger of Flight 11, calls his wife from the Admiral's club of AA to tell her that he has switched from Delta Airlines to American Airlines. He is NOT aboard N334AA. Filipov's Flight 11 is supposed to depart from Gate 26 and is delayed. That's why he has enough time to call his wife. CBS News, 9/13/01
Between 7:45 a.m. and 7:59 a.m. -- N334AA is taxiing to runway 9R along taxiways A, N, K, S, A, K1, B. New York Times, 9/16/01
7:59 a.m. -- N334AA takes off from the runway. New York Times, 9/16/01
The flight
September 11, the skies over Massachusetts and New York State
8:14 a.m. -- The thieves begin to pretend a hijacking. They stop talking with the controllers and don't react when they are ordered to climb. Paul Thompson
8:20 a.m. -- Next step of the fake: The airplane deviates drastically from its projected course. Paul Thompson
8:21 a.m. -- Next step of the fake: The transponder is turned off. Paul Thompson
8:25 a.m. -- The thieves send a message over the air traffic control channel which is seemingly meant for the (not existing) passengers: "Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet." Paul Thompson But this is just the next step of the deceit: In doing this, they convince the air controllers that the airplane is hijacked, avoiding direct communication with them.
8:27 a.m. -- N334AA reaches the Northern edge of his flight path and turns South. Paul Thompson The thieves decide to begin their rush towards New York City. They know that around this time a remote controlled plane is started in Poughkeepsie, 70 miles north of the city. Their task is to run up to this plane so that they cross the heart of New York City at the same moment when the remote controlled plane crashes into the North Tower.
8:28 a.m. -- The thieves begin to push the radio button intermittently. Paul Thompson They want to confuse the controllers and strengthen their believe that the hijacking is going on. These intermittent transmissions are repeated until 8:38.
The overflight
September 11, the skies over New York City
8:40 a.m. -- Ronkonkoma controllers are tracking the path of N334AA, but they don't know its altitude. New York Times, 9/16/01
8:46 a.m. -- The plane from Poughkeepsie crashes into the North Tower. The Ronkonkoma controllers still think that N334AA is in the air. Only after the crash of UA 175 they will learn that both WTC towers have been hit. New York Times, 9/13/01
The phantom flight
September 11, the skies over New Jersey
9:21 a.m. -- Washington Air controllers inform their colleagues from Boston Center that Flight 11 is still in the air, somewhere in Southern New Jersey or even more South. 9/11 report, p. 32
9:24 a.m. -- NEADS scrambles fighters from Langley AFB to search for Flight 11. 9/11 report, p. 32
The landing (Attention! Highly speculative!)
September 11, Reagan National Airport, Washington D.C.
9:37 p.m. -- N334AA lands at Reagan National Airport at the same time the pentagon is hit by another flying object.
Who's done it?
This question will be discussed in PART II
"There is no video footage of the hijackers passing the security check at the airport"
There were a couple of videos shown. They released one at the time the (C)ommission report was published.
This was flight 77. The quoted sentence refers to Flight 11, as you can easily see from the context of the text.
This video from Dulles, by the way, is to be taken with a grain of salt. The time stamp is missing, and - what coincidence - the background of the video suggests that it was made in broad daylight, not in the murky dawn of 9/11 (courtesy of Joe Vialls).
Which other videos have you seen? I know there is a video from Portland Airport with (allegedly) Atta and Al-Omari. But this was not Flight 11.
Are you sure you have seen a video from Logan Airport?
No, you're right. That was a mistake on my part.
I wasn't sure about that Vialls article. What time was the footage supposed to be from? On sunny mornings the light will flood into windows and doorways. But perhaps not in September at that time of morning. It would be interesting to know the exact time that the flights boarded and where the sun would have been at that time.
At 8:27am you add, "...a remote controlled plane is started in Poughkeepsie..."
Can you say where this information comes from? Source? I recall reading that the two Boston flights nearly overlapped by Stewart Airport in Newburg, NY. I had wondered if the probable drone planes had launched from Stewart, which the military uses.
"The first outside word that controllers received was that a small twin-engine plane had hit one tower of the World Trade Center. They thought it was a twin-engine Cessna that had taken off earlier from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to fly south under "visual flight rules," meaning the plane was not under direct air traffic control."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node;=&contentId;=A41095-2001Sep16
I'm well aware of Stewart International Airport and will address this in Part II which will follow in a few days.