Did you know these 9/11 stories?
I didn’t—or at least, I didn’t remember them after thirteen years:
By most accounts, Danny Lewin was the first victim of 9/11. Seated in seat 9B aboard American Airlines flight 11, he saw Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari, sitting just in front of him, rise and make their way to the cockpit. According to calls from flight attendants to air traffic officials, later documented in the 9/11 Commission’s report, Lewin wasted no time in acting. Having served as an officer in Sayeret Matkal, the Israel Defense Forces’ top unit, he moved to tackle the terrorists. The man in 10B, Satam al-Suqami, moved, too, producing a knife and slitting Lewin’s throat. Less than 30 minutes later, at 8:46 a.m., the plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
Also reading this, I learned for the first time that some of the hijackers on 9/11 were tagged by a screening program called CAPPS as being high-risk for various reasons. But the selection had no consequences at the time other than that their checked bags were not loaded onto the plane until it was ascertained that the suspicious men were on board. Failure of imagination; suicide hijackers were outside the realm of what security had envisioned as a possibility.
In addition, the carry-on bags of two of the hijackers set off metal detector alarms, and then were passed through a second metal detector without incident, and the men and their bags were waved forward. Another hijacker “set off the alarms for both the first and second metal detectors and was then hand-wanded before being passed.” The security person who checked him through didn’t seem curious about what had set off the alarms in the first place; his work was described as “marginal at best.”
I also did not know that at the time cockpit doors were locked; for some reason I was under the impression they were not. So although we don’t know for sure how the terrorists gained access to the cockpit, there are guesses:
[Flight attendent] Ong speculated that they had “jammed their way” in. Perhaps the terrorists stabbed the flight attendants to get a cockpit key, to force one of them to open the cockpit door, or to lure the captain or first officer out of the cockpit.
We know a surprising amount about 9/11, and we knew much of it shortly after the event. But some things will remain a mystery.
God Bless Them All, the innocents of 9/11/2001.
Rick Rescorla: A Hero of that day. And, in the Ia Drang Valley, November 1965. A soldier once and young. Led all the Morgan-Stanley employees from the South Tower (Hundreds) and was killed in its collapse while helping rescue others. Ricky: God Bless Your Memory.
Barbara Olson: Conservative author, spokesman, blonde wonder woman and wife of then Solicitor General, Ted Olson. Barbara was on the Pentagon plane and talked with Ted by phone continuously until the crash. Hell To Pay, Indeed, Barbara. God Bless Your Memory.
pilots should be armed, they can handle that aircraft,
a skill transferable to proficiency with weapons.
No mystery that they were all faithful Muslims.
MollyNH: “pilots should be armed, they can handle that aircraft, a skill transferable to proficiency with weapons.”
Just so. Does it make any sense to trust two highly trained men to fly a million dollar piece of equipment from point A to point B, yet not trust them to be responsible for the care and use of a weapon? Nope! But that’s how anti-gun the powers that be are.
Some pilots are armed. The FAA will allow those who are willing to go through a humongous background check and lots of training to carry a weapon on board. The requirements are so onerous that only the highly motivated have done the necessary procedures. They are purposely onerous to discourage pilots from arming themselves. If I was still flying, I would be armed.
Here’s an article about the program:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77449.html
How do we know whT happened to Danny ?
In the (very small) world of gay rugby, the name and story of Mark Bingham is a legend. Mark Bingham was a victim of 9/11 who died on United 93, and it is widely believed that he was one of the people who organized the fight to retake the plane that caused it to miss its intended target. The biennial “World Cup of gay rugby” that finished a couple weeks ago, is named the Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament (the Bingham Cup) in his honor.
JJ glad to see that you would do what you had to do to be armed & take the extra step for safety.
Avi, that 9/11 flight was in constant communication
because of flight attendant Amy Sweeney who gave
moment by moment rendition & names from the sad event .
Zamzam I absolutely love his Mom (Alice) who was such a brave & eloquent speaker during those horrific hours afterward, & by extension, Mark ! Awesome people.
As all of Fl 93 heroes we know about Mark, Todd & Mark(?) Brunette but all the *others* were heroes too.
That young man who wished his wife & 3 month old baby daughter a great life, is so heart wrenching.
Yes, Mark Bingham’s mom Alice Hoagland is a treasure, and a real class act.
WRT to JJ’s comments, I have a good friend who is still flying for a major airline. He is an avid shooter and gun collector, but he is not part of the program because of the onerous requirements–not only those required to get “certified” but the issues of moving and accounting for the gun on a daily basis. He does know where the fire axe is on the flight deck and is resolved to use it if necessary.
Regarding access to the flight deck by the hi-jackers, the doors were so flimsy that they offered virtually no resistance to a determined person. After the fact, doors were hardened, and procedures adopted (beverage cart blocking the door whenever it was opened).
It is clear that suicidal hi-jackers were not part of the security equation at the time. Seems ludicrous in retrospect, just as hearing our President say last night that the “Islamic State” is not really about Islam. To paraphrase an old saying “what you don’t acknowledge can kill you”.
I won’t comment on the TSA.
My brother, a lifelong commercial pilot who has plenty of grit and no fear of doing what must be done, does not think pilots should all be armed: he says it’s enough to do to fly a giant airliner charged with responsibility for all those lives, and he doubts that most pilots can maintain full-time guard duty at the same time as they’re “driving” the plane, as he puts it. He worries, too, about hijackers getting the weapon away from a pilot trying to do more than one thing at once, and shooting it in midair. But he, too, mentioned the fire ax that Oldflyer described. He knows where it is, and he’s ready to use it.
}}} suicide hijackers were outside the realm of what security had envisioned as a possibility.
This is actually part and parcel of a very effective social conditioning that probably isn’t intentional but is highly functional, nonetheless.
In actual fact, TOOL==WEAPON**. A hammer is a GREAT club, a scvrewdriver can easily stab someone to death.
But we are conditioned to not make that connection, so the notion of a tool — an airplane — being used as a weapon — a guided missile, for all intents and purposes — isn’t something we think of.
Personally, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop — I’m not going to detail it, but it seems obvious that we are daily surrounded by deadly weapons in the wrong hands, esp. hands that are not concerned with surviving their abuse.
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** This is, FWIW, why I sneer at the original “Alien” movie. The most critical element of the movie is the innate idea that all these crew members are trapped on the ship with the alien and no weapons to defend themselves with. Except that they aren’t — they are certainly surrounded by TOOLS. Which means — yes, dammit — they are also surrounded by weapons.
And for an advanced, spacefaring culture, that means some SERIOUS firepower when it comes to weapons — one of the most obvious is the concept of “molecular monofilament” — think of very fine wire, like a cobweb, that can slice through solid steel like it was a hot knife through butter. It’s too useful NOT to have it on a spaceship, and it’s an automatic given once you have manufacturing in space… The other obvious need is any form of laser cutting/welding torch.
Either of which would make VERY short work of the stupid damned monster.
Even if those tools have lots of innate “safety features”, it never takes much brainpower to figure out how to circumvent such safety features — you just can’t define all the possible ways someone could deliberately misuse a tool, one reason why the nanny-state notion of total safety from peoples’ own stupidity is a complete farce.