Flight School Head Admits Neither He Nor 9/11 Hijackers Could Fly 9/11 Planes

According to the owner of a flight school at which 2 of the 4 accused 9/11 hijack pilots trained on simple aircraft with questionable ... all » competence, neither he nor the 9/11 hijackers implicated in the attacks, could pilot the 757 and 767 aircraft that they are alleged to have flown into targets on September 11, 2001.

However, when Baxter and fellow instructor Ben Conner took the slender, soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs during the second week of August, they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a federal pilot's license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons.

In the spring of 2000, Hanjour had asked to enroll in the CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., for advanced training, said the center's attorney, Gerald Chilton Jr. Hanjour had attended the school for three months in late 1996 and again in December 1997 but never finished coursework for a license to fly a single-engine aircraft, Chilton said.

When Hanjour reapplied to the center last year, "We declined to provide training to him because we didn't think he was a good enough student when he was there in 1996 and 1997," Chilton said.

Hanjour apparently went to the center after living in Hollywood, Fla., in early 1996 with a couple who knew his older brother. Susan Khalil said she recognized Hanjour in photos the FBI recently showed her and recalled him as "painfully shy" with "really poor hygiene" when he lived with her family for two months in 1996.

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.

Hazmi and Hanjour left San Diego almost immediately and drove to Ari-
zona. Settling in Mesa, Hanjour began refresher training at his old school,Ari-
zona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties
because his English was not good enough.The instructor advised him to dis-
continue 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. At that
point, Hanjour and Hazmi vacated their apartment and started driving east,
anticipating the arrival of the "muscle hijackers"--the operatives who would
storm the cockpits and control the passengers. By as early as April 4, Hanjour
and Hazmi had arrived in Falls Church,Virginia.

A teenage pilot who crashed a small plane into the 28th floor of a bank building left a suicide note saying he acted alone and sympathized with Osama bin Laden, police said Sunday.

British citizen Charles Bishop, 15, an honors student described as a troubled loner with few friends, was not licensed to fly and made an unauthorized takeoff in a Cessna 172-R from the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Airport Saturday. The plane crashed into the 42-story Bank of America building shortly after 5 p.m. local time, killing the boy instantly.