The airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania was the one where one of the passengers called his family on the cellphone and said (after other things) they were going to try to rush the hijackers. I'm not sure if that's the same plane where the cellphone caller said the hijackers claimed to have a bomb or not, but even if they *said* that it doesn't mean they really had one. So it could have been a bomb, or it could have been a fight in the cockpit. At 11:29 PM 09/11/2001 -0700, John Young wrote:
Why, for example, would jet-qualified pilots become involved in terrorist actions? Bin Laden had a jet pilot, trained in the US, who ferried bin Laden's jet from the US to Sudan. After a while he tried to quit the job but a Bin Laden aide threatened the pilot's family. The pilot pondered that then went to the US Embassy to cut a deal to confess what he knew in exchange for getting a new life in the US.
We know from the Egypt air crash that some pilots are cooperatively suicidal when their families are at risk.
Some of the pilots may also have had family killed by Israel or by US bombings in Iraq or the ten years of blockade -- today's (pre-bombing) Marin County CA paper had an opinion-page column by somebody who just had permits rejected by the US export bureaucrats for water chlorination systems they were trying to export to Iraq; they smuggled them there anyway because unsafe water is *still* the leading cause of death in Iraq. Soldiers who are really angry are sometimes willing to do suicidal attacks.