Perhaps no question within the scope of 9/11 research generates as much heat and as little light as questions that have arisen over the role of the aircraft on 9/11, which has come to be known by the name of “planes/no planes” and of “video fakery”. While I had long since concluded that no plane had crashed in Shanksville and that, while a Boeing 757 appears to have flown toward and then over the Pentagon, I was personally unable to bring myself to take the idea that no real airplanes had hit the North or the South Tower seriously until nearly two years of being verbally assailed by Morgan Reynolds, who understood these issues far better than I, where his studies can be found on his web site, nomoregames.net, especially a response to criticism he has received for raising the issue during a FOX News appearance. 

Morgan has also authored excellent critiques of alternative theories of how the Twin Towers were destroyed.  It was the dawning realization that video fakery and real planes were logically consistent, since video fakery could have been used to conceal features of the planes or of their entry into the buildings, that enabled me to take a serious look to sort out what was going on here.  Even I initially thought the very idea was quite bizarre.

During the research I have done on this question, some of the most important reasons to question the use of planes on 9/11 are (1) that Flights 11 and 77 were not even scheduled to fly that day and, (2) that, according to FAA Registration records I have in hand, the planes corresponding to Flights 93 and 175 were not deregistered until 28 September 2005, which raises the questions, “How can planes that were not in the air have crashed on 9/11?” and “How can planes that crashed on 9/11 have still been in the air four years later?”  We have studies (3) by Elias Davidsson demonstrating that the government has never been able to prove that any of the alleged “hijackers” were aboard any of those planes and research (4) by A.K. Dewdney and by David Ray Griffin demonstrating that the purported phone calls from those planes were faked.  And (5), as Col. George Nelson, USAF (ret.) has observed, although there are millions of uniquely identifiable components of those four planes, the government has yet to produce even one.  My purpose here is not to persuade anyone to believe the 9/11 planes were phantom flights on 9/11, but simply to lay out some of the evidence that supports that conclusion, even though I myself was initially unwilling to take it seriously.

Flights 11 and 77: The BTS Tables

The first to notice that American Airlines Flights 11 and 77 were not even scheduled to fly on 9/11 was the brilliant Australian blues musician, Gerard Holmgren, who was interviewed by David West on 27 June 2005.  Others, such as Nick Kollerstrom, “9 Keys to 9/11″, have also reported the same difficulty with the government’s official account.  If AA Flight 11 did not even take off from Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11, then it cannot possibly have hit the North Tower around the 96th floor at 0846 hours and thereby brought about the death of its 92 passengers.  And if AA Flight 77 did not take off from Dulles International on the morning of 9/11, then it, also, cannot have crashed into the Pentagon at 0940 hours and thereby brought about the death of its 64 passengers.  Yet that is what the data that Holmgren discovered in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics shows to have been the case......