Hijackers Likely Took Flight Classes in U.S.

Federal agents Wednesday pored through records at flight schools in the U.S. where they believe terrorists gained the training necessary to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Aviation experts said anyone willing to pay about $4,000 could learn the basics of piloting a plane.

After completing a private pilot course that could take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, the terrorists would have needed only some additional hours in a flight simulator to acquaint themselves with the instruments of a commercial passenger jet.

Once the plane is in the air and one of the most difficult parts of flying is out of the way, “the average private pilot could easily turn an airplane into a missile and ram it into a building,” said Barry J. Schiff, a retired airline pilot and an aviation safety consultant.

How the terrorists took control of the cockpit is still under investigation, but federal officials said Wednesday that the suspects had learned to fly by attending U.S. flight schools, mainly in South Florida.

On Wednesday, U.S. agents served search warrants on at least two Florida schools--Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach and Huffman Aviation in Venice--where four or more suspects are alleged to have attended flight training courses.

The two schools are among more than 80 flight schools in Florida, a popular destination for many foreign nationals hoping to learn to fly. Several Middle Eastern airlines, including Saudi Air, train their pilots at Embry-Riddle. California has about 60 flight schools, which are mostly at general aviation airports such as Van Nuys and Santa Monica.

Several businesses that operate flight simulators in Long Beach and Seattle may have been used by the suspects to hone their skills for the attacks, according to FBI sources. It costs at least $800 for one hour in a flight simulator for commercial jets such as the Boeing 757s and 767s that were involved in Tuesday’s crashes.

But aviation experts said that the suspects may not have needed access to 757 and 767 simulators, which are not as widely available as simulators for the smaller 737 jet. Knowledge gained from a 737 simulator should be enough to maneuver the larger planes. Commercial airlines, as well as more than dozen flight schools, operate 737 simulators.

As investigators were piecing together the flight training received by the terrorists, aviation experts said the terrorists definitely did not have to have the same skills as the flight crews they overpowered.

On a nice day along the Eastern Seaboard, a private pilot with a little extra knowledge could do the job, experts agreed Wednesday.

“Most anybody who had knowledge of flying could guide the airplane. But they did a good job with the accuracy,” said Robert Routh, a professor of aeronautical sciences at Embry-Riddle. “It’s not a matter of strength. It’s a matter of having a little bit of knowledge of how this particular airplane works.”

The hard part of the flights would already be over by the time the terrorists overpowered the flight crews, according to Schiff. The most difficult part is departing the airports and getting the airliners to cruise altitudes.

Once the hijackers took control of the cockpits, the first task was to fly to their targets.

“You can use the pilots to navigate,” Schiff said.

They would be cooperative because, until Tuesday, hijackings “largely have been benign events,” he said. “You may land at an inconvenient airport.” The flight crews would have had no reason to expect their planes were going to become weapons.

Schiff was certain that by the time the planes crashed into the buildings, the flight crews were no longer at the controls, not even with guns to their heads.

Though the videotapes of the two Boeing airliners crashing into the World Trade Center towers show that the planes were under control, they also show a fair amount of last-minute maneuvering.

“They managed to hit the buildings, but the skill required to do that wasn’t particularly high because it’s an easy plane to fly,” said Pat Carey, a test pilot for a business jet manufacturer with a lengthy background as a military and civilian flight instructor.

The terrorists required some familiarity with the cockpits of Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft, which are virtually identical, but they certainly did not need to know how to operate all of the complex systems of the airliners, the two experts said.

Turning off the transponders and the autopilots gave them control of the airplanes and diminished their visibility on air controllers’ radar screens.

After that, it was about as easy to steer the planes as in a Cessna, they said.

“You push the yoke down and the houses get bigger, pull it up and they get smaller,” Carey said, describing the basics of descending and climbing an aircraft.

Throttles on jet planes don’t work the same as on single-engine Cessnas, and the gauges are entirely different, but the basic action is the same: pull the throttles back and the engines slow, push the throttles forward and they speed up.

“It’s like a car. Once you turn it on and get it started, it’s not that hard to steer,” said Mike Doiron, chief executive of Moncton Flight College, a New Brunswick, Canada, school that trains airline pilots.

Going to flight school is not much different from attending driving school. After courses on aerodynamics and instruments, students learn to fly in a single-engine airplane.

Although at least one of the suspected hijackers reportedly had an instrument rating, indicating the skill to fly through clouds, that was not an issue in Tuesday’s attacks.

Developers of increasingly realistic flight simulators for personal computers said Wednesday that although these games can help civilians become familiar with a plane’s instruments, the experience of flying with enough precision to hit a target goes well beyond that.

“When you’re going 400 knots, you have to be in the right trajectory from more than a mile out to hit your target,” said Seamus Blackley, an executive at Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox video game console division. “Those buildings may be big, but at high altitudes, they look like needles. These guys had one shot to get it right. They had to have some serious, expensive training.”

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Times staff writers Judy Pasternak and Alex Pham contributed to this story.