Did Hanjour receive military flight training?

[Kevin Fenton]

“Hanjour successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by an instructor at Congressional Air Charters of Gaithersburg, Maryland, landing at a small airport with a difficult approach. The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation.”
CR, note 170 to Chapter 7

There is no report of Hanjour ever having any official military training.

Sometimes, Hanjour was accompanied by another person on his reconnaissance flights, for example on his way to Gaithersburg from New Jersey. The CR says it was likely Nawaf al Hazmi (page 242). What does “likely” mean? I guess it means the FBI showed the people who Hanjour rented the plane from a bunch of photos and they picked out Nawaf al Hazmi as looking like the guy who accompanied Hanjour.

Here is a photo of Nawaf al Hazmi:


And here is our old friend, the mystery hijacker “Fat Hani”, just before he (allegedly) boarded American 77:

They are not dissimilar. I think a person who rented a plane to Hanjour and "Fat Hani" two months previously could mistake him for Nawaf al Hazmi.

Could the “mystery hijacker”, not Nawaf al Hazmi, have accompanied Hanjour on his recon flights?

One of the hijackers on the original list for American 77 was named as Mosear Caned (probably a misspelling of Mansour Khaled). When in Hamburg, Atta lived with and ran a radical Islamist group with a man called Atif bin Mansour, who was a fighter pilot for the Pakistani Air Force. It seems that these two Mansours may be the same person. If they were, this would explain why ATCs thought American 77 was being flown like a fighter.
CNN transcript of original list of hijackers:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/bn.01.html

From PT’s timeline, August 2001:
“At least six 9/11 hijackers, including all of those who boarded Flight 77, live in Laurel, Maryland, from about this time. They reportedly include Hani Hanjour, Majed Moqed, Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf Alhazmi, and Salem Alhazmi.”
I wonder who the sixth one was? My guess is that Mansour is the sixth hijacker.

If Mansour, an air force pilot, was flying with Hanjour, then that would explain how HH picked up military skills.

[philb]

1. Were the other flight instructors exagerating Hani's incompetance?

Or was he faking it?
What reason would he have to do so?

[Kevin Fenton]

2. Hani

I don't think the other instructors were exaggerating his poor skills, although some people in the "9/11 truth movement" seem to be. The truth is probably that he was a slightly below-average Cessna pilot. Some people highlight the plane he wasn't allowed to hire, but ignore the dozens of other planes he was allowed to hire.

Neither the 9/11 Commission nor the FBI has any proof the man who often accompanyied HH was Nawaf al Hazmi - it's just guesswork. I think Mansour was accompanying him and that Mansour taught him some of the skills he had learned in the Air Force. Also, I think it's Mansour who flew American 77 into the Pentagon - there's no way Hani could have brought a big plane like that in under the radar at that speed, but for a trained fighter pilot 350 mph is pretty slow.

[John Doe II]

3. But then

why would the Commission claim that this photo shows Hanjour?
And if it's not Hanjour why is there no photo of him but of all the others?

[Kevin Fenton]

4. Commission

I guess the commission, or whoever they took their assessment from, got the identification of the hijackers wrong (they don't seem to have cross-referenced the photos): they're claiming five hijackers, so they show five photos, four of them are "right" one of them is wrong. If they came out with the photo of Hanjour now (assuming they have it) people would ask who the fat hijacker is, if he isn't Hani.

Why no photo of Hani?
It's not Hani, so either:
(1) He wasn't on the plane at all - he didn't check in either (but it seems he did buy a ticket - maybe he decided he didn't want to die and did a runner the night before);
(2) He was on the plane, but they just didn't get a photo of him for some reason;
(3) The people who released the photos didn't know they were supposed to keep Mansour quiet and just released the first five Arab-looking guys they found - maybe Hanjour seemed like an improbable hijacker because he is/was so weedy.