the fact that they took rooms in the Bronx and Brooklyn, how they spent the month that followed remains a mystery. Atta bought a cell phone and calling card—the first of more than a hundred cards the team was to use during the operation. Ziad Jarrah, the last to arrive, headed straight for a flight school in Florida. He had signed up while still in Germany, having seen its advertisement in a German aviation magazine.
Florida Flight Training Center, still in business today, sits beside the runway of the airport at Venice, a quiet retirement community on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota. It was a small operation, and Jarrah got on well with the man who ran it. “He was,” Arne Kruithof was to remember ruefully, “the kind of guy who wanted to be loved.… I remember him bringing me a six-pack of beer at home when I hurt my knee one time.” Jarrah himself, Kruithof said, liked an “occasional bottle of Bud.”
Jarrah’s course was geared to obtaining a Private Pilot License to fly single-engine aircraft. He already had a handle on the theory, having studied aviation mechanics in Germany, and he made quiet, steady progress. A fellow student, Thorsten Bierman, however, found Jarrah self-centered and uncooperative when they flew together. “He wanted to do everything single-handed.”
Atta and Shehhi had left New York and traveled first to look at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, at which one of bin Laden’s personal pilots had once trained to fly. As early as 1998, the FBI’s regional office had been alerted to the large number of Arabs learning to fly in the area.
After a tour of that school, however, Atta and Shehhi decided not to enroll. They made their way instead to Venice, Florida, and Huffman Aviation, just a block from the school where Jarrah was already at work. No reliable source, however, has spoken of seeing Jarrah with Atta and Shehhi in Venice. Their tradecraft was superior to that of the inept fellows who had arrived earlier in California.
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Rudi Dekkers, who ran Huffman, would have nothing good to say about Atta. The hijackers’ team leader, he said, “had an attitude, like he was standing above everybody … very, very arrogant.” Shehhi, by contrast, was a “likeable person, he had fun, he was laughing … this is a male environment, so we talk about girls, planes. But Atta was never socializing.”
Their first flying instructor, Mark Mikarts, was at first just a little nonplussed at the sight of Atta. “When you do flight training,” Mikarts said, “you tend to get a little bit dirty—there’s oil and fuel. You’re sweating. He was always immaculately dressed, with the $200 Gucci shoes, silk shirts, double-hemmed pants. He always overdressed.”
Teaching Atta to handle a Cessna 172, meanwhile, turned out to be a nightmare. “Generally,” said Mikarts,
the first five to ten hours is where a student learns to fly by visual references. Using outside visual references, we’d keep the horizon at a certain part of the windshield. He had a very difficult time learning that. He would always over-rotate, or he couldn’t keep the reference.… But he would not listen.… It was like he had to do it his way.
Then finally one day he over-rotated the airplane and I thought, “I’m going to let him do whatever he wants to do. Let’s see what happens.” He pitches the airplane way up.… The engine is screaming. The stall horn is blaring. The air speed’s bleeding away. We’re about to stall and tumble out of the air. I’m saying, “Nose down!” Next time, louder. Third time, I said, “Nose down!” in a rather nasty tone. [Then] I took my hand and shoved the control wheel forward and stamped on the rudder pedal to get it back where it’s supposed to be. We pitched down so abruptly that he popped out of his seat from the negative g’s—hit his head on the ceiling.
He turned his head towards me and gave me a look like, “You infidel …” or something. Like he wanted to kill me. That’s it, we turned back and he went and complained to my chief pilot.… I said, “If he’s going to be that much of a baby about it and not follow instructions, let him go someplace else. Not worth me breaking my neck and you losing an instructor.”
Things were no better in September, when Atta and Shehhi tried another flight school. They failed an instrument rating, argued about how things should be done, even tried to wrest control of the airplane from their instructor. They were asked to leave—and got Huffman to take them back again.
Ann Greaves, a student from England, asked the instructor they shared how the two Arabs were getting on. He replied with “a gesture of the hand. Nothing was said. It was sort of, you know, ‘So so …’ ” The instructor told her that Atta had connections to Saudi royalty, that Shehhi, who seemed to follow behind, was supposedly his bodyguard. Once, when Greaves reached out to retrieve her seat cushion—Atta, who was short and also needed a cushion, had appropriated it—Shehhi rushed to place himself between them. Royalty and their staff, Greaves thought, ought to have better manners.
What led Shehhi to respond the way he did probably had nothing to do with manners—and everything with the fact that Greaves was a woman. Islam dictates that men and women not married or related to each other may not touch, not even to shake hands. Atta abhorred the idea of proximity to women, even after his death. In his will, written long since at the age of twenty-seven, he had stipulated: “I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me … I don’t want women to come to my house to apologize for my death … I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all, during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”
In Venice, they all remembered Atta’s hang-up about women. “We had female dispatchers at the flight school,” Mikarts recalled. “He would order them around, tell them this, tell them that. I’d pull him aside and say, ‘I don’t know how you treat women in your country, but you don’t talk to her that way.’ ” Ivan Chirivella, who taught Atta and Shehhi during their brief stint at another school, remembered that they were both “very rude to the female employees.”
The pair were never seen in a woman’s company at the Outlook bar, where flight students gathered at the end of the working day. Lizsa Lehman, who worked there, remembered the two of them well. She liked Shehhi, thought him “fun, inquisitive, friendly,” while Atta rarely exchanged a word with her. He always stood with his back to the bar, Shehhi explained, because he did not approve of female bartenders.
Atta did break one Muslim taboo. If he did deign to address her, Lehman said, it was to utter the words “Bud Light.” There appears to be no truth to allegations made after 9/11 that several of the terrorists, including Atta, drank alcohol to excess. Lehman’s clear memory, though, is that Atta and Shehhi were partial to a beer at the end of the day. “Two, maybe, but they never—ever—overindulged.”
IN EARLY AUGUST, the diligent Ziad Jarrah was awarded his Private Pilot License. In contrast to Atta, the love of a woman was on his mind. He headed back to Germany in the fall to spend several weeks with his girlfriend, Aysel. They went to Paris together, had themselves photographed up the Eiffel Tower. “I love you … don’t worry,” Jarrah wrote when he got back, then indulged himself a little. He bought a red Mitsubishi Eclipse, spent a weekend in the Bahamas. Over Christmas, he took a week-long trip to Lebanon to see his family.
By late December, and in spite of Atta’s obstreperous behavior, both he and Shehhi had qualified to fly not only small private planes but also multi-engine aircraft. Professional, however, the pair were not. The day before Christmas, when their rented plane stalled on the taxiway at Miami Airport, they simply abandoned it and walked away. That fiasco reportedly marked the end of their relationship with Huffman Aviation.
Atta’s mind was racing ahead. Even before receiving his certification, he had sent off for flight deck videos for Boeing airliners. In the last week of December, at a training center near Miami, he and Shehhi paid for six hours on a Boeing 727 simulator. “They just wanted to move around in mid-air,” said the instructor who supervised the session, “not take off or land. I thought it was really odd. I can see now what I was allowing them to do. It’s a terrible thing to live with.”
Some have argued that the hijacking pilots did not have the skills required to pull off the maneuvers performed on 9/11. Given that they would not have to face the complexities of takeoff and landing, though, and given the further practice they were to have in the remaining months, their abilities apparently sufficed for their deadly purpose.
On New Year’s Eve, at another school, Atta and Shehhi trained on a Boeing 767 simulator. It would be a 767,
