Airplane Hijacking Quotes

Back on September 11, terrorists attacked our metropolitan cores, two of America's great cities. They did that because they knew that was where they could do the most damage and weaken us the most.

The 19 hijackers that came over here to commit the attack on Sept. 11, there were those that were at the bottom of the line. There were those who were the principal conspirators. There were those who were the pilot. Everybody has a role.

I was visiting my mother in Florida when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened. I was working on The Tale of Despereaux at that point. I had already gone into writing it with a great deal of trepidation and fear, and then this God-awful thing happens and it was really hard to even get back home to Minneapolis.

We have to remember that Arafat was the one that started with hijacking airplanes already in 1968.

A small-time hoodlum who had spent most of the 1960s at San Quentin State Prison in California, the 30-year-old Bryant claimed that he hijacked Flight 97 under orders from his higher-ups in the Black Panther Party; he said his mission was to arrange for the purchase of bazookas to aid the organization's struggle against oppression.

On the morning of September 11th, I was literally about 18 blocks from the World Trade Center. I witnessed in person what a lot of people witnessed in person, but what the world really saw on the television screen, I saw it with my own eyes that morning.

The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks.

How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, have... plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets?

When you had the World Trade Center go, people were put into planes that were friends, family, girlfriends, and they were put into planes and they were sent back, for the most part, to Saudi Arabia. I would be very, very firm with families. Frankly, that will make people think because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families' lives.

She said it had been hijacked shortly after takeoff. By this time, the plane had been in the air - again, I'm presuming that it took off on time - for over an hour.

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

The World Trade Center was the target for the world, and they hit the target.

So we knew their intentions were to strike in the United States. We also knew from other sources of dozens of examples of where the notion of using planes as weapons was discussed.

All we wanted to do was fight against Israel. But the Jordanian government saw us as a problem. This was their problem. We thought that the way to attract the world’s attention to our problem was to hijack airplanes.

I'm a New York kid, so when I saw that plane that hit the first building, I suspected it was terrorism - blue sky day.

We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of sort of denials. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.

A tom cat hijacked a plane, stuck a pistol into the pilot's ribs and demanded: 'Take me to the canaries'.

Like all Americans, I will never forget where I was the morning of the 9/11 attacks.

I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.

Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility.

We came back right over the World Trade Center and could see, even from that altitude, the devastation, the smoke that was coming up. It was obvious it was going to be horrible.

I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue?

I will never forget the bright September day, standing at my desk in the White House, when my young assistant said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center - and then a second one - and a third, the Pentagon.

I immediately called the command center of the Department of Justice to let them know that my wife was on a plane that had been hijacked. I mainly wanted them know there was another hijacked plane out there.