imkittymyers at hotmail dot com
Saturday, March 04, 2006
THE GUY WHO TAUGHT MOUSSAOUI TO FLY
He's called Clancy and he lives right across the border in Pennsylvania. Although he found Moussaoui to be "genial," Clancy had his doubts about his student from the beginning. He no longer gives interviews, but his wife spoke to the local press.
Wellsboro man is key witness in 9/11 trial
"Well, Clancy was uneasy about Moussaoui from the beginning," Sheilah said. "He was uneasy because (Moussaoui) hadn't even soloed in a single-engine airplane, and here he was paying all this money to learn to fly the biggest jet airliner, the 747-400.
"The second thing was that he had this superficial knowledge of the airplane," she said.
"He obviously had studied the manuals. This stuff didn't add up. It just didn't compute."
Clancy instructed Moussaoui in two ground-school sessions and noted that his student didn't make much progress. Nor did Clancy think he ever would.
Then he went to the people who ran the flight academy.
"And he said, 'There's something wrong here,' " Sheilah said. " 'And what are we doing?' And they dismissed it.
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Clancy found out that Moussaoui had paid his "tuition" with 68 $100 bills. That raised yet another red flag. Clancy walked into a meeting of company executives.
"If a customer came in and wanted to pay with $100 bills, they would have him scrutinized immediately," Sheilah said. "That's when the line came out, 'He paid the money. We don't care.'
"Clancy said, 'You will care if he tries to hijack a plane and there's a paper trail back that shows he was trained here,' " Sheilah said.
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