This page was added on 12 Aug 2020

On Sunday, 31 October 1999 a 767 passenger plane departing JFK airport in New York was hijacked by a sucide attacker.

It was the flight's own reserve first-officer who locked the other crew members out of the cockpit before crashing the plane in to the ocean, murdering two hundred and sixteen people.

I was stunned. The warnings I tried to give were of a lack of cockpit security on domestic and international flights in the US, and the risk of a suicide hijacking by trained pilots. I thought my prediction had come true and I felt guilty, responsible, because I'd not given enough warning.

My December 1997 visit to New York was the last time I was in the USA.

But I had given multiple warnings in 1997, all very specifically detailing my 9/11 attack method prediction. I'd warned people who said they had contacts in the security services. They said they would, most definitely, pass my reports on with my details from my business card.

I expected to be stopped by security officials and questioned further, but no one ever contacted me. 

In 1998 I was made redundant from my parent’s engineering company but got a good job working for the Manchester office of a German electronic control systems manufacturer in the same industry.  From 1998 to 2001 I was a frequent business traveller to Germany and holidayed in Morocco. From 2003 to 2007 I went on a world tour,  in-between undergoing surgery to treat injuries suffered in a motorbike accident in 1989. I drove from Manchester to Marakesh and spent six months there, volunteering at an equine care refuge and other stuff. I spent a year in Thailand, eight months in Colombia and visited a few other places too.

Millenium Bug, Millenium Plot, Millenium Party

1999 was already a whirlwind year. A Milleniium Bug computer breakdown scare and New Year party plans drowned out pretty much all other news. In America there was the Millenium Plot, an al Qaeda linked plan to hijack flights in Asia and attack airports in the US. There was a huge secutity operation, the plot exposed and arrests had been made. Our Intel services seemed to be on top of things.

My confidence in our security services combined with me thinking my attack prediction had already been fulfilled two months earlier, with the 767 pilot’s suicide hijacking over the Atlantic, I assumed the cockpit vulnerabilities I’d seen and warned of would have been secured. We’d entered a new Millenium, there’d been no major attacks and things were looking up. That’s when I stopped thinking a civilian airliner departing the USA would be hijacked and used as a missile by suicide attackers.

I assumed our combined security services had our enemies in check. I now know that assumption was wrong.