American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles was one of four flights hijacked on September 11, 2001. The Boeing 757 was crashed into the Pentagon, killing 59 passengers and crew and 125 in the building as well.
Five hijackers took control of the aircraft after storming the cockpit and sending passengers and crew to the back of the plane. At 9:37 a.m., Impact happened. The time is eastern.
Two of the hijackers almost didn't make the flight, and one American Airlines agent has been guilty of letting them check in when they were late for the airport for 21 years.
The ticket agent at Washington Dulles saw two first class passengers and wanted to give his best customer service.
The check-in was odd. The two that I checked in, two brothers, one was kind of gruff and the other one was standing a couple of paces behind him. And this sounds odd, but this is what caught my attention. He was almost dancing, he was moving from foot to foot and grinning and looking around, and my thought was, here’s somebody that’s never been on an airplane and boy is this guy excited,” Allex recently recalled in an interview at Dulles airport in Virginia.
“And I kind of watched him for a couple of minutes as we went through the whole check. And he was totally unresponsive as far as whatever we asked him to read, to look verbally. He just smiled and danced and was oblivious to what was going on,” he continued. “That’s the image I have, is the two of them standing there and the one just dancing, it was the oddest thing.”
"I realize that there's probably nothing I could've done to prevent what happened. I've come to terms with that."
Vaughn Allex, former American Airlines gate agent, speaks about the guilt he feels for allowing hijackers onto Flight 77 on Sept. 11, 2001. https://t.co/qabkKxf6WD pic.twitter.com/HYj7VXTVRK
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) September 10, 2021
The pair couldn't answer basic security check-in questions, so he marked them for extra security. They didn't have bombs or guns, that's not how they'd hijack the plane
Allex is guilty of suggesting a co-worker take the flight with a connection to Las Vegas, since the transcon offered a meal and a movie and was so lightly booked.
“She said that sounded good, but that she’d never written a ticket that way and we were just transitioning to electronic tickets. Could I help her? So I wrote her ticket from Dulles to Los Angeles with a connecting flight back to Las Vegas. And then the following day, I saw that she had gotten on the flight on the ticket I’d written.”
He was introduced to an American Airlines lawyer who said he wasn't your lawyer. Two FBI agents were present.
“I started to run my hand down the list and I saw the names of the two people I checked-in, and in that moment and that instant, that’s when I looked at him and I said, ‘I did it, didn’t I?’ And they said, ‘what did you do?’ And I go, ‘these were the two that I put in,'”
Allex blames himself because he had the right information to make the right decisions. It has been difficult for him to escape his role in that fateful day. He realized how many things happened that day, and how small a role he played, when he realized that he was just listed as a footnote. He left American Airlines in 2008 and went to work for the Transportation Security Administration. The thread has an inside look at how the day unfolded.
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