11 September 2001
I have already posted on The Register that no civil airliner as large as a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon.
The rest is speculation.
Shortly after the atrocity happened among the doubters people were asking whether an airliner could be controlled from the ground. I knew about the beacon which transmitted and received between the ground station and the a/c flight control computer, which also provided the autopilot flying through gps co-ordinates. I was shocked then, clearly a conspiracy could provide a vulnerable rom as an update. So I was wrong, every a/c is vulnerable.
Vulnerabilities are even easier to utilise when the attacker has the code of the target system.
In researching this well before 2003 I found several pages that proposed that to beat hijacking every airliner should be subject to an overriding control from the ground. A link from 2001 is below. I was troubled because hijacking is still a threat and ground control of the system through the existing radio channels was always possible if it was coded in.
http://everything2.com/title/How+to+build+a+hijack-proof+airplane
At the time a forum post reported that Lufthansa when they took a delivery of Boeing airliners refused the standard control code and wrote their own. Fly Lufthansa.
When did Boeing system managers know that they were equipping their a/c with an OS as vulnerable as Windows ?