Captain Steeeve on Cheating Death After Almost Flying 9/11 Plane, 25 Years On

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Almost 3,000 people died that day. Many millions died in the wars that followed. And from surveillance to security and to society itself, nothing has ever been the same again. For that reason, you know an extraordinary amount about it. There are stories of amazing serendipity like Seth McFarlane missing one of the flights because of a hangover. Others are grimly ironic. The FBI's top bin Laden investigator took a new job a couple of weeks before 9/11 as a chief of security at the World Trade Center. Some stories are infuriating, but the decision to effectively ignore the erratic and suspicious behavior of the hijackers and their flight classes. My next guest as a personal story is as extraordinary, frankly, as any of them. A 7.59 AM on 9/11, American Airlines Flight 11 to go from Boston Logan International Airport. 47 minutes later, he hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Captain Steve Scheidner was supposed to be flying him, and he joins me now. Well, Captain Steve, great to have you back on Uncensored. I didn't know the story about you, and it's a quite extraordinary story because you were supposed to be flying that plane. Why in the end did you not fly it? Well, I was the first officer at the time based at a Boston, and I was on what the airlines call reserve, which means I'm a pilot that's ready to fill in for another pilot that for whatever reason can't make it. And it was the right seat of flight 11 that was open. It had been open for about four or five days prior to 9/11. And no senior pilots filled in the seat. It stayed open until the day before on the 10th. And then cruise scheduling at the airline will call you up, and if you're on reserve, they go down through a pecking order. I was the only guy on reserve on call on the 11th. So the computer automatically assigned my name to the trip. I had looked at it on the computer. I saw my name on the manifest. I told my wife, I'm going to LA tomorrow. I packed my bags, put them in the back of the car. And they finalized the assignment via a phone call, usually within about 30 minutes. And they never called, which was very unusual. I can count on maybe three fingers and amount of times over the years that I got assigned a trip. And then they never called somebody else ended up taking it. And it ended up that I got bumped off the trip by a more senior pilot at the very last minute. And that's why I didn't make it onto that trip. But I was originally scheduled, somebody else bumped me. It's incredible. It was first of us, the Tom McGinnis, who took your place. Do you know how that happened that he came to be the one that that took over? Yeah, Tom was a line holding pilot. So I was on reserve ready to fill in Tom held a regular line. So Tom can go in and if he's got space in his schedule, can fill in with another trip. If he wants to just make some more money. And so Tom had been looking at the trip for a few days apparently, didn't pull the trigger on it just yet. He was celebrating his 42nd birthday on the 10th of September with his wife and his children. And then sometime around three o'clock in the afternoon, when they normally proper the trips, Tom went and looked at it one more time. And he saw that my name had been assigned to the trip, but there's a little code next to my name that says they haven't called and confirmed the assignment. So it's a little blurry at this point, but I think Tom called and said, Hey, can I still get that trip? It's up to the scheduler at that point. They can say no to him, but the scheduler said, yes, Tom talked to his wife said, yep, I'll take the trip. And so at that point, then they erased my name off the trip. They put Tom's on it. That's his prerogative, but that's how I get bumped off the trip. Tom just made a decision at the last minute to take flight 11, which in the airline business happens all of the time and it's no big deal. Unless the next day is 9/11 and flight 11 is the first airplane that gets hijacked. Well, where were you when you first heard that that plane had crashed into the North Tower? So since I didn't go flying for the airlines that day, I was working three jobs at the time. I was aware of a church up in Maine. I was also a naval reservist and I was working on a leadership project that I had written for the Navy. And so I went into the Navy base that day, because in my commander's uniform was in my boss's office. And just like everybody else on the planet, all of a sudden we're watching the TV. And you know, you mentioned the airplane took off at 759. 846 is a moment that for me lives in my, it's seared into my memory because 846 was that moment that the first airplane flight 11, the one I was supposed to be on hit the first North Tower. But we're watching it on TV. It's transpiring. We saw the second airplane hit a few minutes later. At that moment on the Navy base, we're thinking we're going to war when we really don't know what's going on. And people show up with guns and we're running around. There's a lot of running around going on that day. I got locked down on the Navy base that day all day, making contingencies. Fortunately, it was only four airplanes and not more. I think if you remember the news reports that day, the initial reports were as many as ten airplanes have been hijacked. Yeah. And so it was only four to American to United. We know where they all ended up now, looking back at it. It was later on that night when I finally got released from the Navy base, I went home. I had looked at the flight the day before. And I know how to log in at the company to find out who would be on any particular flight. I thought, well, I must know the crew members on that flight because Boston is a very small base. I've flown with everybody. So I went back to the computer, I logged in to try to find out, bring up the manifest. And when the manifest came up, it was the exact same screen I had looked at the day before. And where it had my name written in, but now they had erased all the names and all it said on the screen was sequence failed continuity, which at the airlines means the trip never made it to its destination. And you talk about an understatement. And when I saw that screen visually, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, I packed my bags to go on that trip and they never called. And a few minutes later, my wife came around the corner and she said, what are you doing? I said, honey, remember? I told you I was going to LA today and she said, yeah, I said, that was the first airplane they got hijacked this morning. And here's it's, there's still, it's still a moment, right? There's still, there's a place inside where a feeling belongs. And I don't, it's just empty. Even after 25 years, I still don't know how to feel about that moment. What was the actual moment when you realized it was that flight? Was it the moment you just recounted or was it soon after you first saw the plane crash? In other words, how quickly had you done the mass about it being that flight? Yeah, it was actually that moment I just described. I had been on the base all day watching it, but I knew it was the whole day and I find that an amazing thing that you went through a whole day without actually realizing that was the flight you should have been the first officer on. Right. Correct. And again, all day long, they were trying to verify which flight it was, where it came from, where it was going to. There was a lot of confusion in those first 24 hours. And I was on the Navy base. We're talking about moving airplanes, are we going to war? What are we doing? So my, my focus was in a different direction besides on the 11th, my phone was ringing off the hook. Everybody I knew on the planet wanted to make sure I was alive and I was okay. So I was distracted by all of that on that day. But yeah, I never connected the dots. The most bizarre part of the September 11th for me was, remember, I talked about Chris scheduling a minute ago when they should have called me on the 10th. They called me on the 11th. They called me on the 11th, the 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the phone rings. And I answer it and they said, it's American Airlines scheduling. I go, yeah, they go, we had a trip for you tomorrow. I said, what are you talking about? I said, I thought we were grounded. Well, we're grounded, but the FAA wants us to man the airplanes for tomorrow. And so we're giving you a call, I said, well, what's the trip? They said, it's flight 11 to Los Angeles. Wow. And I, I was dumbfounded and you know, a lot of things go through your mind at that moment. And so I said to her, I said, well, I'm not sure I'm okay with that. And I can remember what she said to me just as kind of forceful as possible. She said, well, you know, you have to take the trip. And I said, lady, I don't have to do anything. I'm not sure I'm okay with where we are right now. You know, those first 24, 48 hours, we had no confidence in the system at all. And I wanted to make sure we got good answers. And they ended up, they didn't fly for another four days anyway. But even so that first shocking, you know, you have to take the trip, I, no, no, at first I was like, no, I don't. I, I, I want to sort out what's going on with the air traffic system before I get back in an airplane. And I'm on there with any other passengers going anywhere. Scams are getting a lot more sophisticated, AI, has completely changed what fraud looks like. Fraudsters can generate perfect messages using flawless grammar, your bank's logo, your employer's name, and they're designed to make you act fast without thinking. 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It must have been an incredibly emotional moment for you and your wife when you said to her, "That's the flight I was supposed to be on." Because in that moment, you both realized you've cheated death. I mean, you cheated death. You would have died had you been on that flight, right? I mean, 99.9% the same thing would have happened. And you would have been in the seat that Tom McGinnis was in. What was it like for you and your wife in the few minutes after you realized? - Yeah, well, there was that moment where we just kind of held each other for a little while. And no words were spoken. I don't think there is a word at that moment because you're conflicted. You know that at the same time that you know that your life was spared. Somebody else got the phone call or somebody showed up at their house and gave them the worst possible news you could ever possibly get. And that was repeated a lot of times with all the air crews and all the people that were in the buildings. What a horrible day. But my wife, they made a documentary out of my story for the 10th anniversary. It's called In My Seet. And In My Seet's been out for about 15 years. We just released one on the Captain Steve Channel yesterday, the 25th anniversary. And my wife, she tells her side of the story in both of those documentaries. But one of the things she said in the new documentaries, she said, I can't watch the original documentary. Just going there every time I go in some public event and I show that film and I tell the story about living on borrowed time, she gets up and leaves the room. I watch her every single time. She can't, it's just too much for her. 'Cause it's like Groundhog Day, right? You're living it over and over and over again. And I think at some point you just gotta say, that's enough, I can't do it anymore. - Yeah, you know, there was a very poignant moment where Tom McGinnis' widow talked about, obviously she had the converse to you guys. She had the worst possible news. And the irony being that he'd wanted to get home to her, to Cheryl, his wife, listen to what she said about it. - My phone was ringing off the hook. My children were calling from school to find out if dad was involved in this in any way. And then I remember going to the front of my house and looking out the window and there was a black car at the end of the driveway. And it was the chief pilot from American Airlines. Not only had the airplane been hijacked, but it had been flown into the walk-trade center. And there were no survivors. And it was the most horrific day. I just broke down when I heard that and I just started screaming, no God, no God, please God, don't let that be true, no, please don't take and just crying with everything I had inside I mean that he wouldn't take my husband home. I mean, could it be pointing and desperately sad, of course, for her, you've met Cheryl. I mean, the first time that you met each other, what was that moment like for you? - Well, I've spoken to Cheryl on the phone. I didn't meet her in person. And I have to admit it was kind of an awkward conversation because back in the early days, maybe the first year, so after 9/11, I didn't know all the details about Tom's side of the story. I collected those over the years. And I wanted to verify that so I got Cheryl's number and I called her and she didn't know my story. And it was still very raw for her. And for me to introduce myself and then say, hey, I was originally scheduled to take your husband's place and he bumped me off the trip. It's just the only word I can use it was awkward. She was very gracious. You can tell she's a lovely lady. She was very gracious that she was recounting that. But when you see the heart of a widow, it just breaks your heart. 'Cause the anguish that she had to go through and continues to go through even all these years later is really obvious from her testimony there. And it was really true for me when I was talking to her on the phone. She filled in some of the details for me, which was very nice, but we kind of ended the conversation in sort of an awkward kind of way. I guess that's the only way to put it. - Had you ever met Tom McGinnis? - I met him once or twice. Now, generally speaking as a first officer, I'm gonna know more of the captains at the airline 'cause I work with him. First officers don't really know each other. I met him a couple times in operations, gone one way or another. I wouldn't call him a friend, I'd call him an acquaintance. I know much more about his story in his life now that I recount it over and over again. But from everybody that's ever talked to me about Tom McGinnis, they loved him. He was a great guy. He was a top gun trained pilot, Naval Academy graduate, just the ace of the base in every way you can think of it. And what a tragedy for him and the others. John Oganowski was a captain on that late 11. All of those folks were just incredible people and people that I account as friends are closer acquaintances. - Steve, how hard was it to get back the control of a plane after this? I mean, taught me through the first time you did that. You said it was four days before they got you back in the air, but how hard was that moment for you? - Yeah, so there was that first 24 hours where we weren't sure about what the system was doing and whether it was secure. By the time we started flying again, which was Friday after 9/11, American Airlines flew their first flight. At least I got called for a flight 'cause they were taking all of the reserve pilots at that time and filling up all the available flights. I was itching to get back into cockpit. I think all of us were, if you remember, you know, at least on this side of the Atlantic, all right? Everybody wanted red meat, they wanted revenge. And we felt helpless. Americans helped, they hate feeling helpless. And for four days we felt helpless. And I was itching to get back in an airplane. So they called me up and said, hey, your schedule for flight 25 to Los Angeles. By the way, flight 25 was the former flight 11. They just, they retired that number forever. They renamed it 25. So the very first airplane I flew on the Friday after 9/11 was a Boston to Los Angeles flight that I would have flown on the 11th. There was about 17 people on the whole airplane. I went and shook everybody's hand and thanked them personally for having the courage to come out and get on an airplane. Incredible. What an incredible moment for you. How do you feel, I mean, it's the 25th anniversary of 9/11, this week, today, in fact, Friday? How do you feel about the hijack? Is your amount of faith, can you feel any forgiveness for them or not? That's a great question. That's a mixed bag of things. Assama bin Laden was shot a few years ago. And I got a bunch of calls to comment on what my thoughts were about him being killed. And my first thought was, good riddance, you know, I'm glad. I'm sorry, it took so long. But at the same time, you mentioned I'm a man of faith. I believe in God through faith in Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ went to the cross and died for Assama bin Laden as much as he did for me or for Tom or for you or for anybody else. That's hard to fathom. A lot of us can't accept that. But it puts in perspective for me how fleeting life is, how humbling life can be at times. And how important it is to just hug your family, take care of the things that you've got some control over and not worry about the stuff that you don't have control over. But I think for me, the bigger deal is, can I forgive those terrorists? Yeah, I can if God can. Then I ought to be able to do that as well. But am I conflicted about that? Sure I am, yeah. Yeah, I bet you are. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do. But you're right. If you're a man of faith, well, one of faith, you've got to think about this very deeply, right? About what God would do, what he would do in the same situation. Let me just move on to some of the other questions that came out of what happened. Just some of the conspiracy theory stuff again, but relevant, I think, to your expertise. Is it many people, well, how did these hijackers manage to pull this off? Given the relatively limited amount of training they'd had, we used surprise when you learned all about what had happened. We used surprise that they were able to execute this so brutally effectively. Yeah, I was shocked. I mean, I think the sheer audacity of it is what caught everybody off guard. When I'm doing incidents and accidents analysis on my channel, I talk frequently about the Swiss cheese model. There's lots of holes in a piece of Swiss cheese. If all those holes line up, that's when you have an incident or an accident. So something like this on 9/11 was no accident, but all of the Swiss cheese holes had to line up. So the CIA wasn't talking to the FBI. The FBI wasn't talking to the CIA. Things were, you know, and this was going on and there were whistleblowers, there were people that were trying to raise a flag. Hey, take a look at these guys, they're down in Florida. All they want to do is fly at altitude. They don't want to take off and land. All of those messages were being communicated, but they weren't connecting to the right people to make the right decisions. Many times those things get taken care of because they do connect with the right people and we never see that in the news. The stuff that the FBI and the CIA do behind the scenes on 9/11, it was a classic failure of all of the institutions simultaneously all at the same time. Now, that's that's this side of the equation. The other side is you've got somebody, you've got a group of people with hate-filled hearts that are financing the cold-blooded murder of thousands of people at one time and how do you stop that? You can't, you got to catch it, you got to nip it in the bud, you got to see it developing, but at the same time, evil has been around since the beginning of the planet and it's going to be around for some time longer. Just the sad part is 3,000 people-ish went to work that day and the hardest part for me about 9/11 was watching the Twin Towers and you can see on the screen, people jumping from the buildings. Remember that here? I remember watching it. I remember watching it and we suddenly realized what we were seeing and I was in a newsroom of a newspaper and we were transfixed and completely horrified and then we realized the, I think, journalist realized pretty quickly the enormity of what we were dealing with because for people to do that, jumping to their certain death, it made you realize immediately just how horrific things must be inside these towers, right? If so many people were jumping out to their certain death, how awful was it inside? And I think that was the moment of realization. I mean, just beyond, wasn't it? Yeah, nobody should have to go to work to provide for their family. Then to minutes later, have to make a decision about jumping out of a skyscraper to their death or burning to death. The horror of that should never escape us. Right after 9/11, we were doing, we'll never forget and Congress was hugging each other. All that stuff was kind of short-lived. But those images live on in my mind and I can see those people having to make that decision, the most horrible decision you'd ever have to make. And so don't lose track of the fact that there's real evil out there. There's real, we have a real enemy and that enemy takes on a lot of different faces. I'm not getting into that conversation. I'm just saying that there's real evil out there and it still exists. And we've got to do everything we can to combat it so that we don't ever have to face another day where somebody goes to work and they have to decide whether they're going to jump out of a building or burn to death. Did you have a view Steve about some of the other conspiracy theories that the South Tower collapsed 56 minutes after being struck? The North Tower won our 42 minutes after impact. All the conspiracy theorists say that a plane crashing into massive buildings like this couldn't bring them down without other help, i.e. explosives. You've flown these planes, you know how big they are. What do you say to people that subscribe to that kind of theory? Well, I do get a fair amount of conspiracy theory folks that kind of confront me from time to time. I'll be at a speaking event or signing a book or something and somebody will come up in it. The conversation always starts out the same way and I'm sure you're going to identify with this. Somebody will come up to you and they're looking at it and they'll say they'll start out with some website they've been to or some book they've read and they'll say have you seen this website or this book and I know where it's going and then they want to talk about some conspiracy theory about how this country or that country or these people or these government officials must have put explosives in the buildings and that's what brought the buildings down. You can tell by physics why the buildings came down. The second airplane hit lower on the building. So where the heat was and the melting effect, there was that many stories above it and just more weight. That's why it collapsed first. That's common sense. The other airplane, the first one that I was supposed to be and hit higher in the building. So it collapsed second. What I always say to those folks is like, I go, you can't have it both ways because most people think that the people that are running the government are the biggest idiots on the planet. But at the same time, they're trying to convince you that they're the most evil geniuses that have ever existed. And they come up with this elaborate deceptive plan to build on bring down these two buildings. For what reason? I don't know, but whatever reason they've got. And I go, you can't have it both ways either that they're total idiots or they're evil geniuses, but they're not both at the same time. And so I just kind of kind of remind them that it's time to move out of their mom's basement, maybe get a job and contribute. Yeah, quite right. One of the most powerful documentaries I saw about the whole thing included some extraordinary interviews with Colonel Mark Tillman, who of course was the pilot of Air Force One that day. I want to just play a clip from Matt and just ask you about this. My big concern was looking at it from the moment he arrives, the moment we get airborne, where we're going to take him that we've got the right firepower from the moment he arrives to one where we're born. We have fighter escort. Do we have? Do we know that the past can be cleared to Washington DC? Is Washington DC going to be cleared? Do I take him to Andrews Air Force Base? Do I take him to another location? You know, all of us were highly trained and one of the biggest challenges for us was always, do you do everything as you normally do? Because they're going to be, you're going to be a sit duck. They're going to be waiting for you. As Andrews Air Force Base safe, is, you know, as extra security brought in, maybe we should take him to another base first, kind of unannounced to what, you know, see what's going to happen, you know, and let everybody know. Have a decoy. Have our backup aircraft. These are all things that I put in motion. I mean, quite amazing interviews that he's given over the years. I mean, I remember him talking about the speed when they took off to take the president into the air to what they thought was the safest place and how they, people who were on board just said they'd never seen Air Force One go off at that speed and at that vertical. I mean, how would you have felt if you'd been in the Air Force One cockpit that day? Yeah, well, that's, it's show time right for those guys. This is what they've trained for their entire lives. And something is going down. They don't know the magnitude of it at the time, but their job is to get the president to safety and keep him there. And their role in that is flying that airplane and flying safely. So I love hearing guys like this. These are, these are the heroes of 9/11, the ones that it was fluid on that day. And, but they, they were trained. They've got the military background. They've got the temperament for these sort of things and they're doing their jobs. And the whole system depends on that. And at a crisis moment like 9/11 or some other national crisis, you want the right people on the job to keep the president safe so the president can communicate and keep running the government and running the response to this to save lives and to keep the American people reassured. I love that about George Bush. He really gave everybody a great sense of reassurance. He was kind of like everybody's dad for the next few days, right? He reassured everybody it was going to be okay. Captain Steve, do you ever think about if you had been on that flight and had been in the cockpit, how you would have responded if you had been attacked in the way that the crew were that day? I would have responded the exact same way that the crews did. That's why we were trained to respond that way. So the paradigm shifted on 9/11 and it shifted in about an hour. Because the last airplane flight 93, they realized that they weren't going to go land at some airport to publish a manifesto in a newspaper. They realized that they were being used like a missile to go crash someplace and everybody was going to die. So they took over, tried to take over command of that airplane. The initial airplane flight 11, my training was build a rapport with the terrorists, personalize yourself as a human being, show them pictures of your wife and your children and get the airplane back on the ground so that professional negotiators can take over the negotiation. But all of that changed on 9/11 because that wasn't what they were after at all. They weren't there to publish anything. They were there to use the fuel in that airplane as a missile to bring down symbolically those world trade centers. So I would not have had any different. I wouldn't have fought back. I wasn't trained to fight back now. That's different. If I was still in the cockpit today, I'm trained to fight back. Really, that's interesting. Do you think as a consequence, there were many consequences of 9/11, of course there were? Is it safer now, both for passengers and for air crews than it's ever been? I think it is. You can debate whether TSA does a better job of screening people or not. They've got a difficult job. But at the same time, the general public is still cute and clued in to the idea that something could go wrong and some you should might want to hijack an airplane and not to go publish a manifesto, but to use it as a missile. So I think able-bodied passengers are your biggest line of defense. If they get through the cockpit, I'm trained to fight back. They have armed airline pilots now. I was one for a while. But having said that, I think able-bodied passengers, as you're rushing the door to the cockpit, are going to run and jump on that person. That's going to be the best line of defense at the last moment. How will you personally remember this 25th anniversary today on the 25th anniversary? Well, we're going to spend some time together. My wife and I, we've already been talking about it as it's been coming up. Like I said, we just released the 25th anniversary edition in my seat video on my Captain Steve Channel. And that brings up the old memories. What I'm concerned about going forward peers is it's been 25 years, you know, it's kind of faded into the background over the years. Every time we get to a milestone anniversary, we remember these things. I think Fox, the CNN, and some of the other channels, they're doing documentaries on the 25th anniversary. But once the 25th anniversary is coming on, I kind of think we're going to let this thing sail off into the distance. And honestly, if you're not 35 years or old or older these days, you don't really have a vivid memory of where you were on 9/11. So the whole, the whole thing kind of ages out after a while. It just does. I will never forget it. I got to say I was running a daily newspaper, a big newspaper in the UK. And I just remember that the following like two, three months was just relentless wall-to-wall work on this story, all consuming, very emotional in many ways for many of the staff. And I'll never forget it. And the scenes that day, the chaos, nobody really knowing, I was driving to work at high speed. And I just remember my news desk ringing me. They've hit the Pentagon. They're aiming at the White House. It was out every five, ten minutes. And you're right, they thought there were 10, 12 planes potentially going to be crashing into famous monuments. It was, it was very terrifying. And God knows what it must have been like for the four people in the crews of the planes that were used as bombs or the passengers. It must have been just the most incredible terrifying, horrifying experience. And we remember them, of course, on this day. But what an amazing escape you had, Steve. What an amazing story you've told me today. Thank you very much indeed for sharing with me. Thank you, Pierre. It's my pleasure. Imagine setting your makeup. Then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all day comfy grip. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Maybe it's Mabelie.