United States Congress
House Transportation Committee: Subcommittee on Aviation
Hearings on the 9/11 Commission’s Report
August 25, 2004, 10:00 am

Statement of Ellen Saracini, widow of Captain Victor Saracini, killed while commanding United Airlines Flight 175, September 11, 2001.

Members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of my husband, Captain Victor Saracini, who was killed on the morning of September 11, 2001, commanding United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 scheduled to fly from Boston to Los Angeles.

Even after so many years of marriage, I cannot pretend to know precisely what Vic might have been thinking in the early morning hours of that beautiful late summer day. Perhaps a thought of home in Pennsylvania, of me and our two girls. Maybe a grumble about on-going construction at Logan Airport. But as Vic went through his pre-flight checklists with his First Officer, Michael Horrocks, his thoughts doubtless turned to the work of the day – ensuring a safe and comfortable flight for his seven flight attendants and 56 passengers bound for the West Coast.

A veteran Navy pilot with nearly two decades of flying with United, Vic had all the characteristics of the consummate professional aviator – thorough and safety-conscience while at the same time adaptable and inventive. To be sure, the crew and passengers of United Flight 175 were in capable, well-trained hands as they rolled down the runway and took off into a brilliant aqua sky. How it came to pass that just a short while later, my husband’s flight was no longer in his capable hands is a question that will forever torment us. In the hands of suicidal terrorists bent on mass murder, United Flight 175 hit the second World Trade Center tower, abruptly ending lives, dreams, and the innocence of a nation.

Did it really have to happen this way? Could we, as a nation or as individuals, have done something – anything -- at any point in either the planning or execution phase of the attack to prevent it from unfolding the way it did? At the heart of the 9/11 Commission’s conclusions is that the terrorist attacks were fundamentally the consequence of a “failure of imagination.” It is quite true that our national intelligence agencies had difficulty contemplating a plot similar to that which unfolded on September 11, even with pieces of intelligence coming in from various field agents that, in retrospect, seem like major ‘tip offs.” Likewise, this “failure of imagination” extended to the training and equipping of our commercial flight crews, none of whom were prepared in any way to handle a suicide-hijacking scenario. The hijackings of the 1970s provided the template for flight crew training prior to September 11, with the tacit assumption that hijackers were generally not suicidal and therefore would be dissuaded from harming the pilots on which their survival depended.

In addition to being a wonderful husband and a loving father, Vic perhaps had more imagination than most. Long before United Flight 175 departed Logan Airport on what would be Vic’s last flight, he was a proponent of arming the pilots of commercial airliners. Commercial airline pilots have long been given training and tools needed to address a myriad of in-flight emergencies. The majority of these emergencies are rare, but the consequences of being ill-equipped or ill-trained if one does occur can be catastrophic.

What if Vic had been able to defend his flight on the morning of September 11, 2001? Would my little girls still have dreams of their dad walking them down the aisle on their wedding day? Would countless families have been spared unspeakable tragedy? Could our nation have been spared the economic and psychological catastrophe of September 11th, and all that followed in its wake? None of us truly knows the answer to these questions. But knowing my husband as I did for so many years, I can assure you that he would have fought with every tool and resource he had to save his passengers and his aircraft. I suspect seven of his fellow aviators – would have done the same.

In the nearly three years since September 11, much has been done in the name of improving airline security. Billions of dollars have been spent addressing screening of passengers and checked baggage, a larger force of Federal Air Marshals, and reinforced cockpit doors. And yet it is an undisputed fact that the system is still substantially porous, and single-point failures take place all too frequently. It does not take much imagination to see we are still vulnerable to more September 11th style attacks.

The single most cost-effective way to address this vulnerability is to allow professional airline pilots to carry firearms with the sole purpose of defending the cockpit from terrorists. Congress – with the backing of the flying public – supported this idea with great conviction when it passed legislation calling for the creation of the Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program in the Arming Pilots Against Terrorism Act. Regrettably, the vast majority of pilots are reluctant to join the program due to its current, ill-conceived implementation by the Transportation Security Administration.

Immediate passage of the Cockpit Security Technical Corrections and Improvements Act (HR 4126), now pending in the House Aviation Subcommittee, would standardize the program’s implementation and fix the most serious problems with the current program, attract thousands of pilot volunteers and send a message to the American people that Congress is serious about aviation security.

There are more than 3,000 stories like mine – personal tragedies that collectively form our national nightmare that was September 11, 2001. I do not pretend that mine is more compelling than the next, but I know my husband would want his voice heard on this issue. It is a travesty that some three years after the attacks were are still sending our commercial airline pilots into what is effectively a major theater in the war on terror without the training and equipment they need to ensure the safety of their passengers and fellow crew, and thousands of innocent people below.

For the sake of Vic, his friends and colleagues, his passengers, and his fellow Americans who perished on September 11th, pass the Cockpit Security and Technical Corrections Act and give those who fly in his seat today a chance he didn’t have. What we lacked in imagination before 9/11 let us make up for in courage today.

Thank you for the opportunity to address the Committee.

Ellen Saracini