The debut of the show involved Byers’ father faking his death to uncover a conspiracy to hijack an airliner. The Lone Gunmen try to get to the truth of his supposed death and uncover the conspiracy.
One retrospectively relevant aspect of this pilot episode is that the airliner has been hijacked (via remote control of the plane’s autopilot) and, by the end, both Byers and his father have boarded the plane to try to stop the hijacking. Through the aid of the other Gunmen, they are able to regain control of the plane and just miss crashing into the World Trade Center with the airliner. This, of course, was before the actual September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center later that year.
The possibility that the planes were remotely piloted had never occurred to me.
With respect to three of the four jets, we have no idea whatever what happened. They went dark, then crashed into something (or in the case of the Pentagon, we are told they crashed into something).
Only one jet provided intelligence, United 93. We cannot necessarily assume from that case that what happened there happened on the other three. It could be that the remote control, for example, failed for some reason, and the terrorists were there as a backup plan.
And I will continue to insist that the most logical target of United 93 was WTC7. Flying a plane into was part of the plan. It is astonishing to me that this long after those attacks no one in high ranking position has demanded an honest investigation into its collapse, since the official one was farcical.
And Fairbanks continues to disappoint me. I don’t know what the hell is going on up there. An architect friend of mine I mentioned this to opined he was just trying to milk this thing for as much money as he could get. Until something formal comes out, I can’t say he is wrong.