Four commercial airplanes were hijacked on September 11, 2001.

Quick Scoop

On 9/11, four passenger jets were taken over by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers as part of a coordinated terrorist attack in the United States. Two of these planes were crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, one into the Pentagon, and one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers resisted the hijackers.

The four hijacked flights

  • American Airlines Flight 11 – departed Boston, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
  • United Airlines Flight 175 – departed Boston, crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
  • American Airlines Flight 77 – departed Washington Dulles, crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia.
  • United Airlines Flight 93 – departed Newark, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers attempted to overpower the hijackers; it is believed the hijackers were targeting a major site in Washington, D.C.

In context and recent discussion

Even decades later, the question “how many planes were hijacked on 9/11” still comes up in quizzes, forums, and online polls, where the correct answer – four – is sometimes confused with the number of impact sites people remember most clearly (often just the Twin Towers). This is why many educational and historical sites continue to restate the basic facts of the day, including the total of four hijacked aircraft and their flight numbers, as part of efforts to preserve an accurate public memory of the attacks.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.