Was There a Fifth Plane on 9/11?
No fifth plane was hijacked on 9/11, and the official record counts four. The theory centers on United Flight 23, a JFK to Los Angeles flight that never took off that morning. The 9/11 Commission Report never mentions it, but the FBI still withholds its Flight 23 records, citing a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding.
By the Conspiracy Podcast team | Last updated: October 2026
The fifth plane story never made the history books, but it never went away either. It rests on a working flight crew’s memories, a few official hints at more than four teams, and a government file that is still closed. Here are the questions people actually search, answered with the official record first.
What does the official record say about a fifth plane?
It describes four hijacked planes, not five. The 9/11 Commission Report, released in July 2004, names four flights and 19 hijackers and does not mention Flight 23 at all. No agency has publicly confirmed a fifth hijacking team, and the FBI has declined to release the records it holds on the flight.
On the Commission’s account, the plot used four teams on flights out of Boston, Washington Dulles and Newark. Flight 93 carried four hijackers while the other three carried five, the gap behind years of talk about a missing 20th man. The silence on Flight 23 stands out because, according to Florida Bulldog, Commission staff had heard about the flight in an April 2004 interview with a United dispatcher.
Official voices did hint at more. In the fall of 2001, Newsweek reported a theory widely held inside law enforcement that there had been five hijacking teams. In 2002, NORAD’s deputy commander said the military suspected more than four aircraft might have been involved, without naming Flight 23. In 2004, an Illinois congressman said the suspicious passengers had never been found. And in July 2023, the FBI told Florida Bulldog it holds records on Flight 23 but withheld them, writing that “there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records.” The hosts weigh each point in the full Part Seven dossier.
What happened to United Airlines Flight 23?
United Flight 23 was a Boeing 767 booked from JFK to Los Angeles with about 160 passengers, scheduled to leave around 9 a.m. on September 11, 2001. It was stuck in a line of jets when the airport froze, never took off, and returned to a gate, where everyone was ordered off and the plane was locked.
It was a transcontinental departure from the same morning wave as the four hijacked flights, and the same aircraft type as two of them. Around 9:20 a.m., a United dispatcher warned his flights to “beware any cockpit intrusion” because two aircraft had hit the World Trade Center. The captain took up the crash axe and the first officer wedged the pilots’ luggage against the door, since cockpit doors in 2001 were not reinforced.
The nationwide ground stop ended any chance of a departure. The captain has described the tower telling crews that the airport was closed and that they were on their own. He taxied back to the terminal, and a mechanic came aboard with orders to clear everyone off and seal the airplane. Passengers and crew walked out into a terminal that was itself being evacuated, and the 767 sat at the gate, locked and empty.
Why did the crew believe hijackers were on board?
Mostly because of four first class passengers. Flight attendants described two men, a young boy and a figure in a burqa whose hands looked to them like a man’s. The group refused food, kept asking to just take off, and two of them turned up at the cockpit door after being told no.
Three flight attendants have told the story on the record, most fully on camera together in a March 2023 TMZ documentary. More than one came away separately convinced the burqa hid a man in disguise. When the purser tried to find the group something to eat, one of the men cut her off: they did not need food, they just wanted to take off. A flight attendant says a man and the boy later stood at the cockpit door, peering in, after a cockpit visit was refused.
The hosts push back hard. People fly with children, plenty of travelers have dietary restrictions, and a passenger who asked during the evacuation whether they got the White House was making a logical guess once the Pentagon had been hit. Above all, the crew’s memories took shape after they knew what happened that day, and the hosts call that hindsight. One flight attendant insists the crew was reacting to red flags, not profiling, and the guys still call the evidence loose.
What happened after Flight 23 was emptied?
The accounts get thinner. One flight attendant says she found two men hiding aboard the locked plane, and the captain says he was told box cutters turned up on the 767 parked next to his. Neither claim has been officially confirmed, and the passengers who worried the crew have never been publicly identified.
The galley story comes from a flight attendant who asked not to be named. She says she went back aboard alone for a water bottle, found two men she did not recognize in the rear galley, and was later told they slipped out through a floor hatch into the electronics bay. The hosts flag it as a single, uncorroborated account. The documentary adds a report of two uniformed figures seen in the empty cabin, and of that floor hatch found open.
Then the box cutters. A few days after the attacks, the captain says, a United chief pilot asked for his plane’s fleet number, which ended in 6002, and told him box cutters had been found on 6001, parked nearby. His read is that someone on the ground planted them on the wrong plane. The hosts ask why an insider would plant box cutters rather than guns, and note that every extra helper makes a plot easier to break. A 2008 book, Touching History, reported box cutters and al Qaeda instruction sheets in unclaimed luggage, a claim never officially confirmed.
The main claims stack up against the record like this.
| Theory | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Flight 23 was a fifth target. The captain says it is more likely than not. | The 9/11 Commission Report does not mention the flight, and no agency has publicly confirmed a fifth team. |
| The first class group were hijackers. Based on the cabin crew’s accounts. | They were never publicly identified, and the accounts came after the crew knew what happened that day. |
| Men hid aboard the locked plane. One flight attendant’s account. | No second witness has confirmed it. The documentary reports a floor hatch was found open. |
| Box cutters were planted for a hijack team. Reported on a neighboring 767. | Known only through the captain’s account and a 2008 book, and never officially confirmed. |
| The FBI is sitting on an open case. Based on its 2023 records refusal. | It withheld its Flight 23 records citing a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding, and has not publicly described that proceeding. |
The only reason why I really put this as an episode is because of the flight crew. I wouldn’t have done it if it was a super fringe theory.
the guys, on the record
Was Zacarias Moussaoui supposed to fly a fifth plane?
He said so once, then took it back. Testifying at his sentencing trial in March 2006, Moussaoui claimed he and shoe bomber Richard Reid were meant to fly a fifth plane into the White House on 9/11. Weeks later he called that testimony a complete fabrication, and three jurors wrote that he had limited knowledge of the 9/11 plans.
Moussaoui is the one man tied to the plot whom the government caught in advance. A French citizen with no pilot’s license, he paid $6,800 in cash for Boeing 747 simulator training in Minnesota. The flight school called the FBI, and he was arrested on August 16, 2001 for overstaying his visa. FBI headquarters decided there was not enough for a warrant to search his laptop, and agents got one only on the afternoon of 9/11. The 9/11 Commission wrote that a maximum effort conceivably could have led investigators to the core of the plot.
He pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts in April 2005 while denying a role in 9/11 itself. The jury did not agree on death, and he is serving life without release at the federal supermax in Colorado, the only person convicted in a US court in connection with 9/11. The men accused of planning the attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are charged but not convicted before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay. Plea deals reached in 2024 were revoked by the Defense Secretary, a move a federal appeals court upheld in July 2025, and Mohammed’s trial is set for June 2028.
So where do the hosts land on Flight 23? Somewhere between hindsight and that open file. They call most of the eyewitness story loose, but a case the FBI still will not discuss keeps the question alive, and one host floats, purely as speculation, that extra teams could have been a planned backup. Follow the whole series on the 9/11: Unanswered series hub, and hear the complete debate in our breakdown of Part Seven, The Fifth Plane.
If you like cases where a few real details and a closed file grow into a bigger story, our roundup of famous conspiracy theories covers many more.
