The Fifth Plane,’ Passengers Argue with Flight Attendants to Take Off

A United 767 scheduled to take off from JFK Airport on September 11, 2001, may have been the 5th plane targeted by hijackers … according to flight attendants and pilots on that plane. TMZ will present the United 23 story Monday on FOX at 9 PM ET.

TMZ conducted a 6-month investigation into United Flight 23 — scheduled to depart JFK at 9 AM … bound for Los Angeles. We interviewed 3 flight attendants, the pilot, the United dispatcher, a member of the 9/11 Commission and others about a series of suspicious activities on the plane … suspicious enough to get the FBI involved.

Four passengers in first class aroused suspicion shortly after they boarded. Flight attendants said one of the passengers was a man disguised as a woman. The purser [first class flight attendant] tells us that those passengers ate no meat, and had only 2 fruit plates in the galley. He wanted to get more fruit plates for the passengers to eat, and this led to a heated argument … with one of the passengers insisting, “We don’t want to eat. We don’t need food. We want to fly . . . We just want to go.”

There were other reasons why the flight attendants were suspicious of the first 4 passengers, along with 2 others in business class.

The plane taxied to the runway and was about to take off when the World Trade Center was hit and the airport closed. United 23 returned to the gate and was evacuated — the plane was empty and locked. Twenty minutes later, people on the ground saw 2 uniformed men running into the passenger cabin of United 23. Authorities arrived moments later, opened the door and found the hatch — leading from the belly of the plane to the cabin — is open.

The pilot believes that those 2 people may be there to remove weapons or other incriminating evidence. We don’t know what was removed from Flight 23, but we do know that someone placed box cutters in the first-class seat pockets on the plane parked next to United 23 … a plane that wasn’t scheduled to fly at the time. The pilot of United 23 believed those boxcutters were intended for his flight but someone confused the 2 planes.

The FBI interviewed the flight attendants that day and even took them to a lineup at the Port Authority to see if they could ID the 4 passengers.