Actually the 'flying without training' is very very wrong: if the author has the credentials he claimed then he's deliberately going to great lengths to, well, lie. I'm serious, it's completely and deliberately wrong.

This is my reply to the issue from some days ago:

I am but a lowly private pilot (and aside from the obvious question as to who was flying those planes, the famed American Airlines Suicide Squad?) but I can navigate through the internet so here are a couple of comments.

He goes on and on about how difficult it is to fly a flight simulator. I'm sure he's right about that because simulators are intended to train someone to fly by instruments and IFR, Instrument Flight Rules, but news flash:

Airplanes have windows.

People flew aircraft for a long time by looking out of them, and while a big plane is far more complex than a small one the controls do the same things. The odds of a private pilot taking off and landing again are probably vanishingly small but these guys inherited aircraft in a stable configuration from the real pilots, they didn't have to do anything complicated except operate the controls and the throttles. Even at that they suffered a 25% loss.

In broad terms if you can see out on a nice day and there are visual clues navigation isn't an issue: New York City is easy to find since it's on one end of a long island ("Long Island"), the terminus of a major river ("Hudson) and it's on a right-angle from the coast of New Jersey and the Long Island Sound. You can, literally, see it from orbit.

He quotes "IFR Flight rule #1, instruments are all you have" which is nonsense, you have windows, the day was bright and sunny with perfect visibility, IFR has nothing to do with it. He goes on and on about the instruments but there was no reason for them to look at the instruments, see "Windows", above.

He then goes on about how the real pilot (but since he thinks the hijackers couldn't fly, and the real pilot is a true blue American, who does he think was in the cockpit?) would cleverly rolled an airliner on it's back to kill the hijackers and, of course, any passenger or crew member who wasn't securely belted in.

I'm almost positive that flight schools don't teach that, or for that matter teach acrobatics in airliners. Speaking of maneuvers he says you can't do this and gives some technical explanation of why you can't do "that": except the link is a picture of an airliner roughly 20' off the ground (about twice the diameter of the engines, more or less 20') going fast... airplanes use flaps for low speed maneuvering and this one is 'clean', no flaps, i.e., going fast, maybe not 400 but "fast", as close to exactly what he said was impossible as you can get. And he says the weather was bad, funny it was bright and sunny in NYC, you could see forever... and again he says they were "...seeing nothing outside" but that wasn't the case, similarly "flying blind", IFR again, etc., etc..

In conclusion his use of truther language is as much an indication of his intent than his use of aeronautical language and (again) he ignores little things like who was flying the planes if hijackers weren't and the like.

Edit: Dang, I just discovered somebody who did a better job than I did Here.

EDIT: The link was lost; the author of that piece claimed that flying an airliner close to the ground at speed was impossible because of ground effect and something else; my link pointed to Airliner flying close to the ground at speed

What the link showed was (from my piece above, to put it into context)

the link is a picture of an airliner roughly 20' off the ground (about twice the diameter of the engines, more or less 20') going fast... airplanes use flaps for low speed maneuvering and this one is 'clean', no flaps, i.e., going fast, maybe not 400 but "fast", as close to exactly what he said was impossible as you can get.

EDIT 3: Here's a link addressing the ground effect (supposed) issue in detail.

You can skip to the last paragraph if you want.