Who's Trying To Kill
9/11 Flight School Owners?


By Fintan Dunne
Editor, GuluFuture.com
January 25, 2003

PAGE URL
http://www.gulufuture.com/future/big_chill_z.htm

  It's just not fair the way your luck can run real bad at times. Ask Rudi Dekkers. Yesterday Rudi was lucky to survive after his helicopter crashed into a river in Florida --just 24 hours after AP reported he was about to be arrested by the State Attorney's Office on felony fraud charges. That was the SECOND air crash involving owners of flight schools which trained 9/11 hijackers.

There is a chill wind blowing. Not just because it was the coldest day of the year in Southwest Florida on Friday, but because somebody may be cleaning up a few loose ends from the 9/11 terror attack.

Yesterday the man who ran Huffman Aviation --the flight school which trained Mohammed Atta-- crashed his FH-1100 helicopter into an ice-cold Caloosahatchee River. The 46-year-old native from Holland, whose Huffman Aviation flight school made national headlines when it was discovered it trained two Sept. 11 terrorists, nearly drowned trying to escape his sunken aircraft. But a friend and fellow chopper pilot pulled the freezing Dekkers from the river, dragging him to shore as he clung with both hands to the chopper's skids.


"I really thought I was going to die today," said the Bonita Springs resident, hours after surviving an episode unmatched by any reality TV show. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.

The plane hit the water at 40 mph to 50 mph, shattering the front windshield and instantly filling it with water. The force of the impact flipped the helicopter onto its right side — covering the escape route.

"In one or two seconds the plane was upside down and I was facing the bottom of the river," Dekkers said. Visibility was zero.

"It was pitch black," Dekkers said. He was wearing a bulky sweater and jacket, and couldn't get out of the shoulder harness. He struggled for four or five seconds, gulped down water and began to panic.

"I thought this was it. I thought about my wife and kids and thought they were going to have to do it without me," he said.

Dekkers put his left leg underneath the 2,000-pound aircraft and pried it upward, escaping underwater beneath it. "I had to push away from ground. I used my weight as leverage and made an opening between it and the bottom of the river," he said. He swam to the surface of the possibly 10-foot deep water.

A following helicopter had circled around, and as Dekkers got to the top of the skids, the pilot took the chopper dangerously low to the water for Dekkers to grab hold. He lifted Dekkers about 20 feet high and took him to the south side of the river, to the back yard of a newly built but-not-yet occupied home. It took an emergency worker 10 minutes of warming Dekkers with thermal blankets before the lowest temperature on the ear-thermometer registered his 91.8 degrees, Dekkers said. Doctors at Lee Memorial Hospital told Dekkers that the weight-loss and exercise program he has been on for the past year is what saved him.

Just this week, Dekkers was accused of failing to repay a loan to his business partner and is now facing felony fraud charges and possible arrest. The day before the chopper crash, The Associated Press reported Dekkers was about to be arrested by the State Attorney's Office on felony fraud charges for selling a building without paying back a promissory note-holder $300,000. Dekkers has denied wrongdoing and provided documents Friday showing the complainant no longer wants to pursue the matter.

Dekkers says his luck changed Friday. "This is a blessed day," he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "I don't have to go to court, I am still alive and I sold my business."

PREVIOUS CRASH

On July 5th, 2002 Arne Kruithof, another Dutchman and owner of Florida Flight Training had another lucky escape when a private plane nose-dived to earth after taking off from the Venice Airport.

Kruithof's and two companions cleared the shattered fuselage of the Twin Beech E18 to safety only moments before the plane exploded in a fireball.

Kruithof's school trained Siad Al Jarrah, who was on the aircraft which crashed in Pennsylvania on 9th September 2001.

The survivors were on a pleasure trip to Cancun. Venice Police said they "were really lucky to walk away." Mechanical failure was believed to be responsible, but the precise cause of the crash remains unknown.

There seemed to be a great deal of haste in clearing the wreckage.

"The plane was almost immediately dragged off to be compacted even though the FAA hadn't yet determined the cause for the crash," one local aviation observer told Daniel Hopsicker of MadCow Morning News.

"That's not just irregular. It's highly irregular. So we're all kind of wondering just what the hell's going on"

See MadCow Morning News for more.


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Who's Trying To Kill 9/11
Flight School Owners?

   GuluFuture.com, 25 Jan 2003
  
by Fintan Dunne

   It's just not fair the way your luck can run real bad at times. Ask Rudi Dekkers.
  Rudi was lucky to survive after his helicopter crashed yesterday into a river in Florida -just 24 hours after AP reported he was about to be arrested on felony fraud charges. That was the SECOND air crash involving flight school owners who trained the 9/11 hijackers.... Continued

 

   
     
    
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