Flight 77 was full of people connected to the DoD!

“Is it a just coincidence the most of the passengers on Flight 77 with military backgrounds were Navy and that the crash at the Pentagon happened in the Navy’s command center which took the heaviest casualties?”

                                         — Killtown

Approximately 20 of the 58 passengers worked at classified positions in the defense sector!

About a third of the flight worked in classified positions linked to the DoD, with a predominance being aerospace engineers.  Yamnicky is a lifetime CIA operative that works for Veridian as an aerospace engineer.  Caswell led a team of 100 scientists for the navy.  Several worked for Boeing and Raytheon on the Global Hawk in El Segundo, California.

Passengers that are Pentagon/Defense related.

John D. Yamnicky Sr. – 71, of Waldorf, Md., was a retired naval aviator, but worked as a defense contractor for Veridian Corp. Involved in many black box operations.

John D. Yamnicky Sr.

(Photo: AP/Yamnicky family photo)

William E. Caswell – 54, was a third-generation physicist whose work at the Navy was so classified that his family knew very little about what he did each day. They don’t even know exactly why he was headed to Los Angeles.  He is credited to have made major contributions to quantum gauge field theories (See chapter on William E. Caswell).

Wilson Flagg – 62, and wife, of Millwood, Virginia.  Pentagon consultant, and retired Navy Admiral and pilot with American Airlines before his retirement.  He was one of three admirals censured by the Navy over the 1991 “Tailhook” sexual-assault scandal.

Stanley Hall – 68, of Rancho Palos Verdes, California.  Director of program management with Raytheon Electronics Warfare, helped develop and build anti-radar technology.  “Our dean of electronic warfare,” said a colleague at Raytheon.

Bryan Jack – 48, of Alexandria, Virginia.  Head of programming and fiscal economics in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was a top budget analyst.  He had worked at the Pentagon for 23 years.  Colleagues say Jack, 48, was a brilliant mathematician and he was headed to California to give a lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.  His wife is a high-ranking member of the military.

Keller, Chandler – 30, was a lead Propulsion Engineer and a Project Manager with Boeing Satellite Systems.
Dong Lee – 48, of Leesburg, Virginia, was an engineer with Boeing.
Ruben Ornedo – 39, of Los Angeles, was a propulsion engineer with Boeing.  Born in the Philippines, he graduated from University of California, Los Angeles.

Robert Penninger – 63, of Poway, California, was an electrical engineer with defense contractor BAE Systems since 1990.

Robert R. Ploger III – 59, and his wife, Zandra Cooper, of Annandale, Virginia.  He was a Navy commander, and a manager in the systems and software architecture department with Lockheed Martin Corp.

John Sammartino – 37, an engineer at XonTech Inc. in Rosslyn, he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 to attend a conference in Los Angeles.  Out of college, Sammartino was hired as an engineer at the Naval Research Lab; he had worked 11 years at XonTech, a research and development firm involved in defense issues.

Leonard Taylor – of Reston, Va. was a technical manager at XonTech Inc., a research and development firm specializing in sensor technologies for defense and industry.
Vicki Yancey – a former naval electronics technician.  She worked for Vredenburg, a Washington-based defense contractor.  She was bound for a business conference in Reno.
     In 1991, she wrote a letter to The Washington Post bringing attention to the demise of the one-income family.  It led to her making an appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, where she testified over the struggles of middle-class families; mainstream media followed up on her story.

Charles Burlingame – A 1971 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Charles F. Burlingame III was captain of American Airlines Flight 77.

Mark Burlingame said his brother was in the Navy Reserve and had worked in the same area of the Pentagon where the airliner crashed.  When he was in the Navy, he developed anti-terror strategies, and helped draft the Pentagon’s emergency response plan in case it was ever hit by a airliner.[i]

Passengers with interesting governmental connections.

Barbara Olson – Advocate and Conservative Commentator, was well known to television viewers across the nation as a combative and confident political commentator representing the conservative Republican point of view (see the Barbara Olson chapter).

David Charlebois – Copilot, Navy-member National Gay Pilots Association.

Karen Kincaid – 40, of Washington, D.C., she was a partner at the Washington law firm of Wiley Rein & Fielding, which specializes in communications law.  She was married to Peter Batacan, a lawyer at another firm. [Wiley Rein & Fielding is a powerful Republican law firm that was part of the Bush Cheney Transition team, as well as an important white-collar crime defense counsel.]
Steven “Jake” Jacoby – was Chief Operating Officer of Metrocall Inc., one of the nation’s largest paging companies.  Metrocall has 6.2 million customers nationwide, many of them in the medical or emergency services field.

Mike Scanlon, spokesperson and senior vice president of marketing and communications at MetroCall (claimed he’s a long-time friend of Bush adviser, Karl Rove) stated:

Jacoby was one of the key architects of a multiple-frequency wireless messaging system that has 15 redundant backup frequencies at any given time.  “He’s the guy who had more to do with setting up the systems, and we lose him when our systems are taxed to the max”… “Nationwide, 75 percent of the hospital, emergency worker and medical field use our services.            

Paul Ambrose – 32, of Washington, was a physician who worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the surgeon general to address racial and ethnic disparities in health.  A 1995 graduate of Marshall University School of Medicine, Ambrose last year was named the Luther Terry Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Preventative Medicine.

Charles S. Falkenberg – Director of research at ECOlogic Corp., NASA, Global warming issues.  He worked on data systems for NASA and also developed data systems for the study of global and regional environmental issues.  Falkenberg was the lead software engineer for ECOlogic Corp. in Washington, D.C., and had worked in developing software systems since 1980.  He also developed “scientific data delivery systems” for oceanographers, space and ecosystem scientists, and was working with the University of New Hampshire as part of NASA’s Earth Science Information Partnership.  Falkenberg previously worked in Alaska to help evaluate the long-term effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Lisa Raines – 42, from Great Falls, Virginia, and was married to Stephen Push (executive at Gene Logic Inc.).  She was senior vice president for government relations at the Washington office of Genzyme, a biotechnology firm.  She worked with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on developing a new policy governing cellular therapies, announced in 1997.  She also worked on other major health-care legislation.

Information compiled from CNN, AP, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.