Patrick Flannery could never have imagined that a customer entering his family’s Arizona restaurant would later be linked to an act of terror that reshaped modern history. Yet one detail stayed with him: the man’s intense, unforgettable stare.
Those striking brown eyes belonged to Hani Hanjour, the al-Qaeda operative who later hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon during the September 11 attacks.
Now, speaking exclusively to Our News Outlet, Flannery has described his unsettling encounters with the restaurant regular and explained why the memory has remained with him for more than 25 years.
Around the turn of the century, a seemingly routine day unfolded at the Left Seat Restaurant at Scottsdale Airport when five men wearing grey overalls approached the counter to pay for lunch.
Flannery assumed they were pilots, part of the familiar mix of aviation students and private-jet passengers who regularly visited the airport restaurant.
His mother spotted the group first. She took Patrick by the hand and quietly told him, “Those are Saudi pilots taking flying lessons here.” Then she added words that would later take on a deeply disturbing significance: “Isn’t that neat? They are our allies.”
When Flannery looked back, one man appeared to command the group. Standing at its center, he joked animatedly in Arabic while the others broke into laughter.
Although Flannery could not understand the conversation, he remembered the man’s moustache, cropped hair and faint stubble. Above all, he recalled the “piercing eyes that bore into you” and the unwavering eye contact from only a few feet away.
Patrick Flannery remembers coming face to face at his family’s restaurant with a man he would later identify as one of the 9/11 hijackers
Hani Hanjour, whom Flannery says regularly visited the restaurant, was involved in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77
Flannery recalled Hanjour standing with four other men and laughing in Arabic as they waited at the counter after lunch. He also remembered that the group often chose the booth shown here
When images of the 19 hijackers emerged after the attacks, Flannery said he felt sick as he realized that one of the faces was instantly familiar
He went on with the rest of his day, but the stranger’s face remained fixed in his thoughts.
“The image of his face burned in my brain,” Flannery recalled. “It never left me.”
Less than two years later, photographs of the 19 September 11 hijackers appeared across television screens. Flannery said he recognized the man immediately.
“There he was. I mean, clear as day,” he said. “I would never forget this guy’s face.”
The man was Hani Hanjour, one of the hijackers who seized American Airlines Flight 77 before it was deliberately flown into the Pentagon on 9/11.
Five hijackers took control of Flight 77 after it departed Washington Dulles International Airport. The Boeing 757 was turned back toward Washington and crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing all 64 people aboard and 125 people inside the building.
Hanjour spent considerable time in Arizona pursuing flight training. He earned a private pilot’s license and later received a Federal Aviation Administration commercial pilot certificate in 1999. He subsequently returned to the state with fellow hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi for additional training.
For Flannery, learning what the restaurant visitor would go on to do transformed an ordinary meeting into a memory marked by the overwhelming horror of the 9/11 attacks.
Flannery’s mother had told him ‘Isn’t that neat? They are our allies’, he says
His long-term partner Margie added that none of the servers would want to wait on their tables on account of their lack of tips
When the suspects’ images were released Flannery’s mother told him that Nawaf Alhamzi, who also trained in Arizona, was another of the restaurant’s regulars
Flannery and his partner Margie
The revelation was all the more unsettling because the men were far from strangers to the restaurant. Flannery’s family had owned the Left Seat from 1987 until February 2000, and the men came in repeatedly while taking flying lessons. Margie, Flannery’s longtime partner, worked there and served them frequently.
The other waiters did not particularly want their tables, but the reason was strikingly mundane: the men were known never to tip.
According to Flannery, his mom pointed out Nawaf al-Hazmi after the attacks and told him that she had seen him eat at the family restaurant several times. Al-Hazmi was one of the five hijackers aboard Flight 77 alongside Hanjour and also trained at the airfield.
For Flannery, the discoveries brought a terrible sense of guilt. ‘You can imagine the shock and horror that our family felt knowing that these evil men had eaten at our restaurant.’
He added: ‘I still feel bad in my heart that we served them food.’
But while those encounters seemed utterly unremarkable inside the restaurant, elsewhere in Arizona questions were beginning to surface.
In July 2001, FBI agent Kenneth Williams, working out of Phoenix, wrote a memorandum raising concerns about the number of people of investigative interest attending civil aviation schools in the state. Williams suggested that Osama bin Laden might be directing students to the United States for flight training and urged the FBI to examine the pattern more closely.
‘You can imagine the shock and horror that our family felt knowing that these evil men had eaten at our restaurant,’ Flannery said
As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 passed, the documentaries and coverage brought the memory back to Flannery with renewed force
The memorandum became known as the Phoenix Memo. It did not identify the September 11 plot, nor was it specifically a warning about suicide pilots. But it showed that, before the attacks, an FBI agent had already noticed an unusual pattern around Arizona’s flight schools.
Flannery knew nothing of the memo. He had no reason to connect the men sitting at his family’s tables with anything more sinister than a flying lesson and a meal they would, as the staff had learned, leave without tipping.
For years, he kept the story largely to himself. He said the memory ‘tainted’ how he saw his family restaurant, ‘hurt his heart’ and left him with ‘a sour feeling in my stomach.’
‘I didn’t share this with anyone in the media for all these years because actually it is still hurtful,’ he said.
He had once imagined he might ‘let the story die with me’ when his time came. Then, as the 25th anniversary passed, the documentaries and coverage brought the memory back with renewed force.
‘Every single year I think of that man’s face because I was so close to him,’ Flannery said. ‘You never know who you’re standing next to anymore.’
