Huffman Aviation was a flight-training school in Venice, Florida at Venice Municipal Airport.

Background

Huffman Aviation Florida was established in 1972 as ''Venice Flying Service'', and was reorganized in 1987 and renamed as ''Huffman Aviation''. Huffman Aviation was purchased by Rudi Dekkers in 1999. At the time of purchase, the school had a fleet of 12 small aircraft. Huffman offered private pilot,

instrument rating Instrument rating refers to the qualifications that a pilot must have in order to fly under instrument flight rules (IFR). It requires specific training and instruction beyond what is required for a private pilot certificate or commercial pilot c ...

, commercial pilot, multi-engine ratings, and flight instructor training, but did not offer training on larger,

jet aircraft A jet aircraft (or simply jet) is an aircraft (nearly always a fixed-wing aircraft) propelled by one or more jet engines. Whereas the engines in Propeller (aircraft), propeller-powered aircraft generally achieve their maximum efficiency at much ...

. Dekkers sold Huffman Aviation in 2003.

Controversies

9/11 pilots

The Huffman Aviation flight log of 9/11 ringleader and hijacker Mohamed Atta The business gained notoriety after the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

, when it was revealed that

Mohamed Atta Mohamed Atta (1 September 196811 September 2001) was an Egyptian terrorist hijacker for al-Qaeda. Ideologically a Pan-Islamism, pan-Islamist, he was the ringleader of the September 11 attacks and served as the Aircraft hijacking, hijacker-pi ...

Ziad Jarrah Ziad Samir Jarrah (11 May 197511 September 2001) was a Lebanese man who was one of the four terrorist hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as part of the September 11 atta ...

, and

Marwan al-Shehhi Marwan Yousef Mohamed Rashid Lekrab al-Shehhi (; 9 May 197811 September 2001) was an Emirati terrorist hijacker from al-Qaeda who served as the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, crashing the Boeing 767 into the South Tower of the ...

had attended the school to learn how to fly small aircraft. The three first trained at Huffman in July 2000. In August, the school filed the M-1 student visa request forms for Atta, Jarrah, and al-Shehhi to switch from 'tourist' visas, to 'student', in order to allow them to enroll in the school's professional pilot program that would last from September 1, 2000, until September 1 the next year. The student visa requests were granted on July 17, 2001, for Atta, August 4, 2001 for Jarrah, and August 9, 2001, for al-Shehhi. For a short while, during their time at the school, both Marwan and Atta lived with a company employee named Charlie Voss. While Jarrah on the other hand lived with a German student Thorsten Biermann.

Security issues

In January 2002, Huffman Aviation again made headlines when the local paper sent a reporter onto its property, who managed to casually move between airplane

cockpit A cockpit or flight deck is the area, on the front part of an aircraft, spacecraft, or submersible, from which a pilot controls the vehicle. The cockpit of an aircraft contains flight instruments on an instrument panel, and the controls th ...

s, fuel tanks and other "safety concerns" without anybody noticing or stopping him. In March, the school was cited for having left fuel trucks unlocked, with keys in the ignition, at the Venice Municipal Airport.

References

{{Reflist Aviation schools in Florida Companies based in Florida Educational institutions established in 1972 Mohamed Atta September 11 attacks 1972 establishments in Florida