Captain Steve Scheibner has spoken out about the chilling moment he discovered his name had been replaced by three stark words on the flight manifest of American Airlines Flight 11.
Scheibner, a Navy veteran who flew out of Boston for American Airlines, had packed his bags on the evening of September 10, 2001, fully expecting to captain the Boeing 767 to Los Angeles the next morning. The call confirming his assignment never came. Another pilot, Tom McGuinness, 42, drew the flight instead. McGuinness, who left behind his childhood sweetheart Cheryl McGuinness and their two children, would perish when hijackers seized the aircraft and slammed it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
The realization did not hit Scheibner until roughly twelve hours after the attacks. Speaking on his YouTube channel, Captain Steeeve, he recalled spending much of September 11 in his boss’s office, watching the catastrophe unfold on a small television alongside colleagues who were certain they were “going to war.” It was not until 9 p.m. That he thought to check the computerized crew schedule.
“I thought, ‘I probably know the pilots and the flight attendants that were on that first airplane that was hijacked out of Boston because I’ve flown with everybody out of Boston,” he said. “So, I went back to the computer and tried to bring up the manifest [flight schedule] with all the names on it of the flight.”
What appeared on screen stopped him cold.
“And when I did, it brought up the manifest and it was the exact same that I had seen the day before, where my name was on the trip,” Scheibner continued. “Except this time they had erased all of the names from the trip and all it said on the manifest was ‘sequence failed continuity’.”
The phrase is airline shorthand for a flight that never reached its destination. Scheibner called it a “complete understatement.”
He stared at the screen, processing what the erased names and clinical phrasing meant. “I was just staring at the screen thinking, ‘that plane that got hijacked was the one I packed my bags for, I was supposed to be on it.'”
His wife found him there. Scheibner told her, “Remember I told you I was going to Los Angeles today? That was the first aeroplane that got hijacked this morning.” The couple held each other in silence. “It’s hard to describe that moment,” he said.
The Scheibners made a deliberate choice to shield their children from the full truth for a full year. When they finally revealed that their father had been scheduled to pilot the first hijacked plane, one of their sons recalled that the reality did not “sink in for a while.”
The near-miss has shaped the family’s relationship with the anniversary ever since. To mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks, the Scheibners launched a fundraiser through Make-A-Wish Eastern North Carolina, aiming to raise $150,000 to send 15 children on “wish trips.” The family described the planned excursions as creating “an unforgettable experience filled with hope, joy, and lasting memories.”
The substitution that saved Scheibner’s life came down to the routine mechanics of airline crew scheduling, a system of bids and assignments that placed McGuinness in the left seat that Tuesday morning. McGuinness, a former Navy fighter pilot like Scheibner, had joined American Airlines after his military service and was based in Boston. The two men shared similar backgrounds and overlapping circles; Scheibner’s initial impulse to check the manifest stemmed from the likelihood that he would recognize the crew.
The 9/11 attacks claimed nearly 3,000 lives across four hijacked flights, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center. Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., sixteen minutes before United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., and United Airlines Flight 93 went down in a Pennsylvania field at 10:03 a.m. After passengers fought back against the hijackers.
Scheibner continued flying for American Airlines after the attacks, eventually documenting his experiences and perspectives on his YouTube channel, where he discusses aviation, faith, and his personal connection to the defining tragedy of the early twenty-first century.
The Scheibner family’s Make-A-Wish fundraiser remains active as the September 11 anniversary approaches.