Lynn Spencer

Lynn Spencer is an American commercial airline pilot and certified flight instructor who was flying for a regional carrier on 11 September 2001, which is both why she wrote Touching History and why she was able to.

She graduated from Duke University with honors before training as a pilot, and completed high-altitude training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. She flew for ExpressJet Airlines and held the position of instructor for the airline, and has been flying commercially since the early 1990s.

Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11 was published in 2008 and reissued in 2018. She conducted hundreds of interviews with air traffic controllers, FAA managers, military commanders, National Guard fighter pilots, and commercial flight crews, worked through the recorded radio transmissions, and assembled the morning minute by minute from the perspective of the people responsible for American airspace.

Her position as an insider is what made the reporting possible. She could reach people who would not have spoken to a general-assignment journalist, and she understood the procedures well enough to know which questions produced answers. The book makes corrections to specific findings of the 9/11 Commission Report regarding the aviation timeline, which is a substantial claim from an author with no institutional backing, and she supports it with the recordings.

The book covers Ben Sliney, the FAA national operations manager on his first day in the job, who ordered every aircraft in American airspace to land without the authority to do so, and the fighter pilots who launched from Andrews Air Force Base unarmed, intending to bring United 93 down with their own aircraft.

She lives in Virginia and has continued to fly.