ALEXANDRIA, Va. — He never could fly right.
In practice sessions with his instructor, Zacarias Moussaoui couldn't keep the plane level. He was bad at banking, always turning the plane too sharply. When they entered a heavy traffic pattern, he would tense up. He wouldn't focus.
His instructors told him that he was a disaster, that he never would fly. And yet when he was arrested by the FBI and suspected of being a terrorist, he grew angry and kept telling the agents over and over to hurry their investigation "because I've got to get back to flight school."
Moussaoui, 37, is on trial for his life in U.S. District Court here. On Thursday, the prosecution focused on his last six months of freedom -- from his failed attempts to master the cockpit at an Oklahoma flight school to his August 2001 apprehension in Minnesota and the FBI's desperate attempts to determine what he was up to.
They were just about to start figuring some of that out on Sept. 10. But by then it was too late.
Moussaoui pleaded guilty last year to being part of the conspiracy that culminated in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. A jury will decide whether he is sentenced to life in prison or put to death.
Shohaib Nazir Kassam, his flight instructor at Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., liked Moussaoui, he told the court -- but he also knew that the French citizen of Moroccan descent just didn't have the right stuff.
"He was a not a very good student. Just below average," Kassam testified. "He couldn't maintain basic aircraft control."
Kassam added, "I didn't succeed with Zack."
Most students solo after 15 hours of practice with an instructor. Between February and May 2001, Moussaoui had 57 hours of instruction, and still was not ready to go it alone.
He began sending e-mails to flight schools around the country, trying to find another program that would accept him.
"My dream is to fly one of these big birds," he wrote one school.
He told another he wanted to learn how to fly "from JFK to Heathrow" -- from New York to London. "After all we are in America and everything is possible," he wrote.
In August Moussaoui arrived at that school, the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minn., saying he wanted to learn to fly a Boeing 747.
In his testimony Thursday, instructor Clarence "Clancy" Prevost said that in six lessons on a flight simulator, a student could learn how to handle such a plane, whose controls in flight are largely computerized.
