The Terror Dream
"On September 11, 2001, 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airliners and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States. Two of the planes were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The total number of people killed because of these attacks was 2,753. The ratio of men to women killed during the attacks was 3:1. Faludi talks in depth about how mass amounts of volunteers arrived to help the victims rescued for the World Trade Center Towers. However, there were very few victims to help. 21,744 remains were found while only 291 bodies were found "intact".
The Lone Gunmen
One retrospectively relevant aspect of this pilot episode is that the airliner has been hijacked (via remote control of the plane's autopilot) and, by the end, both Byers and his father have boarded the plane to try to stop the hijacking. Through the aid of the other Gunmen, they are able to regain control of the plane and just miss crashing into the World Trade Center with the airliner. This, of course, was before the actual September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center later that year.