How many people were on board United Airlines Flight 175 when it hit the Twin Towers?
Executive summary
United Airlines Flight 175 carried 65 people on board when it was flown into the South Tower: 56 passengers (which includes the five hijackers) and nine crew members, for a total commonly reported as 65 fatalities (56 passengers + 9 crew) [1] [2] [3]. A small number of secondary sources and some summaries give different totals, so a short accounting of sources and the reasons for discrepancies follows.
1. The direct answer: 65 people on board (most reliable contemporary accounts)
Contemporary and authoritative accounts of United Airlines Flight 175 report 56 passengers and nine crew members on board, which sums to 65 occupants; these figures are cited by major outlets and reference sources such as NPR’s timeline and multiple encyclopedic summaries [3] [1] [2]. The passenger count of 56 is itself commonly described as including five hijackers among those passengers, and the listed crew complement was two pilots plus seven flight attendants, giving nine crew [1] [4].
2. Why other numbers appear in reporting and online lists
A minority of sources show different totals—ranging from higher figures such as 81 to variant passenger counts like 51—because of reporting errors, conflation with other aircraft, or differences in whether hijackers are counted among “passengers” or treated separately; for instance, an Australian resource cited 81 passengers in a general overview [5], while some crowd-sourced wikis list differing boarding numbers [6]. The official and most-cited contemporaneous records and major news timelines favor the 56-passenger/9-crew breakdown [3] [4].
3. How the historical record and victim lists support the 65 total
Victim lists and recovery reporting compiled after the attacks enumerate crew and passengers by name and note identification challenges: multiple passenger remains were later identified by DNA fragments while many others were never fully recovered, but the assembled passenger-and-crew lists published by news organizations and memorial projects align with the 56-passenger, nine-crew tally [7] [8] [9]. Encyclopedic entries used for memorial panels and museum inscriptions also reflect this accounting while acknowledging the difficulty in distinguishing remains from nearby impacts where two planes struck the World Trade Center in rapid succession [7].
4. The provenance of discrepant claims and how to evaluate them
Variations in the online ecosystem stem from secondary compilations, fan wikis, or non-contemporary summaries that may misread passenger vs. total-occupant distinctions or copy an error forward; for example, some non-official pages list 56 passengers but then give other totals or omit whether hijackers are included [9] [6]. The most reliable contemporaneous sources—mainstream media timelines and established reference works—converge on the 65-occupant figure, which is therefore the simplest and best-supported answer [3] [10]. Where sources explicitly note uncertainty about attributing remains between Flight 11 and Flight 175 because the crashes occurred close in time and location, they do so to explain forensic limits, not to dispute the manifest totals compiled from airline and investigation records [7].
5. Bottom line and context
The accepted and widely reported total for United Airlines Flight 175 at impact is 65 people on board—56 passengers (including five hijackers) and nine crew—an accounting echoed across major timelines, memorial listings, and reference articles while alternative figures should be treated as secondary or erroneous unless they cite primary manifest or investigative documentation [3] [1] [2]. The record also carries the caveat that forensic identification of human remains was complicated by the overlapping devastation of two aircraft striking the towers within minutes, a limitation that memorial projects and official reports explicitly acknowledge [7].