The 767 climbed to thirty-five thousand feet, as instructed by ground controllers, but without acknowledging the order. Boston Center tried to contact the aircraft, but this, like all subsequent communication attempts, was not acknowledged. Two alert and courageous flight attendants in the coach cabin, Betty Ong and Madeline “Amy” Sweeney, broke training and did something they were not supposed to do. Each grabbed an AT&T airphone and dialed an American Airlines office on the ground. Ong got through to the Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina. At 8:19 she said, “The cockpit is not answering, somebody’s stabbed in business class — and I think there’s Mace — we can’t breathe — I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.”
At 8:21 the American employee who took Ong’s call, Nydia Gonzalez, alerted the American Airlines operations center in Fort Worth. Fort Worth instructed the dispatcher responsible for the flight to contact the plane. At 8:23 the American dispatcher tried and failed. Six minutes later the air-traffic-control specialist at American’s operations center contacted the FAA’s Boston Air Traffic Control Center.
Ong whispered into the airphone that two men sitting in the second row (Wail al-Shehri and Waleed al-Shehri, according to the flight manifest) had stabbed both flight attendants in the first-class cabin as they were preparing for breakfast service. The hijackers, according to Ong, then forced their way through the locked but flimsy cockpit door.
About this time Mohammed Atta, trained to fly the jet, and Abdulaziz al-Omari began to move toward the cockpit from their seats in the business-class cabin. As Atta and al-Omari started to move, a passenger named Daniel Lewin, an Israeli army veteran, realized what was going on. But as he tried to stop the two men, who were in the row in front of him, Lewin was stabbed by Satam al-Suqami, who was seated in the row behind him.
The hijacking team then moved ruthlessly and efficiently through the first-class cabin, spraying passengers with pepper spray to force them back to the tourist cabin. The hijackers yelled out that they had a bomb. Ong’s emergency call lasted nearly half an hour as she relayed the tragedy playing out on board to the reservations center in North Carolina. At 8:25 the Al Qaeda team attempted to speak to the passengers. However, ignorant of how the communications system worked, they inadvertently transmitted the message over the plane’s radio instead of the public address system: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” Because of their error, the control tower at Logan heard the transmission, but no one in the plane’s cabin did.
Amy Sweeney got her call through to the American Flight Services Office in Boston at 8:25 am. At 8:29 she was cut off after she told the ground someone was injured. At 8:32 she successfully got through again and kept relaying reports.
At 8:26 Ong told the ground that the aircraft was “flying erratically.” Just after that report Atta turned the 767 south. By getting seat numbers from Ong, American Airlines was able to figure out the identities of the Al Qaeda hijackers. Sweeney reported that one of the stabbed flight attendants was seriously wounded and was on oxygen, while the other flight attendant’s wounds seemed minor. At 8:38 Ong reported that the plane was again flying erratically. Sweeney told the ground that the hijackers were Middle Easterners and that one spoke excellent English while another was barely comprehensible. At 8:41 Sweeney said that passengers in coach believed there was a routine medical emergency in first class. The other uninjured flight attendants were finding medical supplies as Ong and Sweeney talked to the ground. At 8:41 air-traffic controllers declared Flight 11 hijacked.
The radar track put Flight 11 on a rapid descent toward New York City. The controllers ordered all other flights out of the way. At 8:44 the ground lost the phone connection with Ong. At about the same moment Sweeney told Boston, “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent . . . we are all over the place.” Officials on the ground asked Sweeney to look out the window to see if she could figure out where the plane was. In an increasingly tense voice she said, “We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low . . . Oh my God we are way too low.” The phone cut off. A moment later Mohammed Atta steered the big jetliner across the East River and between the skyscrapers toward his target.
People in Lower Manhattan looked up, startled by the roar of the aircraft. At 8:46:40 the American flight sliced into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. As the plane came apart against the glass, concrete, and steel, its jet fuel ignited and created a conflagration that would begin to soften the steel superstructure of the building.
At 8:14, just as American 11 was being taken over, Captain Victor Saracini and First Officer Michael Horrocks piloted United Flight 175 off the runway at Logan. United 175 was also a 767, also bound for Los Angeles; it carried seven flight attendants and fifty-six passengers. At 8:33 United 175 reached thirty-one thousand feet, the seat belt sign was turned off, and the flight attendants began to serve breakfast. It was about this time that Captain Saracini and First Officer Horrocks radioed the ground to report a suspicious transmission they had picked up from American 11. That would be the last transmission from United 175.
The Al Qaeda team attacked with knives and Mace sometime between 8:42 and 8:46. The nightmare playing out on American 11 was repeating itself on United 175. A passenger and a flight attendant in the rear of the plane independently used onboard phones to report that members of the crew had been stabbed. A flight attendant reported that Saracini and Horrocks had been murdered. Once again the passengers in first and business class were forced to the back of the plane.
The calls from their sons caused Lee Hanson and Louise Sweeney to turn on their television sets. The picture showed the North Tower of the World Trade Center in flames. At 9:03:11 they watched their sons die as United 175 hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
The national command authority was in total disarray. President Bush and his national security staff had been ignoring warnings about a major terrorist attack since June. The president himself was in a Florida classroom when he was notified of the attacks. The vice president was at the White House. It soon became apparent no military or executive agency had any plan for responding to such an attack. America’s vulnerability was complete.
Flight 77 was supposed to have left Dulles for Los Angeles at 8:10 am, but it did not get off until 8:20. The 757, piloted by Captain Charles F. Burlingame and First Officer David Charlebois and staffed by four flight attendants, carried a light load, just fifty-eight passengers. At 8:46 American 77 arrived at its assigned altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. The breakfast service started. A few minutes later the Al Qaeda team went into action, following much the same pattern as the others.
At 8:54 American 77 began to deviate from its route, turning due south. A few minutes later the plane’s transponder was turned off, effectively cutting off active radar contact. FAA controllers in Indianapolis tried and failed again and again to reach the cockpit. The dispatchers at American Airlines failed as well. At 9 am American executives were told they had a second plane in trouble. All American flights in the northeast corridor were grounded. It was only when American learned that United 175 was also down that they sent out a nationwide order to stop all flights.
Renee May called her mother from Flight 77. She said her flight was being hijacked by six individuals who had moved passengers to the rear of the plane. Her mother notified American Airlines. Also on Flight 77 was the right-wing political commentator Barbara Olson. Just before 9:26 am she called her husband, Ted, who was the Bush administration’s solicitor general. She told him the hijackers had both knives and box cutters. The hijackers were not aware of her phone call, she continued, which she was making from the back of the plane. Olson’s call was cut off. Her husband tried to call Attorney General John Ashcroft but could not get him. Barbara Olson managed to call her husband back. This time she said the pilot had announced the flight had been hijacked. Her husband asked her where she thought the plane was. She looked out the window and said they were over a residential area. Ted Olson broke the news to his wife of the two planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Barbara Olson took the news calmly.
At 9:29, when Flight 77 was forty miles west of Washington and flying at seven thousand feet, the autopilot was disengaged. Inside Dulles terminal radar controllers spotted the image of a plane flying eastbound at a very high rate of speed. At 9:34 Reagan Airport officials called the Secret Service and warned that an aircraft of unknown nature was closing in on Washington, DC. By that time Flight 77 was just seven miles from the White House and five miles west-southwest of the Pentagon. An emergency evacuation order was given to the White House staff, and people began to pour out of the building. The plane then began a wide swooping turn and dropped to twenty-two hundred feet, with the pilot now aiming the plane toward his target. Hani Hanjour, slender and small, used his almost effeminate hands to push the throttles to maximum power and dive.
At 9:37:46 Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at a speed of 530 miles per hour, puncturing the outside wall in a fireball and piercing and burning ring after ring as people in the building and on the plane were incinerated. The secretary of defense felt the thump as the huge building shook. As a final insult, the plane had hit a recently rebuilt section of the Pentagon that housed intelligence operations.
The United States had just suffered an intelligence failure greater than any since Pearl Harbor. Phone calls were going back and forth among members of the intelligence community asking that the Operation Bojinka debriefing files from 1995 be pulled. Already the president was flying from military base to military base after leaving the grammar school in Florida.
Frank Argenbright was in the AHL boardroom finalizing a deal with Clay Perfall. The two men were discussing how best to time the announcement to the media in order to get the stock to jump. “All of a sudden,” Argenbright recalls, “the receptionist ran in with the news that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. We brought a TV into the boardroom in time to see the second plane hit the other tower. We were still sitting there shocked and horrified when the newscasters broke in with word that the Pentagon had been hit. Clay Perfall . . . was from Washington; his family lived near the Pentagon, so he was in an absolute panic to get back home.” With all air traffic grounded, Perfall rented a car and began the ten-hour drive to Washington.
United Airlines Flight 93 took off half an hour late from Newark’s Liberty International Airport en route to San Francisco. It had the lightest passenger load of all the planes targeted that day. Besides Captain Jason Dahl, First Officer Leroy Homer, and five flight attendants, there were just thirty-seven passengers. Flight 93 was originally set to depart at 8 am, but local air-traffic control delayed the departure, disrupting part of Osama bin Laden’s plan. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, the hijackers had planned to take flights departing within half an hour of one another—American 11 at 7:45, United 175 and 93 at 8, and American 77 at 8:10. Three of the flights had actually taken off within fifteen minutes of their planned departure times. United 93 should have left the ground at about 8:15, after a few minutes of taxiing. In fact, it didn’t take off until 8:42. Even so, the flight crew were unaware of the other hijackings. As the commission reported: “Around 9:00, the FAA, American, and United were facing the staggering realization of apparent multiple hijackings. At 9:03, they would see another aircraft strike the World Trade Center. Crisis managers at the FAA and the airlines did not yet act to warn other aircraft. At the same time, Boston Center realized that a message transmitted just before 8:25 by the hijacker pilot of American 11 included the phrase, ‘We have some planes.’”
It was true that no one in the United States had ever dealt with multiple hijackings. Project Bojinka was a distant memory. At 9:07 the Boston Center asked that the Herndon FAA send out a message warning all pilots in the air that there might be attempts to breach the cockpit. Herndon FAA failed to send out the warning message. When the 9/11 Commission later interviewed FAA personnel, they said it was not the FAA’s responsibility to send such a message. American Airlines also did not send any warnings to its other pilots. The only one who acted was United dispatcher Ed Ballinger. He took responsibility and transmitted warnings to sixteen transcontinental flights he was monitoring. His e-mail message: “Beware any cockpit intrusion — Two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.” The message was sent out at 9:23:59.
Flight 93’s trip to San Francisco had been perfectly normal for forty minutes. At 9:24 Ballinger’s warning was received in the cockpit. At 9:26 the pilot, Jason Dahl, asked via e-mail link, “Ed, confirm latest mssg plz — Jason.” Two minutes later Al Qaeda supplied the clarification: At 9:28 am, while the plane was over eastern Ohio, the team stormed the cockpit. The first hint most of the passengers had that something was wrong was when the plane descended seven hundred feet in just eleven seconds. Then FAA air-traffic control in Cleveland received a pair of radio transmissions from the crew. During the first broadcast, either the pilot or the first officer called “Mayday,” and there were the startling sounds of a fight going on in the background. Half a minute later the captain or first officer could be heard screaming, “Hey, get out of here — get out of here — get out of here.”
At 9:32 Ziad Samir al-Jarrah, the Al Qaeda pilot, announced, “Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So, sit.” Al-Jarrah disengaged the autopilot and began to head back east. With them in the cockpit was one of the female flight attendants, who was being held captive after she had tried to stop the hijackers.
As on the other hijacked flights, members of the cabin crew and passengers used personal mobile phones and airphones to call people on the ground. These calls were critical in giving passengers the information that would prevent this Al Qaeda team from carrying out its mission. At 9:39 the FAA’s Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center overheard the hijackers’ second announcement — that there was a bomb on board, that the plane was returning to the airport, and that passengers should remain seated. Like the Al Qaeda team on American 11, this team had not mastered the communications system, and the message that was supposed to go to the passengers was instead broadcast to air-traffic controllers.
The Al Qaeda team was aware that passengers were telephoning but did not seem concerned. It was a huge mistake. The hijackers did not realize that once passengers understood that the previous planes had been used as missiles rather than as hostages, they would have nothing to lose by trying to disrupt Al Qaeda’s mission.
Ten phone calls were made from Flight 93. All those passengers said the hijackers had knives and were claiming to have a bomb. The callers reported that at least one passenger was stabbed and two others were on the aircraft floor, probably dead. Another caller said the bodies were those of the pilot and first officer. For the first and only time in the day’s four hijackings, a passenger reported that he believed the hijackers had a gun. Then callers from the plane began to tell people on the ground that there were plans to rush the terrorists and retake the aircraft. At 9:57 the passengers ended their conversations with loved ones as the revolt began. One woman ended her message: “Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.” The passenger revolt went on for several minutes. Al-Jarrah banked the airliner sharply to the left and right in an attempt to throw the attackers off balance. At 9:58:57 al-Jarrah told another Al Qaeda member to block the cockpit door. At 10 am he started to pitch the nose of the plane up and down to halt the assault. But nothing could stop the passengers from trying to break through the cabin door. Al-Jarrah asked, “Is that it? Shall we finish it off?” Another hijacker responded, “No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off.” One of the passengers yelled, “In the cockpit. If we don’t we’ll die!” Another cried, “Roll it!”
His colleague said, “Yes, put it in it . . . pull it down.”
At 10:02:23 another hijacker yelled, “Pull it down! Pull it down!” Al-Jarrah turned the controls hard to the right and rolled the airliner onto its back as the hijackers shouted “Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!” The passengers had won. United 93 crashed into the ground instead of its original target, the Capitol in Washington. United 93 disintegrated as it hit a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles an hour. The passengers had heroically ended a horrendous morning.
