Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11: A gripping biography of triumph over tragedy

by Mitchell Zuckoff

BY 9:25 A.M., even as American Flight 77 remained missing and a mystery, one top FAA official grasped the severity and growing scope of the crisis. At the agency’s operations center in Herndon, Virginia, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney knew about the North Tower crash and had seen United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on CNN some twenty minutes earlier. He worried about the disappearance of Flight 77 and feared that more hijackings might be under way. Sliney also had heard about Mohamed Atta’s “We have some planes” remark. He felt haunted by the question of how high the hijacking total might eventually reach. He couldn’t undo what already happened, but Sliney hoped that he might help prevent the next attack. Fifty-five years old, with a shock of white hair, an Air Force veteran and a lawyer by training, Sliney concluded that he had both the authority and the responsibility to take drastic action. Accordingly, he declared a “nationwide ground stop,” the first order of its kind in U.S. aviation history, which prevented all commercial and private aircraft from taking off anywhere in the United States. Making Sliney’s order even more remarkable, he had only recently returned to the FAA after several years in a private law practice. The morning of September 11 was Sliney’s first shift on his first day in his new job as the FAA’s National Operations Manager, boss of the agency’s command center.