AFTER AMERICAN FLIGHT 77 crashed into the Pentagon, Gofer 06 pilot Steve O’Brien asked his crew if they were too rattled to continue flying. They assured him they were fine, so O’Brien pointed the C-130 toward their home base in Minnesota, on a northwesterly route that took them over Pennsylvania. Several minutes after ten, a crew member looking out a window in the back of the plane spotted black smoke rising in the distance. He told O’Brien, who reported to Cleveland Center, that the plume, some twenty miles away, reached some five thousand feet into the air. “You say black smoke in sight?”
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