Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

by Mitchell Zuckoff

(The month-and-day abbreviation became the universal shorthand for the attacks largely because the digits corresponded to the nation’s 9-1-1 emergency call system; there’s no evidence the terrorists chose the date for that reason.)

Flight 11 had a capacity of 15854 passengers, but as the crew prepared for takeoff, only 81 seats were filled: 9 passengers in first class, 19 in business class, and 53 in coach.

At one second before 8:18 a.m., flight controllers at Boston Center heard a brief, unknown sound72 on the radio frequency used by Flight 11 and other nearby flights. They didn’t know where it came from, and they couldn’t be certain, but it sounded like a scream.

The idea that hijackers might incapacitate or eliminate the pilots and fly a Boeing 767 themselves didn’t register in the minds of Boston Center controllers. To them, the old rules still applied. Zalewski kept trying to hail the plane.

Like American Flight 11, United Flight 175 had lots of empty seats, flying at about one-third capacity.

Aboard Flight 175, the Ghamdis sat together in the last row of business class, in the center two seats, 9C and 9D. None of the five men or their luggage was chosen by the computerized system or by airport workers for additional security screenings.34

Betty dialed a toll-free reservations number for American Airlines, a number she often used to help passengers make connecting flights. The call2 went through to the airline’s Southeastern Reservations Office in central North Carolina, where a reservations agent named Vanessa Minter answered. “I think we’re being hijacked,”3 Betty said, her voice calm but fearful.

“Um, the cockpit’s not answering,” Betty said. “Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and, um, I think there is Mace—that we can’t breathe. I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.”

Betty’s call was beyond shocking. After some confusion about who Betty was and what flight she was on, during which the airline employees asked Betty to repeat herself several times, eventually they understood that Betty was the Number Three flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11. Once that was established, Betty stammered at times as she did her best to describe a bloody, chaotic scene. “Our, our Number One got stabbed. Our purser is stabbed. Ah, nobody knows who stabbed who and we can’t even get up to business class right now because nobody can breathe. Our Number One is, is stabbed right now. And our Number Five. Our first-class passenger that, ah, first, ah, class galley flight attendant and our purser has been stabbed and we can’t get to the cockpit, the door won’t open.

Two minutes into Betty’s call, at 8:21 a.m., Gonzalez called Craig Marquis, the manager on duty at American Airlines’ operations control headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, to report an emergency aboard Flight 11, with stabbings and an unresponsive cockpit.

Even as his anxiety rose about American Flight 11, Boston Center air traffic controller Peter Zalewski knew nothing about Betty Ong’s anguished, ongoing call. No one from American Airlines’ Fort Worth operations control headquarters relayed information6 to the FAA’s Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, to FAA headquarters in Washington, or to anyone else. As minutes passed and commandeered Flight 11 flew west across Massachusetts and over New York, communications among the airline, the FAA, and U.S. military officials were sporadic at best, incomplete or nonexistent at worst.

Mohamed Atta—keyed the mic in a way that transmitted the message to air traffic control on the ground, as well as to other planes using the same radio frequency, and not to passengers and crew in the cabin behind him. To have been heard inside the plane, the hijacker-pilot would have needed to flip a switch on the cockpit radio panel.

The first sentence of the hijackers’ first cockpit transmission at 8:24:38 a.m. not only announced the terror aboard American Flight 11, it included a seemingly unintentional warning about an unknown number of similar, related plots already in motion, but not yet activated, on other early-morning transcontinental flights.

Whoever was flying Flight 11 didn’t simply say that he and his fellow hijackers had seized control of that plane. He said: “We have some planes.”

If the message had been understood immediately, the plural use of “planes” conceivably might have prompted Zalewski and other air traffic controllers to warn other pilots to enforce heightened cockpit security. Those pilots, in turn, might have told flight attendants to be on guard for trouble. But that’s a best-case scenario. It’s also possible that the comment would have been overlooked or dismissed as an empty boast or downplayed as a ...

Seconds later, Zalewski heard another communication from the cockpit, also apparently intended for the passengers and crew of Flight 11: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourselves and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

Between 8:25 and 8:32 a.m., Boston Center managers alerted their superiors within the FAA that American Flight 11 had been hijacked11 and was heading toward New York City. Zalewski felt what he could only describe as terror.

A few seconds before 8:38 a.m., Cooper made the first direct notification24 of a crisis on board American Flight 11 to the U.S. military: “[W]e have a problem here,”25 Cooper said. “We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there. Help us out.”

The Boeing 767 that was American Airlines Flight 11 completed an unapproved, L-shaped path through bright blue skies that covered roughly three hundred miles from Boston, west to Albany, then south over the streets of Manhattan. At the last millisecond of its trip, at a speed estimated at 440 miles per hour,53 the silver plane’s nose touched the glass and steel of the north face of the 96th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

United Flight 175, traveling between 540 and 587 miles per hour, slammed on an angle into the 77th through 85th floors of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. A bright orange fireball exploded. The building rocked and belched smoke, glass, steel, and debris. The plane and everyone inside it disappeared forever.

President George W. Bush had learned about the World Trade Center crashes only minutes earlier, and no discussions had yet taken place about what action the military should take if more terrorists turned passenger jets into weapons of mass destruction.

The hijackers on American Flight 11, United Flight 175, and American Flight 77 had boarded without incident, despite their apparent possession of short-bladed knives, not to mention previous travels and associations that should have been flaming red flags. They’d swiftly gained access to cockpits and replaced pilots with men who’d trained to fly jets expressly for the purpose of becoming martyrs.

The plan to use the hijacked planes as weapons of mass destruction depended on the hijackers’ ability to commandeer and maintain control of fuel-heavy transcontinental flights that took off within a few minutes of one another. That narrow window maximized the element of surprise, which the hijackers understood or hoped would lead to a chaotic response, too late to stop them from reaching their intended targets.

Just as Atta intended, American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 took off from Boston’s Logan Airport only fifteen minutes apart, at 7:59 a.m. and 8:14 a.m. respectively, each fourteen minutes after its scheduled departure time. American Flight 77 left Washington’s Dulles Airport at 8:20 a.m., ten minutes after its scheduled departure. In fact, all three planes could be described as being on schedule. Departure times typically specified when a plane was supposed to leave the gate,7 before taxiing and takeoff. Considering the long delays that often dogged air travel, time had been on the hijackers’ side. So far.

On September 11, 2001, the FAA’s “no-fly list” included a grand total of twelve names.25 By contrast, the State Department’s so-called TIPOFF terrorist watchlist included sixty thousand names.

an FBI agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams had written a memo27 to his superiors in Washington expressing concern about Middle Eastern men with ties to extremists receiving flight training in the United States. Williams’s memo presciently warned about the “possibility of a coordinated effort by [O]sama bin Laden” to send would-be terrorists to U.S. flight schools to become pilots to serve al-Qaeda.

President Bush began his September 11 at 6 a.m. with a four-mile run at a golf course with his Secret Service protectors. Afterwards he showered, dressed, and sat for a routine, fifteen-minute intelligence briefing from CIA official Mike Morell in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s swanky Colony Beach Resort. Many of the president’s summer 2001 briefings had included mentions of a heightened terrorism risk.

One of those briefings, received by the president on August 6, marked the first time that Bush had been told of a possible plan by al-Qaeda to attack inside the United States.

“Ladies and gentlemen,52 this is a difficult moment for America,” the president began. “Today we’ve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand.” Bush asked for a moment of silence, then said: “May God bless the victims and their families and America.” Then he left.

Sliney’s emergency order to empty the skies would require compliance from 4,546 planes.79 It would take hours of effort and precise coordination on the ground and in the air. Ultimately, Sliney’s demand would be met by 4,545 of those planes. All but one.

flying at an estimated 563 miles per hour, pointing nose-down at a 40-degree angle, the Boeing 757 with more than 5,000 gallons of jet fuel cut through power lines and reached its termination point. United Flight 93 exploded in flames as the cockpit broke off, plowed forward, and shattered into countless pieces. The rest of the plane burrowed more than fifteen feet deep into the soft earth of a grassy field that had once been a coal strip mine known as the Diamond T. Originally bound for San Francisco, hijacked toward Washington, D.C., the flight ended near tiny Shanksville, Pennsylvania, population 245.37 The nation’s capital was about fifteen minutes’ flight time away.38 It was 10:03 a.m. After

Late in the afternoon, President Bush returned to Washington, D.C., after a brief stop at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, home of the U.S. Strategic Command. After landing at Andrews Air Force Base, he flew to the White House aboard the Marine One helicopter. The pilot stayed low and zigzagged, in case a terrorist on the ground had a shoulder-launched missile.

As it entered the building, what remained of Flight 11 sliced through thirty-five exterior steel columns and heavily damaged two more. It severed six core columns and damaged three others. It shattered at least 166 windows. It broke the concrete floor slabs of the 95th and 96th floors eighty feet deep into the building.

The North Tower’s external steel columns cut through the Boeing 767’s fuel-filled wings like the blades of an egg slicer. Fireballs visible for miles exploded from the entrance wound and from blown-out windows on the east and south sides of the tower. More fireballs raced up and down elevator shafts, blowing out doors and walls as far down as the basement levels. Toxic clouds of hot, thick smoke poured up and down the central core and gushed out of the broken building. No longer was the morning sky an unblemished blue. Despite the explosions, less than half of the ten thousand gallons of jet fuel from Flight 11 burned in the initial fiery blasts. The rest sprayed through the impact floors and nourished fires that consumed combustibles from the plane and the office furnishings. Those fires fed off fresh air that flowed into the torn-open building. As flames gathered strength and spread, trapped survivors rushed toward sealed and broken windows in desperation. At the same time, the fires began to threaten the remaining support columns that already carried a heavier-than-normal load from their broken neighbors. Meanwhile, fires licked at the exposed steel of floor supports that were shorn of their fire-retarding insulation.