Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

by Mitchell Zuckoff

I have not included unfounded allegations or pseudoscience from the cottage industry of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Facts are stubborn and powerful: this is a true story.

Normally, if the system had worked as designed, top officials at the FAA in Washington would contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, which in turn would call the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization responsible for protecting the skies over the United States and Canada. NORAD, in turn, would ask approval from the Secretary of Defense to use military jets to intervene in the hijacking of a commercial passenger jet. None of that was necessarily a smooth or rapid process.

TJX planning manager Tara Creamer’s instructions to her husband, John, on how to care for their children would need to last a lifetime.

Amy Sweeney’s children would have to get to school, and through life, without her.

Daniel Lee’s soon-to-be-born daughter would spend her entire life without him.

Dozens of children would grow up without a mother or a father, an aunt or uncle, a grandmother or grandfather. Parents would grow old without a daughter or a son; husbands, wives, and partners would be forced to carry on alone. Grief would grip untold families, friends, colleagues, and strangers, wounded by the deaths of seventy-six passengers and eleven crew members, all murdered by five al-Qaeda hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11.

The toll was incalculable, just as it had been less than seventeen minutes earlier from the crash of American Flight 11. The immediate victims of United Flight 175 were two pilots, seven crew members, and fifty-one passengers, including three small children. All of them slaughtered in public view, preserved on film, by five al-Qaeda terrorists.

Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian.

Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini, wouldn’t see her grandsons grow up as Americans. The Reverend Francis Grogan, who survived World War II on a Navy destroyer, would never again see his sister or comfort his flock. Flight attendants Alfred Marchand and Robert Fangman, who’d changed careers to fly, wouldn’t see the world or their loving families. Flight attendants Michael Tarrou and Amy King would never marry.

And still the day had just begun.

Unknown to Biggio, during the previous ten minutes29 strange and suddenly familiar events had begun aboard a third transcontinental passenger jet.

Strapped into a jump seat in the back of the plane was senior flight attendant Michele Heidenberger, wife of a US Airways pilot and mother of two, who’d been flying for thirty-one years. Before takeoff she called her husband, Thomas, to make sure their fourteen-year-old son was awake and had packed a lunch for school.

Also on board were five young Saudi Arabian zealots who’d pledged their lives to al-Qaeda. Like their collaborators on American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, the men chose seats strategically, clustered toward the front of the plane.

A fourth transcontinental flight, scheduled to depart at 8:00 a.m. from another airport in the Northeast, didn’t get off the ground as quickly. And that made all the difference.

In a window seat one row back sat an affable thirty-one-year-old man with curly hair, sympathetic eyes, and the thickly muscled shoulders of a powerful athlete. Jeremy Glick13 worked as a sales rep for a web management company, but he looked as though he’d be more comfortable in a weight room. Jeremy carried 220 pounds on his six-foot frame and held a black belt in judo. In college, he showed up alone, without a coach or a team, to a national collegiate judo championship—and he won. Jeremy and his wife, Lyz, were high school sweethearts; she had given birth three months earlier to a daughter they named Emerson, after Jeremy’s favorite poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. They called her Emmy. Jeremy reluctantly tore himself away from home for a business trip to California. A fire on September 10 at the Newark airport forced him to switch his plans to Flight 93.

Seated in first class, four men from the Middle East—three from Saudi Arabia and one from Lebanon—had murder and martyrdom in mind. All four had checked out of the Newark airport’s Days Inn that morning and had passed through security without incident.23 The CAPPS security system selected one, Ahmed al-Haznawi, for additional screening. Following the same steps as the screeners at Logan and Dulles airports, Newark’s security staff checked his suitcase for explosives, didn’t find any, and held it off the flight until Haznawi boarded.

If the group of terrorists on United Flight 93 tried to follow the pattern of their collaborators aboard Flights 11, 175, and 77, they were clearly one hijacker short. A Saudi27 man who authorities later suspected was supposed to have been the twentieth hijacker had landed a month earlier at Florida’s Orlando International Airport, arriving on a flight from London. He landed with no return ticket28 or hotel reservations, carried $2,800 in cash and no credit cards, spoke no English, and claimed he didn’t know his next destination after he intended to spend six days in the United States. He grew angry when questioned by an alert immigrations inspector named José E. Melendez-Perez, who suspected that the man was trying to immigrate illegally. Melendez-Perez thought the Saudi fit the profile of a “hit man.”29 He consulted with supervisors, then forced the man onto a flight to Dubai, via London. Waiting in vain that day at the Orlando airport was Mohamed Atta.

They remained oblivious to the hijackings and suicide-murder crashes of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 by men from the Middle East who sat in first class and business, who killed passengers and crew members, who forced their way into cockpits and took control. No one told them that a hijacker on Flight 11 had said “planes,” plural. They also hadn’t been told about the disappearance of American Flight 77, which had occurred roughly twenty minutes earlier. During communications with ground controllers, the Flight 93 pilots’ biggest worry39 seemed to be some light chop and a headwind that might hinder their plan to make up for the ground delay and land in San Francisco close to their scheduled arrival time of 11:14 a.m.

There might have been a benign if multifaceted explanation why LeRoy didn’t answer: not having been warned about multiple hijackings that had begun roughly an hour earlier; unaware of the World Trade Center crashes that had begun more than a half hour earlier; uninformed about the burning towers that Melodie had seen on television; not knowing that another transcontinental flight had disappeared from radar—without all this information, it’s possible that LeRoy couldn’t imagine why his wife was worried. With blue skies ahead and a job to do, perhaps he didn’t see a reason to reply immediately.

Ballinger’s ACARS messages marked the first direct warnings56 of danger to planes by United Airlines or American Airlines, or from air traffic control, for that matter. To be certain that his warnings reached the pilots, Ballinger sent them57 as both digital messages, with a chime, and as printed-out text messages. He knew that every cockpit contained a fire ax,58 located behind the first officer’s seat. Ballinger expected pilots who received his message to move the hammer-sized weapon to the floor near their feet, for easy access, to defend their planes, their lives, and the innocents on board.

Either before they received Ballinger’s warning or before they read it, Jason Dahl or LeRoy Homer Jr. checked in with a routine altitude and weather report to an air traffic controller at the FAA’s Cleveland Center: “Morning Cleveland,64 United Ninety-Three with you at three-five-oh [thirty-five thousand feet], intermittent light chop.” The controller didn’t reply; he was busy rerouting planes affected by the ground stop. At 9:25 a.m., Flight 93 checked in again with Cleveland Center. This time the controller answered, but still he didn’t warn them.

Seconds later, at 9:28 a.m., every missed opportunity, every minute of delay in the spread of information and warning, every bit of bad luck and timing, coalesced in the cockpit of United Flight 93. The terrorists’ element of surprise remained intact, and Melodie Homer’s and Ed Ballinger’s worst fears came true.

The after-it-crashed search for American Flight 11 represented a striking illustration of the confusion and failed communication between the United States’ air traffic control system and the nation’s military during the chaotic first hour after al-Qaeda hijackers executed a plan of unanticipated complexity. Whether by design, chance, or a combination of both, the terrorists’ simultaneous multiple hijackings vividly and fatally exposed vulnerabilities of America’s national defense system on a scale unseen in the sixty years since Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

the FAA bore responsibility as the government agency with a duty to protect airline passengers from piracy and sabotage. Despite that mission, the FAA had significant gaps in domestic intelligence and multiple blind spots. Some of this was attributable to a lack of communication, and perhaps a lack of respect, from federal intelligence-gathering agencies. 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. Yet the FAA’s head of civil aviation security didn’t even know that the State Department list existed.26 Two names on that State Department list were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77. That wasn’t the only example of other federal agencies’ not sharing information about potential threats with the FAA.

At 9:37:46 a.m., the Boeing 757 that was American Airlines Flight 77, originally bound for Los Angeles from Dulles International Airport, exploded in an orange fireball and a plume of dense black smoke that rose some three hundred feet into the sky. The immediate toll of the impact with the west wall of the Pentagon was fifty-three passengers and six crew members, along with five murderous al-Qaeda hijackers.

The terrorists extinguished the life and potential of eleven-year-old “Little” Bernard C. Brown II by crashing the first plane he’d ever boarded. On almost any other weekday, Navy Chief Petty Officer Bernard Brown Sr. would have been inside the Pentagon’s newly renovated Wedge One. But “Big Bernard” had taken the day off, so he wasn’t there when Flight 77 carried his bright, charismatic son to his death.

The Falkenberg-Whittington family would never reach Australia. Newlyweds Zandra and Robert Riis Ploger III wouldn’t honeymoon in Hawaii. Yugang Zheng and Shuying Yang wouldn’t see their daughter become a doctor. Bud and Dee Flagg wouldn’t return to their cattle farm or watch their grandchildren grow. Dr. Yeneneh Betru wouldn’t build the first public kidney dialysis center in his homeland. Eddie Dillard wouldn’t return home soon to his wife, Rosemary. Mari-Rae Sopper wouldn’t save the women’s gymnastics team at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Renée May would never surprise her parents with news of her pregnancy.

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.

Despite Cleveland Center’s suggestion about involving the military; despite the crash one minute later of American Flight 77 into the Pentagon; despite the World Trade Center crashes; still no one at the FAA’s Command Center in Virginia or at FAA headquarters in Washington informed Nasypany or anyone else at NORAD, NEADS, or the Defense Department that a fourth transcontinental passenger jet had been hijacked and was heading toward the capital.

The content of many of the calls from Flight 93 reflected the fact that the hijackings were no longer nearly simultaneous. The forty-two-minute delay before takeoff, plus the forty-six minutes of flight prior to the hijacking, meant that word of the earlier attacks and the terrorists’ suicidal tactics had spread widely on the ground. Almost as soon as telephone calls began to flow from Flight 93, passengers and crew members learned that their crisis wasn’t unique. They also learned how the earlier hijackings had ended.

That knowledge became a powerful motivator. It transformed them from victimized hostages into resistance fighters.

Their call continued for four and a half minutes. Esther told her: “Elizabeth, I’ve got my arms around you,48 and I’m holding you, and I love you.” Elizabeth said she could feel Esther’s embrace, and she loved her, too. Like several others, Elizabeth focused not on herself but on the pain she anticipated among the people she feared she’d be leaving behind: “It just makes me so sad knowing how much harder this is going to be on you than it is for me.”49 They remained silent for a while, then Elizabeth said, “I should be talking. I’m sitting here being quiet, I’m not even talking.” Esther reassured her: “We don’t have to talk, we’re together.” After another pause, Elizabeth seemed at peace. She told Esther she knew that her late grandmothers were waiting for her.

But CeeCee wasn’t giving up. Before the call ended, she told Lorne, “We’ve got a plan.”

From an ethical standpoint, Nasypany’s question could be phrased this way: Would it be permissible for U.S. fighter pilots chasing hijacked planes to shoot down a passenger jet filled with innocent people, if they believed that such action would prevent a potential catastrophe with greater loss of life?

In fact, no hijacked flights had been shot down, and none would be, and neither Major Kevin Nasypany nor anyone else at NEADS or NORAD had passed along shootdown authority to the fighter pilots from Otis or Langley. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary. But Cheney’s comments revealed the depths of confusion, misinformation, and chaos52 at the highest levels of the U.S. government fully two hours after the crisis began.

As fighters patrolled the skies over the United States, it remained unknown whether the ground stop ordered by the FAA’s Ben Sliney had interrupted plans for more attacks. One plane that raised questions was United Flight 23, seventh in line for takeoff53 from John F. Kennedy International Airport, bound for Los Angeles, when flights were halted.

Aviation and law enforcement officials told reporters that when the captain announced over the intercom that they were returning to the gate, four young men sitting in first class who appeared to be Middle Eastern became agitated, stood, and consulted one another. They reportedly refused flight attendants’ orders to return to their seats. When the plane reached the gate, the men apparently bolted before they could be questioned.

Flight dispatcher Ed Ballinger, who’d sent one of his cockpit intrusion warnings to United Flight 23, said he was told a similar story54 about the passengers’ strange behavior by airline officials. In that version, the men initially refused to get off the plane. In eit...

Any possible threat in the air ended by shortly after noon.55 Every one of the thousands of planes ordered to land at the nearest airport had done so without incident, an extraordinary feat of coordination by air traffic controllers, pilots, and airport officials. Thirty-eight of those planes landed in the tiny community of Gander, Newfoundland, where they deposited nearly seven thousand passengers and crew members from more than a hundred countries, plus seventeen dogs and cats.56 An outpouring of kindness, hospitality, and generosity from the people of Gander became a bright spot on a dark day.

The most notice given to Major Kevin Nasypany and his team at NEADS was eight minutes before American Flight 11 hit the North Tower. They had less than four minutes’ notice about American Flight 77, and they were told that it was missing, not hijacked. NEADS was notified about United Flight 175 only eleven seconds before it hit the South Tower. The U.S. military’s guardians of the sky received no advance warning and had no knowledge of United Flight 93 before it crashed.

The forty heroes of Flight 93 couldn’t save themselves. They couldn’t return home to their loved ones. But they were all that stood between the hijackers and the destruction of the U.S. Capitol or the White House. All deserved to be honored and remembered as civilians turned combatants, the saviors of countless lives during the first battle of a new war. If there is a heaven, Lizz Wainio’s grandmothers were waiting there to greet every last one.

As the towers rose into the clouds, their size demanded that attention be paid. Positioned on a diagonal from each other, the buildings stood 131 feet apart, about the distance of a third baseman’s throw to first. Each exterior wall spanned 208 feet. The North Tower rose 1,368 feet, an imperceptible six feet taller than its twin, and its flat roof sprouted a 360-foot television and radio antenna. On clear days, visitors to an indoor observation deck on the 107th floor of the South Tower could see parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Windows on the World, in the North Tower, came with similar views plus fine wine and pricey food that earned mixed reviews. Some critics complained that the menu never lived up to the height.

With its load redistributed, the tower could have remained standing4 indefinitely, potentially allowing rescue workers to reach everyone who survived the initial damage. If not for the fires, that is.

The fire considered her open mouth to be an invitation to scorch Elaine’s lungs.

As Stan Praimnath lunged under his desk on the 81st floor, as Brian Clark and Bobby Coll plotted their next moves on the 84th floor, as Alayne Gentul reached the 97th floor, al-Qaeda terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi aimed the Boeing 767 full throttle at the south face of the South Tower.

At 9:03 a.m., Peter Hanson spoke on the phone to his father, Lee. His mother, Eunice, watched on television as the North Tower burned and a plane suddenly approached the South Tower. Lee heard a woman inside the plane scream as Peter spoke his last words: “Oh my God, oh my God!”

Before tossing it out a window, to flutter among countless bits of paper blown from both towers, Randy Scott pressed a bloodied finger against the note, leaving his unique DNA proof of its authenticity.

Melissa’s words became a heartbreaking litany of sorrow.

Melissa’s spirits flagged: “Can you, can you stay on the line with me, please? I feel like I’m dying.”

Near the end of their telephone call, Melissa spelled out her mother’s name and asked if they could arrange a three-way connection. Vanessa Barnes said that wasn’t possible but promised to call Melissa’s mother. Melissa gasped for air, sensing that time was running out. She had one more request for the 9-1-1 dispatcher, a message for her mother: “Tell her,” Melissa said, halting between words, “I love her, with all my heart and soul, and that she was the best mother a person could ever have.”