Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

As the fighter pilots approached a crime scene of almost unimaginable proportions, NEADS Major Kevin Nasypany ordered them to fly in a holding pattern in military-controlled airspace off Long Island. That way, they’d stay clear of scores of passenger planes that still flew nearby.

At 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the crash of United Flight 175, FAA controllers issued an order that barred all nonmilitary aircraft from taking off, landing, or flying through New York Center’s airspace until further notice. Meanwhile, Boston Center had stopped all departures from its airports. Soon after, all departures were stopped nationwide for planes heading toward or through New York or Boston airspace.

Around the same time, fearing more hijackings, the operations manager at Boston Center told the controllers he supervised to warn airborne pilots by radio to heighten security, with the aim of preventing potential intruders from gaining access to cockpits. He urged the national FAA operations center in Virginia to issue a similar cockpit safety notice nationwide, but there’s no evidence that that happened.

As the NEADS team absorbed news of the second crash into the World Trade Center, a technician uttered an offhand comment charged with insight: “This is a new type of war, that’s what it is.”

At first, almost no one could fathom the idea of terrorist hijackers who’d been trained as pilots at U.S. flight schools. Several technicians at NEADS held on to the idea that the original pilots had somehow remained at the controls, flying under duress from the terrorists and unable to use their transponders to issue an alert, or “squawk,” using the universal hijacking code 7500.

“We have smart terrorists today,” a NEADS surveillance officer said. “They’re not giving them [the pilots] a chance to squawk.”

Shortly before 9:08 a.m., five minutes after the South Tower explosion, Nasypany decided that he wanted the Otis fighter jets to be ready for whatever might come next from the terrorists. No simulations, exercises, or history had prepared any of them for this, and other than Boston Center’s unapproved calls to NEADS, the FAA still had yet to make contact with the military. Nasypany improvised.

“We need to talk to FAA,” Nasypany told his team. “We need to tell ’em if this stuff is gonna keep on going, we need to take those fighters, put ’em over Manhattan. That’s the best thing, that’s the best play right now. So, coordinate with the FAA. Tell ’em if there’s more out there, which we don’t know, let’s get ’em over Manhattan. At least we got some kind of play.”

Nasypany wanted to launch two more fighter jets, the pair of on-alert F-16s ready and waiting at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The fighters were part of the North Dakota Air National Guard’s 119th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Happy Hooligans.

But Colonel Marr rejected that plan. He wanted the Langley fighters to remain on the ground, on runway alert. With only four ready-to-launch fighter jets in his arsenal, the colonel didn’t want all of them to run out of fuel at the same time. Unaware that airborne fuel tankers would have been available, Marr thought that putting the Langley fighters in the air might leave the skies relatively unprotected if something else happened in the huge area of sky that NEADS was sworn to protect.

Nasypany’s mind kept churning. Two suicide hijackers in fuel-laden jets had slammed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, both of which burned on television screens all around him. They’d killed everyone on board and an unknown number of people in the buildings. Nasypany had positioned two F-15s in the sky over New York, and it remained anyone’s guess if they’d soon be chasing other hijacked planes with similar deadly intentions.

“We need to do more than fuck with this,” Nasypany declared.

Nasypany wondered aloud how he and his team would respond if the nation’s military commanders, starting with the president of the United States, gave a shoot-down order for a plane filled with civilians. He asked members of his staff how they would react to such an order. As they scrambled to absorb the moral and practical implications, Nasypany focused on the weaponry they would use, if necessary.

“My recommendation,” Nasypany told his team, “if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft, we use AIM-9s in the face.”

The AIM-9 is a short-range, air-to-air missile known as the Sidewinder, with a twenty-pound warhead and an infrared guidance system that locks onto its target. Each fully armed F-16 fighter carried six of them, while each F-15 carried two Sidewinders and two larger missiles called Sparrows.

Nasypany made the comment with the professional air of a military airman who might receive a wrenching command. Then he paused a moment, as though unsettled, and added more obliquely, “If need be …”

The potential need to shoot down a commercial airliner filled with innocent men, women, and children remained unresolved. A short time later, a female NEADS staffer said to no one in particular: “Oh God, they better call the president.”

Another staffer said: “Believe me, he knows.”

In fact, 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.

Still, at NEADS they wanted to be ready. On Nasypany’s orders, Otis F-15 fighter pilots Duffy and Nash left their holding pattern and established a CAP, or Combat Air Patrol, over Manhattan. A staffer from NEADS radioed Duffy to ask if he’d have a problem with an order to shoot down a hijacked passenger jet. Having seen the destruction already caused by suicide hijackers, Duffy answered flatly: “No.”

Nash looked down from his cramped cockpit at the burning towers. Thick black smoke spiraled upward to space. Nash thought: “That was the start of World War III.”

If Nash was correct, the next battle had already begun, and the battlefield would be Washington, D.C.

THE SKIES WERE blue, the air was smooth, and all was normal during the first half hour of American Flight 77’s voyage west.

Shortly after the flight took off from Dulles, before the hijackings of Flight 11 or Flight 175 were known beyond a tiny circle of people, an FAA flight controller at the Washington Center, Danielle O’Brien, made a routine handoff of Flight 77 to a colleague at the FAA’s Indianapolis Center. For reasons she couldn’t explain and would never fully understand, O’Brien didn’t use one of her normal sendoffs to the pilots: “Good day,” or “Have a nice flight.” Instead she told them, “Good luck.”

Indianapolis Center air traffic controllers managed separation in the airspace over 73,000 square miles of the Midwest, including parts of Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. When initially under the control of Indianapolis Center, Flight 77’s pilots climbed, as instructed, to 35,000 feet and turned right 10 degrees. At just before 8:51 a.m., five minutes after the crash of Flight 11, the pilots acknowledged routine navigational instructions from Indianapolis controller Chuck Thomas, an eleven-year FAA veteran who tracked the flight along with fourteen other planes in his sector.

Focused on their work, neither Thomas nor the other controllers in Indianapolis Center had seen television reports about the crash of American Flight 11. They also had no knowledge of the then ongoing crisis aboard United Flight 175.

From the perspective of Chuck Thomas and other controllers in Indianapolis Center, all of them unaware of the emerging pattern of suicide hijackings, American Flight 77 began behaving in strange and unexpected ways starting at 8:54 a.m. First, the plane made an unauthorized turn to the southwest. Three minutes later, someone turned off its transponder and the plane disappeared from Thomas’s radar screen.

Concerned, but with no reason to fear the worst, Thomas searched for Flight 77 on his screen along its projected flight path to the west and to the southwest, the direction in which he had seen it turn. Nothing.

“American Seventy-Seven, Indy,” Thomas called over the radio. He tried five more times over the next two minutes, starting at 8:56 a.m. No reply.

Thomas called American Airlines for help in contacting Flight 77 pilots Chic Burlingame and David Charlebois in the cockpit, but the airline’s dispatchers also couldn’t reach them by radio. Airline officials sent a text message to the cockpit instructing the pilots to contact Indianapolis Center air traffic controllers. That went unanswered, too.

Thomas and other controllers spread word throughout Indianapolis Center that they had lost contact with Flight 77. As a precaution, they agreed to “sterilize the airspace,” moving other planes out of the way of Flight 77’s projected westerly path. But its failure to respond and the loss of its transponder signal made the controllers doubt the plane was still airborne. Still in the dark about what had happened in New York, they suspected that Flight 77 had experienced a catastrophic electrical or mechanical failure and that the plane had crashed. Controllers tried to call the flight for several more minutes but heard only silence. They made a final radio call to Flight 77 at shortly after 9:03 a.m.—coincidentally, at almost the exact moment United Flight 175 hit the South Tower.

Meanwhile, a conference call about the hijackings of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 among air traffic controllers in the Boston, New York, and Cleveland centers didn’t include Indianapolis Center. The reason was at once straightforward and tragically wrongheaded: no one thought a hijacked plane was headed that way, so the FAA didn’t want to distract them from their work.

At 9:08 a.m., more than twenty minutes after American Flight 11 had hit the North Tower, Indianapolis controllers remained unable to find Flight 77 on radar or raise the cockpit by radio. They called the West Virginia State Police, Air Force Search and Rescue in Langley, Virginia, and the FAA’s Great Lakes Regional Office to alert them to the possible crash of Flight 77. They considered a downed plane the most likely outcome; in an information vacuum about the other incidents, nothing of what the Indianapolis controllers saw fitted their expectations or training about a “traditional” hijacking.

But in fact, American Flight 77 was still airborne.

Someone in the cockpit had made a hairpin turn over Ohio. As a result, Indianapolis air traffic controllers were looking for the plane in exactly the wrong direction. While they searched to the west and southwest, because that’s where the plane had been heading, Flight 77 now pointed east.

Its autopilot was set for a new course: to Reagan National Airport, in the heart of Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER 7

“BEWARE ANY COCKPIT INTRUSION”

United Airlines Flight 93

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT ATTENDANT CEECEE LYLES’S CELLPHONE rang before 5 a.m. as she slept on the futon in her crash pad apartment in Newark, New Jersey. Only a few hours had passed since she fell asleep midconversation with her husband, Lorne. Now he called to wake her up, so she wouldn’t miss her flight. As soon as she opened her eyes, they resumed their seemingly endless, “everything and nothing” phone conversation.

As CeeCee got ready for work, she quizzed Lorne about his overnight shift as a Fort Myers, Florida, police officer. She dawdled in the bathroom, fixing her hair and perfecting her makeup before donning her navy-blue uniform. Three minutes before an airport bus made its 6:15 a.m. stop at the apartment building, a flight attendant she roomed with called out: “Girl, you’re going to miss that shuttle!”

CeeCee grabbed her bags and bolted out the door. She and Lorne kept talking on her ride to Newark International Airport, reviewing what bills and chores he should handle while she traveled. They talked until her seven o’clock briefing with fellow flight attendants at the United Airlines operations center, located beneath baggage claim in Terminal A. They resumed talking at 7:20 a.m. and continued their conversation until CeeCee reached the security checkpoint. They talked again as she walked through the terminal to United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 parked at Gate 17A.

CeeCee told Lorne she expected an easy day. The nonstop flight to San Francisco had been assigned five flight attendants, she told him, despite a sparsely filled cabin. First class would have ten passengers and coach would have only twenty-seven, which meant that four out of every five seats on Flight 93 would be empty.

Work had begun and CeeCee said goodbye. Lorne told her he loved her and to call when she landed.

THROUGHOUT THE MORNING, as minutes ticked past and the terror swelled, only the hijackers and their al-Qaeda bosses knew how many planes they intended to seize. It could be two, ten, or more. But from the terrorists’ perspective, the first hour of their attack went like clockwork: so far, they’d hijacked three planes, two of which had struck their targets in New York and the third was under their control, coursing toward Washington, D.C.

Those results were the fruits of a poisoned tree. After months of research and reconnaissance led by Mohamed Atta, the hijackers had guessed correctly about how their victims in the air and their enemies on the ground would and wouldn’t react to a hostile airborne takeover. During the first three hijackings, fifteen terrorists had used planning, training, subterfuge, and deadly violence to exploit preconceived notions and gaping weaknesses they’d identified in U.S. airline security, all in service to Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against the United States and its people.

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. “Muscle” hijackers spread fear by attacking several crew members and passengers. They herded the rest to each plane’s rear section to keep them out of the way. Claims about bombs, whether true or (more likely) false, confused and frightened passengers and crew members into obedience, perhaps with the exception of former Israeli commando Danny Lewin on Flight 11, whose throat was apparently slashed by the hijacker who sat behind him. Announcements from terrorist pilots in the cockpits, even if not all were heard by passengers and crew members, were lies designed to trick their hostages into believing that these were “ordinary” hijackings, with political or monetary goals, and that no one else would be hurt if the terrorists were allowed to fly to their chosen destination and if authorities on the ground satisfied their demands.

During the first three flights, the tightly choreographed strategy worked. And one of the most important elements was timing.

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. Conversely, delays would increase the chance that they’d be stopped on the ground by a shutdown of air traffic, confronted in the air by fighter jets, or challenged on board by passengers and crew members who might discover that other hijackings hadn’t ended with safe landings and the release of innocents.

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, before taxiing and takeoff. Considering the long delays that often dogged air travel, time had been on the hijackers’ side. So far.

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.

THE PASSENGERS OF that flight, United Flight 93, swiftly boarded the lightly booked plane.

Mark “Mickey” Rothenberg always flew first class, thanks to his bulging frequent flier account from far-flung business trips. Trim, fifty-two years old, a husband and father of two, Rothenberg was a devotee of black cashmere sweaters, a pack-a-day smoker, and a math whiz. He settled into seat 5B for the first leg of a business trip to Taiwan for his import business.

Around him was a collection of strangers with a great many similarities, young and young-in-spirit men and women, many of whom had been shaped by sports in their youths and who channeled their competitive fires into successful careers.

Directly in front of Mickey sat thirty-eight-year-old Thomas E. Burnett Jr., tall and square-jawed, who’d parlayed a sharp mind and a knack for sales into a job as chief operating officer of a company that manufactured heart pumps for patients awaiting transplants. Analytical and ambitious, a former high school quarterback, Tom originally booked a later flight, but he’d switched onto Flight 93 to get home sooner to his wife, Deena, a former flight attendant, and their three young daughters.

Across the aisle in 4D was Mark Bingham, a goateed, thirty-one-year-old public relations executive. Six foot four and more than 200 pounds, Mark ran with the bulls in Pamplona and dressed as what he described as a “transvestite lumberjack” for Halloween. During college, he played on national championship rugby teams at the University of California, Berkeley. He still loved the bone-crushing game: he cofounded a gay-inclusive team called the San Francisco Fog. Mark’s toughness extended beyond the field. Six years earlier, two muggers, one with a gun, demanded cash and watches from Mark and his then partner. Mark jumped the armed mugger, who smashed him on the head with the gun, drawing blood. Mark knocked away the gun and the muggers fled. United flights felt like homecomings for Mark: his mother and his aunt were United flight attendants. Headed to California for the wedding of a fraternity brother who happened to be a Muslim, Mark overslept and nearly missed Flight 93—a kindly gate agent had opened the jetway door and let him board.

In a small-world coincidence, six rows back sat Todd Beamer, who graduated one year ahead of Mark Bingham from the same high school in Los Gatos, California. Although both were schoolboy athletes, Todd spent only his senior year there, and it’s unknown whether he and Mark knew each other at school or recognized each other on the plane. Todd had a boyish face, a warm smile, and a drive for success that made him an ace salesman for computer software maker Oracle Corp. When he wasn’t working, Todd devoted himself to teaching Sunday school, playing in a church softball league, and above all, spending time with his pregnant wife, Lisa, and their two young sons. At his church men’s group, Todd was studying a book called A Life of Integrity.

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 Glick 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.

In the next row, Louis “Joey” Nacke II packed almost 200 solid pounds onto his five-foot-nine frame. Joey had a taste for wine and cigars and sported a Superman logo tattoo on his left shoulder. At forty-two, with a new wife and two teenage sons from a previous marriage, Joey ran a distribution center for K-B Toys.

A few rows back sat Toshiya Kuge, an angular twenty-year-old who played linebacker for his college football team in his native Japan. Returning home after his second visit to the United States, Toshiya had spent two weeks sightseeing and sharpening his English language skills, part of his plan to earn a master’s degree in engineering from an American university.

Not as young as the others, William Cashman was as tough as almost any of them: at sixty, wiry and strong, he was an ironworker who’d helped to build New York’s World Trade Center. He studied martial arts and, in his youth, served as an Army paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. His friend Patrick “Joe” Driscoll, a retired software executive seated beside him, had spent four years on a Navy destroyer during the Korean War. Together they planned to test themselves hiking in Yosemite National Park.

Others aboard Flight 93 represented a cross-section of American life, ranging in age from twenty to seventy-nine. The oldest was Hilda Marcin, a retired bookkeeper and teacher’s aide traveling to California to move in with her daughter. Flying home after visiting friends in New Jersey, the youngest passenger was Deora Bodley, a junior at Santa Clara University who dreamed of becoming a child psychologist. U.S. Census workers Marion Britton and Waleska Martinez were heading west for a conference. Computer engineer Edward Felt was rushing to San Francisco on a last-minute business trip. Attorney and engineer Linda Gronlund and her boyfriend, computer software designer Joseph DeLuca, were going to California’s wine country to celebrate Linda’s forty-seventh birthday.

Donald and Jean Peterson, the only married couple on the plane, were, like Cashman and Driscoll, headed to Yosemite National Park, for a vacation with Jean’s parents and her brother. They originally held tickets for a later flight but arrived early at Newark and were given seats on Flight 93. A retired electric company executive, Don counseled men struggling with alcohol and drug dependency. Packed among his belongings was a Bible in which he’d tucked a handwritten list of the names of men he was praying for.

Donald Greene, an experienced pilot who worked as an executive in an aircraft instrument company, planned to join his brothers at Lake Tahoe for a hiking and biking trip. He’d packed his gear in a green duffel bag adorned with the words “Courageous Challenge.” Honor Elizabeth “Lizz” Wainio was a district manager in the retail arm of the Discovery Channel Stores, heading west on business. Andrew “Sonny” Garcia—who had worked as an air traffic controller years earlier with the California National Guard—was going home after a meeting for his industrial supply business. Richard Guadagno, a biologist who’d studied close-quarters fighting as part of his training as a federal law enforcement officer, was returning to his job as manager of the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Eureka, California, after celebrating his grandmother’s hundredth birthday.

At thirty-eight, expecting her first child, Lauren Grandcolas was an advertising executive and aspiring author, returning home to California from a memorial service for her grandmother. Retired bartender John Talignani was traveling west to support his family after the death of his stepson, who’d been killed in a car crash on his honeymoon. A cane and a mobility scooter hadn’t stopped Colleen Fraser from becoming a fierce advocate for the disabled and helping to draft the Americans with Disabilities Act. When Congress debated the bill, Colleen commandeered a paratransit bus and drove fellow activists to Washington to lobby senators. She was on hand when President George H. W. Bush signed the bill into law.