Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

At the American Airlines center in Fort Worth, Nydia Gonzalez begged for information: “What’s going on, Betty? … Betty, talk to me… . Betty, are you there? … Betty?”

Betty didn’t answer.

Nydia turned to her colleagues: “Do you think we lost her? Okay, so we’ll like—we’ll stay open.”

Then Nydia Gonzalez added an unintentionally haunting coda to Betty Ong’s bravery: “We—I think we might have lost her.”

AROUND THE SAME time, Amy Sweeney told Michael Woodward: “Something is wrong. We’re in a rapid descent… . We are all over the place.” Another American Airlines employee who overheard the call said she heard Amy scream.

Michael tried his best to calm Amy. He told her to look out the window and tell him what she saw. “We are flying low,” she said. Amy told Michael she saw water and buildings. “We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low!”

Amy paused. Powerless on the other end of the phone, Amy’s colleague and friend Michael Woodward waited, every second stretching into a lifetime. Less than an hour earlier, he’d stood inside the plane, locked eyes with Mohamed Atta, and waved goodbye to his friends.

Michael heard Amy’s last words, before the call dissolved into static: “Oh my God!—We are way too low!”

UNDER THE COMMAND and control of fanatics bent on murder and determined to commit suicide, American Airlines Flight 11 had been transformed from a passenger jet into a guided missile. Atta’s radio transmissions about returning to the airport and everything being okay were elements of a cruel ruse to pacify passengers and to prevent an uprising against his outnumbered men. He had played on old beliefs about how hijackings occurred and were usually resolved without violence. Even though his lies weren’t heard by Flight 11’s passengers, the radio calls and the hijackers’ advance training and in-flight actions revealed a carefully calibrated plan built on surprise, violence, trickery, and a studied understanding of their targets, all to achieve a barbaric goal.

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, 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.

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

Cambodian farmers who relied on John Ogonowski would have to find a new teacher and patron. His wife and daughters would be set adrift without their anchor.

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

Betty Ong’s elderly friends would need new rides to doctors’ appointments. Her sister Cathie would never again hear her say “I love you lots.”

Robert Norton’s stepson would have to get married without him.

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

Daniel Lewin’s family and his company would have to forge new paths without his genius or his guidance.

Someone else would have to find a health aide for Cora Hidalgo Holland’s mother.

Susan MacKay’s air traffic controller husband, Doug, who planned to have John Ogonowski say hi for him, would have to live with the knowledge that Susan passed through airspace over the Hudson River Valley that he normally controlled.

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 time of their deaths was 8:46:25 a.m.

More than six minutes later, the two F-15 fighter jets from Otis took flight. They soared south toward New York in pursuit of a passenger jet that no longer existed.

But something terrible was happening on another passenger plane also bound from Boston to Los Angeles.

CHAPTER 5

“DON’T WORRY, DAD”

United Airlines Flight 175

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER TAKEOFF FROM LOGAN, WHILE AMERICAN Flight 11 was still airborne, United Flight 175 reached the crystal-blue skies over upstate New York.

With the passage of time and distance came a transfer of ground control from Boston Center to a similar FAA facility called New York Center, located in a sleepy suburb on Long Island. New York Center’s radar scopes covered some of the world’s busiest skies: air traffic over the New York metro area and parts of Pennsylvania.

With the handoff of the flight from Peter Zalewski in Boston Center to his colleagues in New York Center came a new radio frequency for the pilots of Flight 175. At 8:41 a.m., several minutes after being instructed to veer away from Flight 11, they used that new frequency to report the disturbing radio communication they’d heard earlier.

“Yeah. We figured we’d wait to go to your center,” said Captain Victor Saracini. “We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure out of Boston. Ah, with someone, ah, it sounded like someone keyed the mic and said, ah, ‘Everyone, ah, stay in your seats.’”

Saracini didn’t say exactly when he heard the message, and he didn’t know its source among the multiple planes that used the same frequency. The words he used didn’t precisely fit any of the three accidental transmissions believed to be from Mohamed Atta from Flight 11’s cockpit.

Saracini might have been referring to Atta’s second message: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourselves and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” But the fact that Saracini heard only one message made it more likely to have been the hijacker’s third and last transmission. Otherwise, Saracini presumably would have mentioned one or both of the earlier threatening calls. The third call began at one second before 8:34 a.m.: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

Saracini didn’t say why he waited to report the message, but one logical explanation would be that he assumed that the controllers at Boston Center already knew about it because they used the same frequency. Once Flight 175 passed to New York Center and changed radio frequencies, Saracini presumably wanted to be certain that his new ground controller knew about it, too. If so, Saracini showed good foresight: Flight 175’s air traffic controller in New York Center was Dave Bottiglia, who hadn’t yet heard anything about the chaos unfolding aboard American Flight 11 as it raced toward New York City.

“Oh, okay,” Bottiglia answered. “I’ll pass that along over here.”

Under normal circumstances, an official at the FAA would share a report of a suspicious cockpit communication with airline officials, in this case the United Airlines System Operations Control center, just outside Chicago. But no one from Boston Center or New York Center did so. Bottiglia could have remedied that, but other worries suddenly demanded his full attention.

Moments after Bottiglia heard from Saracini, another New York Center flight controller walked over and showed Bottiglia a point, or “target,” on his radar screen.

“You see this target here?” the controller asked. “This is American Eleven. Boston Center thinks it’s a hijack.”

Now Dave Bottiglia had responsibility for both American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. Having been made aware that Flight 11 was racing toward Manhattan, descending rapidly with its transponder turned off and someone in the cockpit making threats, Bottiglia did his best to keep track of the American Airlines plane.

THE FIRST OUTWARD sign of trouble aboard United Airlines Flight 175 came at 8:47 a.m., about one minute after Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Someone in the United plane’s cockpit changed the plane’s transponder code twice within a minute. Bottiglia didn’t notice because he was furiously searching for American Flight 11, which by then no longer existed.

Three minutes later, at 8:50 a.m., the pilot of a Delta Air Lines flight radioed Bottiglia to let him know about “a lot of smoke in Lower Manhattan.” The pilot said it looked as if the World Trade Center was on fire. Bottiglia acknowledged the call as he continued to search his screen for missing Flight 11.

Meanwhile, United Flight 175 remained on a southwesterly route, crossing over New Jersey and then over Pennsylvania. At 8:51 a.m., roughly four minutes after someone switched the assigned transponder code, Bottiglia noticed the change. He radioed the plane to order the pilots to return to their proper code but received no reply.

Whoever sat at the controls of Flight 175 did something else: the pilot changed altitude without approval, climbing several thousand feet, then plunging into a steep descent.

For New York Center controllers watching on radar screens in darkened rooms many miles away, pieces of a horrifying puzzle began to fall into place. First, American Flight 11 vanished as it descended toward Manhattan, and soon after, a Delta pilot reported a fire at the World Trade Center. Now United Flight 175 had changed its altitude and transponder code. The cockpit failed to respond to radio calls shortly after Captain Victor Saracini radioed his report about the suspicious message.

Flight controllers are trained to use logic and reason and not to jump to conclusions. Dave Bottiglia felt in his gut that these abnormal events were related, though he wouldn’t yet call them elements of a coordinated, nearly simultaneous hijacking plot.

Bottiglia tried to focus his attention on United Flight 175 and, if he could find it again, American Flight 11. He began to move all other flights in his sector out of the way of Flight 175’s self-assigned path, and he continued his attempts to reach the United pilots. Five times he called them, with no reply.

His voice starting to shake, Bottiglia turned to a flight control colleague in New York Center. Bottiglia asked him to watch all the other planes in his sector: “Please just take everything and don’t ask any questions.”

AT 8:52 A.M., the phone rang in Lee and Eunice Hanson’s cozy kitchen in Easton, Connecticut. Lee answered and heard the voice of their son Peter, talking quietly, his tone somber.

“Dad, we are on the airplane. It’s being hijacked,” Peter said.

Lee couldn’t process what his son was telling him. He hoped it was a joke, like the prank call Peter made years earlier to Eunice at the conservation commission.

“What are you talking about?” Lee answered. “C’mon, don’t scare everybody.”

“No, it’s true,” Peter said. He spoke in a soft, clear voice. The longer Peter spoke, the more his father heard tremors of nerves, the clearer it became that Peter wasn’t joking.

“I think they’ve taken over the cockpit… . An attendant has been stabbed … and someone else up front may have been killed. The plane is making strange moves. Call United Airlines… . Tell them it’s Flight 175, Boston to L.A.”

Lee asked about Christine and Sue, and Peter told him they were okay. All the passengers had crowded together in the rear of the plane. “It’s very tight here, Dad.”

“I’m going to hang up,” Peter said. “Call United Airlines.”

Lee repeatedly tried the airline, but the line was busy. He called the Easton Police Department, told an officer what Peter said, and asked the officer to call United and to contact the town’s police chief. Shortly after, Lee called back to make sure the police had reached the airline. This time an officer told him: “Gee, Mr. Hanson, a plane has hit the World Trade Tower. You should turn the television on.”

Lee and Eunice turned to CNN.

His son’s voice echoed in Lee’s mind. He shared what he knew with Eunice, who could barely breathe. Lee felt an urge to call Peter on his cellphone, but he stopped himself, fearing that a ringing phone might endanger everyone on board.

Distraught, in shock and disbelief, Lee and Eunice stared at the horrendous scenes on television.

CNN ANCHOR CAROL LIN broke into the cable network’s morning news report shortly before 8:49 a.m., several minutes before the Hansons tuned in. The screen filled with horrifying images of the North Tower, its top floors engulfed in fire and smoke.

“This just in,” Lin said. “You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. CNN Center right now is just beginning to work on this story, obviously calling our sources and trying to figure out exactly what happened. But clearly, something relatively devastating is happening this morning there on the south end of the island of Manhattan.”

From that moment, the global audience expanded exponentially, as seemingly everyone watching rushed to a phone to tell someone else: “Turn on CNN.”

Live on the air, Lin and her viewers heard a first-person account via telephone from CNN’s vice president of finance, Sean Murtagh, who’d been in a meeting on the 21st floor of a building facing the World Trade Center. Murtagh was conscripted by circumstance into working as a reporter: “I just witnessed a plane that appeared to be cruising at slightly lower than normal altitude over New York City, and it appears to have crashed into—I don’t know which tower it is—but it hit directly in the middle of one of the World Trade Center towers.”

Lin: “Sean, what kind of plane was it? Was it a small plane, a jet?”

Murtagh: “It was a jet. It looked like a two-engine jet, maybe a 737.”

Lin: “You are talking about a large passenger commercial jet.”

Murtagh: “A large passenger commercial jet.”

They discussed Murtagh’s location and other details. Then Lin asked a question that suggested she suspected that the crash was caused by a mechanical failure: “Did you see any smoke, any flames coming out of engines of that plane?”

“No, I did not,” Murtagh answered. “The plane just was coming in low, and the wingtips tilted back and forth, and it flattened out. It looks like it hit at a slight angle into the World Trade Center. I can see flames coming out of the side of the building, and smoke continues to billow.”

Other than the exact model of the plane, CNN immediately got the basics right about Flight 11’s crash, although they didn’t yet know the flight number or much else. But several other early media reports suggested that it might have been a small commuter plane. As every broadcast and print newsroom leapt onto the story, early speculation raged that the crash was an accident, caused by a lost or inexperienced pilot. Americans old enough to remember perhaps flashed back to July 28, 1945, when a B-25 bomber lost in morning fog crashed into the Empire State Building, killing three crew members and eleven others.

Confusion reigned in the government as well, including at the FAA and the FBI, as officials struggled to confirm that a plane had in fact hit the North Tower. Others questioned whether it wasn’t a plane at all, but a bomb more powerful than the one driven by truck into an underground World Trade Center garage in February 1993.

One example of the confusion: Around 8:55 a.m., the flight control manager at New York Center tried to notify regional FAA officials that United Flight 175 had apparently been hijacked. But the regional FAA officials refused to be disturbed. They were too busy discussing the hijacking of American Flight 11, which they didn’t realize had scythed into the North Tower almost ten minutes earlier.

During the first frenzied minutes before and after 9 a.m. on September 11, only a few people recognized the enormity of the unfolding catastrophe. Tragically, some of those who best understood key pieces of the crisis were inside American Flight 11 before it crashed and United Flight 175 as it sped toward New York City.

AT NEARLY THE same time as Peter Hanson called his parents’ Connecticut home, a telephone rang at a United Airlines facility in San Francisco where in-flight crews called to report minor maintenance problems. Flight attendants knew they could dial “f-i-x,” using the corresponding numbers on the keypad, 3-4-9, and automatically be connected to the airline’s maintenance center.

From an Airfone near the rear of Flight 175, a male flight attendant, believed to be former cellphone salesman Robert Fangman, reported details of the hijacking to a maintenance worker. The information dovetailed with the report Peter Hanson gave his father. The flight attendant said that both pilots of United Flight 175 had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and hijackers were probably flying the plane.

The unrecorded call cut off after about two minutes. The United maintenance worker and a colleague tried to recontact the flight using the ACARS digital message system linked to the cockpit: “I heard of a reported incident aboard your [aircraft],” they wrote. “Plz verify all is normal.”

They received no reply. Minutes passed before someone from the San Francisco maintenance center reported the call to United headquarters in Chicago.

Not every attempt to sound the alarm or to reach loved ones from Flight 175 proved successful. Between 8:52 a.m. and 8:59 a.m., former pro hockey player Garnet “Ace” Bailey tried four times to call his wife, Kathy, on her business and home phones. The calls dropped or didn’t connect. He never got through.

FLIGHT 175 COMPLETED a fishhook turn over Allentown, Pennsylvania, banking to the left and descending as it crossed back over New Jersey, and headed toward New York City. The pilot almost certainly was Marwan al-Shehhi, the companion of Mohamed Atta and the only one of the five Flight 175 hijackers trained to fly a passenger jet.

Nothing was safe in their path. A New York Center controller watched as the United plane turned toward a Delta 737 flying southwest at 28,000 feet.

“Traffic two o’clock! Ten miles,” the controller warned the Delta pilots. “I think he’s been hijacked. I don’t know his intentions. Take any evasive action necessary.”

The Delta flight ducked away from United 175, but soon after, the hijacked plane put itself on a collision course with a US Airways flight. An alarm sounded in the US Airways cockpit, and the pilots dived to avoid a midair crash.

AFTER DROPPING HER husband, Brian “Moose” Sweeney, at the Hyannis airport, Julie Sweeney got ready for her fifth day of work as a high school health teacher on Cape Cod. She’d already left for work when the phone rang in the home she shared with the former Navy F-14 pilot, Top Gun instructor, “Twin Tower” college football player, and costume-party Viking.

Brian’s call, at shortly before 8:59 a.m., went to their answering machine.

He spoke in a calm, serious tone, and his message echoed what he’d told Julie weeks earlier about how he wanted her to “celebrate life” if anything happened to him:

“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”

Brian hung up. Then he punched in the numbers for another telephone call.

AS LOUISE SWEENEY prepared to leave home to run errands, the phone rang. She picked up to hear her son’s voice: “Mom, It’s Brian. I’m on a hijacked plane and it doesn’t look good. I called to say I love you and I love my family.”

Brian told his mother that he didn’t know who the hijackers were. Calling from the rear of the plane, he said he thought they might come back, so he might have to hang up quickly. He told her he believed that they might be flying somewhere over Ohio. Brian said he and other passengers might storm the cockpit.

Louise knew her son, and she recognized how he sounded when he became “pissed off.” He had that tone.

Before ending the call, Brian told her, “Remember Crossing Over. Don’t forget Crossing Over.”

Louise remembered, and she wouldn’t forget. As Flight 175 streamed toward New York City, descending by the second, flying erratically, the original pilots apparently dead and a flight attendant wounded, Brian tried to comfort his mother. Crossing Over was a book and television program featuring a self-professed psychic named John Edward, who claimed to communicate with the dead. Brian wanted his mother to know that somehow, someday, he would see her again.

Now Brian had to go.

“They are coming back,” he said. Brian told his mother goodbye as he hung up.

Louise Sweeney turned on the television.

AT NINE O’CLOCK, Peter Hanson called his parents’ home a second time from Flight 175.

“It’s getting bad, Dad,” Peter told his father, Lee. “A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace.”

“They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up and getting sick.”

“The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down.”

“I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.”

Peter’s description of the hijackers’ weapons, claims, and tactics echoed the calls only minutes earlier from Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney on Flight 11.

Then, just as Brian Sweeney had tried to reassure his wife and mother, Peter Hanson sought to comfort his father: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”

AT 9:01 A.M., as United Flight 175 rapidly descended, Peter Mulligan, a flight control manager at New York Center, told the FAA Command Center in Virginia: “We have several situations going on here. It’s escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us.”

As it barreled toward the World Trade Center, already the scene of disaster from Flight 11’s crash, United Flight 175 looked as though it might hit the Statue of Liberty.

Air traffic controllers stared rapt at their screens, even as they continued to warn other nearby planes. Everything in their long years of training and experience channeled their minds toward the hope and expectation that hijacked planes would land and passengers would be held hostage until demands were met, or until the military either forced the hijackers to surrender or killed them. To the very last moments, some controllers held tight to the notion that the pilots were racing toward the nearest airport, beset by a routine mechanical or electrical emergency.

Reality overtook that fantasy.

United Airlines Flight 175 flew low and fast, banking toward the southern twin of the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center. Flight controllers, airline officials, government and military experts, and everyone else would need to accept a new script for hijackings, one that featured a multipronged murder-suicide plot designed to maximize civilian casualties and terrorize survivors through the destruction of physical and symbolic pillars of America’s power.

The evidence flashed on the air traffic controllers’ radar screens.

“No!” a New York controller shouted. “He’s not going to land. He’s going in!”

FROM THE BACK of the plane, with his wife and daughter pressed against him, Peter Hanson spoke his final words to his father: “Oh my God… . Oh my God, oh my God.”

Lee Hanson heard a woman shriek.

AT THAT MOMENT, a battalion of television and still cameras on the ground and in helicopters trained their lenses on Lower Manhattan. Every network joined CNN live on the air, yet still almost no one knew what was happening or what kind of planes were involved.