American Airlines Flight 77
Even after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center, even as concern mounted among Indianapolis Center controllers about strange behavior by American Airlines Flight 77, no one from the FAA informed the U.S. military that a plane that took off from Dulles Airport had stopped communicating by radio and had disappeared from radar screens after someone turned off its cockpit transponder.
Meanwhile, based on a combination of wrong and misleading information, Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS began to chase a different plane, a phantom jet that no longer existed, supposedly heading south from New York toward the nation’s capital: American Airlines Flight 11, which had crashed more than a half hour earlier.
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 boondoggle search for Flight 11 kicked into gear when NEADS Master Sergeant Maureen “Mo” Dooley fielded a call from the FAA’s Boston military liaison, Colin Scoggins. He’d just taken part in a frenzied conference call with FAA headquarters in Washington and several regional air traffic control centers about the hijackings.
During that FAA conference call, Scoggins heard someone—he wasn’t sure who—say that American Airlines Flight 11 remained aloft, flying south. If true, that meant some other plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Scoggins consulted with a supervisor, then passed the information to Mo Dooley at NEADS in a phone call at 9:21 a.m.,1 roughly thirty-five minutes after Flight 11 had in fact crashed.
“I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air,” Scoggins told Dooley, “and it’s on its way towards, heading toward Washington.”
Dooley: “Okay, American Eleven is still in the air?”
Scoggins: “Yes.”
Dooley: “On its way toward Washington?”
Scoggins: “That was another, it was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower. That’s the latest report we have.”
Dooley: “Okay.”
Scoggins: “I’m going to try to confirm an ID for you, but I would assume he’s somewhere over, uh, either New Jersey or somewhere farther south.”
The confusion quickly deepened.
Dooley: “Okay. So, American Eleven isn’t the hijack at all then, right?”
Scoggins: “No, he is a hijack.”
Dooley: “He, American Eleven is a hijack?”
Scoggins: “Yes.”
Dooley: “And he’s heading into Washington?”
Scoggins: “This could be a third aircraft.”
Dooley pulled away from the call and yelled to Nasypany: “Another hijack!2 It’s headed towards Washington!”
“Shit!” Nasypany answered. “Give me a location.”
Two hijacked planes had already crashed into buildings in New York. Hearing this new report of a possible third hijacked plane, Nasypany wanted to throw all available assets toward preventing a catastrophe in the nation’s capital.
“Okay,” he told his team, “American Airlines is still airborne—Eleven, the first guy. He’s heading towards Washington. Okay, I think we need to scramble Langley right now. And I’m, I’m gonna take the fighters from Otis and try to chase this guy down3 if I can find him.”
Colonel Robert Marr at NEADS approved Nasypany’s plan to launch more fighters. The two F-16s from Langley and an unarmed training jet scrambled into the air.
As they focused on an airliner that no longer existed, neither Nasypany nor anyone else in the U.S. military knew that a different disaster was developing. A third passenger jet had in fact been hijacked: American Airlines Flight 77 out of Dulles Airport.
Around 8:51 a.m.,4 the five Saudi Arabian men aboard Flight 77 executed their plan. They used swift, coordinated takeover methods similar to those used during the previous half hour on Flight 11 and Flight 175.
Twenty minutes later, the phone rang in the Las Vegas home of Ron and Nancy May. Nancy was getting ready for work5 as an admissions clerk at a community college and she missed the call. The phone rang again a minute later, and this time Nancy May heard the voice of her flight attendant daughter, Renée. They’d last spoken two days earlier, and Renée and Ron had talked the previous day. Renée had sounded happy6 on both of those calls.
Now Renée sounded serious. She calmly, but erroneously, told her mother7 that six men had hijacked her flight and forced “us” to the rear of the plane. Renée didn’t say how she arrived at the number six, and she didn’t explain whether the people crowded together were crew members, passengers, or both. She didn’t know the fate of the pilots. Renée told her mother the flight information and gave Nancy three telephone numbers to call American Airlines.
“I love you, Mom,”8 Renée said. The line went dead.
Nancy yelled upstairs for Ron. Using one of the numbers from Renée, Nancy reached Patty Carson,9 an American Airlines flight services employee at Reagan National Airport in Washington, who had just returned to her desk from a staff lounge where she watched on television as United Flight 175 exploded into the South Tower. When Nancy relayed Renée’s hijacking message, along with Renée’s flight number and employee identification number, Patty Carson seemed confused. She told Nancy that she didn’t think the plane that struck the World Trade Center was an American Airlines jet.
“No, no,” Nancy May interrupted. “We are talking about Flight 77, in the air.” She told Carson that Renée had said “We are being hijacked and held hostage.”10
Ron May took the phone and told Carson that since Renée had just called, it stood to reason that she couldn’t have been in a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center.
Carson took the Mays’ telephone number and promised to call back as soon as she knew anything. After speaking with Carson, Nancy and Ron May tried to call Renée on her cellphone but the call didn’t connect. They turned on the television, hoping for news.
When she hung up with Ron and Nancy May, Carson learned that she had to evacuate the airport, a precaution prompted by reports of hijackings. On her way out of the building, Carson described the call to a flight services manager, Toni Knisley, who called her boss, American Airlines base manager Rosemary Dillard. At first there was some confusion about which plane Renée was on. When they confirmed it was American Flight 77, Rosemary Dillard stumbled backward11 into a chair. That morning, she’d raced to Dulles Airport with her husband, Eddie, the sharp-dressing, dominoes-playing real estate investor who was going to California to work on a property they owned. She’d kissed him goodbye and told him to come home soon.
Eddie was aboard hijacked Flight 77.
Inside the U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington, a telephone rang in a fifth-floor office near a mural that depicted a robed figure protecting a cowering man from a lynch mob. Secretary Lori Keyton12 answered and heard the voice of an operator ask her to accept an emergency collect call from Barbara Olson.
Keyton accepted the charges, and Barbara calmed herself enough to choke out the words: “Can you tell Ted . . .”
Keyton cut her off and rushed into the ornate office of the U.S. solicitor general.
“Barbara is on the line13 and she’s in a panic,” Keyton told Ted Olson.
When Barbara reached him from Flight 77, Ted Olson was watching television, viewing a replay of a still unidentified passenger jet hitting the South Tower.14 When he heard that Barbara was on the phone, Olson’s first thought was relief.15 It meant that Barbara wasn’t on either of the planes that had crashed. Then he picked up the call.
“Ted,” she said, “my plane’s been hijacked.”16
Barbara told him the hijackers had knives and box cutters. Olson asked if they knew that she was talking on the phone, and she answered that they didn’t. She said they’d ordered the passengers to the back of the plane. The call cut off.
Unlike callers from the previous two hijacked planes, neither Barbara Olson nor Renée May mentioned violence against the pilots or anyone else, nor the use of Mace or the threat of a bomb.
Ted Olson tried his direct line to Attorney General John Ashcroft, but Ashcroft was on a flight to Wisconsin. He called the Justice Department’s Command Center and reported the hijacking. For some unexplained reason, Olson’s call didn’t trigger notification of the U.S. military. Olson asked that a security officer come immediately to his office, to offer suggestions if Barbara called again. Before the officer arrived, the phone rang.
Barbara told Ted that “the pilot” had announced that the plane had been hijacked, but it wasn’t clear if she knew whether the speaker on the intercom was one of the hijackers or the original cockpit crew.17 She might have been operating under the old “rules” and believed the terrorists were forcing the legitimate pilots to do their bidding. Barbara said the plane was flying over houses. Another passenger told her they were headed northeast.
“What can I tell the pilot?” Barbara asked Ted. “What can I do? How can I stop this?”18
Ted wasn’t sure how to answer. He decided that he had to tell Barbara about the other two hijackings and crashes at the World Trade Center. Flight 77 seemed bound for the same fate; the question was where the hijackers intended to crash. Barbara absorbed the news quietly and stoically, though Ted wondered if she’d been shocked into silence.
They expressed their feelings for each other. Each reassured the other19 that it wasn’t over yet, the plane was still aloft, and everything would work out. Even as he said the words, Ted Olson didn’t believe them. He suspected that neither did Barbara.
The call abruptly ended.
At that moment, no one at the FAA had any idea what was happening aboard American Flight 77, or where it was.
Shortly after nine, controllers at Indianapolis Center began spreading word that Flight 77 had disappeared from their screens. At 9:09 a.m., controllers at Indianapolis Center reported the loss of contact with the plane to the FAA regional center.20 Fully fifteen minutes later, a regional FAA official relayed that information to FAA headquarters in Washington.
By 9:20 a.m., after the distress calls from Renée May and Barbara Olson and nearly twenty-five minutes after someone turned off the transponder on Flight 77, Indianapolis controllers finally learned that two other passenger jets had been hijacked.21 At that point, they doubted their initial assumptions about a crash. They and their FAA supervisors began to consider the evidence that a third passenger plane had been hijacked.
Overall, confusion and uncertainty were almost universal during the first hour after the hijackings, extending far beyond the FAA. At 9:10 a.m., a United dispatch manager wrote in a logbook: “At that point a second aircraft had hit the WTC, but we didn’t know it was our United flight.” As late as 9:20 a.m., dispatchers from United Airlines and American Airlines were still trying to confirm whose planes had hit the World Trade Center.22 During one phone call, an American Airlines official said he thought both planes belonged to his airline, while a United official said he believed that the second plane was Flight 175. He reached that conclusion in part because enlarged slow-motion images on CNN showed the plane that flew into the South Tower didn’t have American Airlines’ shiny metallic skin.
In fairness to FAA and airline officials, these were extraordinarily fast-moving events for which they had never trained. Also, the officials were hamstrung by a mix of incorrect or fragmentary information, as well as by a false sense of security23 that developed during the years since a U.S. air carrier had been hijacked or bombed. Just four years earlier, a presidential commission24 on air safety chaired by Vice President Al Gore focused on the dangers of sabotage and explosives aboard commercial airplanes. It also raised the possibility that terrorists might use surface-to-air missiles, and it cited concerns about lax screening of items airline passengers might carry onto planes. The commission’s final report never mentioned a risk of suicide hijackings.
Ultimately, though, 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.
Earlier in the summer, 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. Among other recommendations, he urged the FBI to monitor civil aviation schools and seek authority to obtain visa information about foreign students attending them. The FBI neither acted on the memo nor shared it with the FAA. The FBI took a similar approach in the case of a French national named Zacarias Moussaoui who’d been receiving flight training in Minneapolis. Moussaoui was arrested less than a month before September 11 for overstaying his visa, and an FBI agent concluded that he was “an Islamic extremist28 preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals.” The agent believed that Moussaoui’s flight training played a role in those plans. On August 24, eighteen days before the attacks, the CIA described him as a possible “suicide hijacker.” But when the FBI told the FAA and other agencies about Moussaoui on September 4, its summary didn’t mention the agent’s belief29 that Moussaoui planned to hijack a plane.
In the summer of 2001, the FAA seemed to ignore even its own recent security briefings. A few months before September 11, an FAA briefing to airport security officials considered the desirability of suicide hijackings from a terrorist perspective: “A domestic hijacking would likely result in a greater number of American hostages but would be operationally more difficult. We don’t rule it out. . . . If, however, the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion,30 a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable.”
Now that scenario had come to pass, and the FAA found itself unaware and unprepared.
The FAA’s Indianapolis Center controllers continued to search their radar screens to the west and southwest along Flight 77’s projected path, having missed the plane’s sharp turn back to the east. Although the plane had disappeared from radar at 8:56 a.m., it actually reappeared at 9:05 a.m. But because some controllers had stopped looking when they thought it crashed, and some looked in the wrong direction, they never saw it return to their radar screens.31 Neither Indianapolis Center controllers nor their bosses at the FAA command center issued an “all-points bulletin” for other air traffic control centers to look for the missing plane.
American Airlines Flight 77 traveled undetected for thirty-six minutes.32
The plane’s new flight path pointed it on a direct course for Washington, D.C. But yet again, no one told the U.S. military, this time about a threat to the nation’s capital.
By 9:25 a.m., even as American Flight 77 remained missing and a mystery, one top FAA official grasped the severity and growing scope of the crisis.
At the agency’s operations center in Herndon, Virginia, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney knew about the North Tower crash and had seen United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on CNN some twenty minutes earlier. He worried about the disappearance of Flight 7733 and feared that more hijackings might be under way. Sliney also had heard about Mohamed Atta’s “We have some planes” remark. He felt haunted by the question34 of how high the hijacking total might eventually reach. He couldn’t undo what already happened, but Sliney hoped that he might help prevent the next attack.
Fifty-five years old, with a shock of white hair, an Air Force veteran and a lawyer by training, Sliney concluded that he had both the authority and the responsibility to take drastic action. Accordingly, he declared a “nationwide ground stop,”35 the first order of its kind in U.S. aviation history, which prevented all commercial and private aircraft from taking off anywhere in the United States.
Making Sliney’s order even more remarkable, he had only recently returned to the FAA after several years in a private law practice. The morning of September 11 was Sliney’s first shift on his first day in his new job36 as the FAA’s National Operations Manager, boss of the agency’s command center.
Meanwhile, between about 9:23 and 9:28 a.m., American Flight 77 dropped from an altitude of 25,000 feet37 to about 7,000 feet as it continued on its undetected eastward path. By about 9:29 a.m., while controllers fruitlessly searched the Midwest, the Boeing 757 was almost on the East Coast, about thirty-eight miles west of the Pentagon, the physical and symbolic heart of the U.S. military, located a short hop across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
Hani Hanjour—or whoever was in the cockpit—disengaged the autopilot destination that he’d previously set to Reagan National Airport and took manual control of the plane.
As American Flight 77 approached the prohibited airspace of the nation’s capital, confusion about the plane spread further through the U.S. government.
At 9:31 a.m., an agent from the FBI office in Boston called the FAA seeking information on the planes that had hit the World Trade Center.
An FAA official told him: “We have two reports,38 preliminary information, ah, believe to be American Airlines Flight 77 and Flight 11, collided with World Trade Center. Also, a preliminary report, ah, United Airlines Flight 175 off radar. Ah, no further information.”
At 9:32 a.m., air traffic controllers at Dulles airport saw a green dot on their radar screens that no one expected, traveling eastbound at the surprisingly fast speed of about 500 miles per hour.
Among those who noticed the unidentified aircraft was Danielle O’Brien, the air traffic controller who for some reason had wished Flight 77’s pilots “good luck” when she handed them off an hour earlier. From its speed and how it turned and slashed across the sky, she and other controllers initially thought the object on their radar was a nimble military jet.39
O’Brien slid to her left and pointed it out to the controller next to her, her fiancé,40 Tom Howell, who recognized it as a threat. “Oh my God,”41 Howell said. He yelled to the room: “We’ve got a target headed right for the White House!”
A Dulles manager called the FAA’s control center and controllers at Reagan airport in Washington to warn them. Still no one from the FAA called NEADS or anyone else in the military’s air defense system. An FAA supervisor at Dulles, John Hendershot, used a dedicated phone line to alert the Secret Service of the incoming danger. He told the men and women who protect the president and the vice president: “We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft42 inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west.”
President Bush wasn’t in Washington, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in his White House office. Secret Service agents rushed in, lifted Cheney from his chair, and hustled him to a tunnel leading to an underground bunker beneath the White House called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The agents also told White House staffers to run from the building.
Simultaneously, Reagan airport officials sought urgent help identifying the mystery jet. They called the closest plane in the sky: a military cargo plane that had just taken off from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, fifteen miles from the District of Columbia. The FAA’s newly issued ban on takeoffs didn’t apply to military planes, and the cargo plane’s pilots hadn’t heard about it, anyway.
As the FAA tried to identify the plane approaching the White House, little more than ten minutes had passed since Major Kevin Nasypany speculated about using a Sidewinder missile “in the face” to stop terrorists from creating another large-scale disaster.
The F-16s from Langley were airborne by 9:30 a.m. with orders from NEADS to fly to Washington. But no one briefed them about exactly why they were scrambled. The pilots defaulted to an old Cold War plan and flew out to sea, to a training area known as Whiskey 386. The lead pilot, who’d heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center but knew nothing about hijackings, thought he and his two wingmen were supposed to defend the capital against Russian planes or cruise missiles.43
As the Langley F-16s took flight, headed the wrong way, a member of Nasypany’s team pressed the issue of how they’d respond if they encountered a hijacked passenger jet being readied for use as a weapon.
“Have you asked . . . the question what you’re gonna do if we actually find this guy?” wondered Major James Anderson. “Are we gonna shoot him down44 if they got passengers on board? Have they talked about that?”
At that moment, the man on whom shootdown authority rested stood before two hundred students, a handful of teachers, and a clutch of reporters in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida.
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.45
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. Titled “Bin Laden Determined46 to Strike in US,” the memo read in part: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’”
But there wasn’t a word about terrorism47 in Bush’s security briefing on the morning of September 11. Much of it focused instead on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
By 8:40 a.m., Bush’s motorcade had left the resort for the nine-mile drive to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. The president intended to use the school as a backdrop to promote his “No Child Left Behind” education policy with a press-friendly event: a reading lesson with a diverse class of second graders.
On his way into the school, Bush shook hands with teachers and students. Meanwhile, senior White House adviser Karl Rove answered a call from his assistant: a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Rove passed the information to the president but said he didn’t have details and didn’t know what type of plane. Three decades earlier, during the Vietnam era, Bush had served as a fighter pilot in the Texas National Guard. He’d later say that his first thought was pilot error involving a light airplane. Bush also would say he wondered, “How could the guy have gotten so off course48 [as] to hit the towers?”
Bush ducked away from the receiving line into a classroom. At 8:55 a.m., less than ten minutes after the first crash, he spoke on a secure phone line with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. A half hour had passed since the FAA first learned about the hijacking of Flight 11, but no one had immediately informed the White House, the nation’s national security agencies, or the Secret Service. Rice didn’t know much more than Bush’s other aides.
Bush told the school’s principal the situation, then walked to teacher Kay Daniels’s classroom. “Good to meet you all!” he said as he entered. “It’s really exciting for me to be here.” Bush smiled, clapped, and followed along as Daniels led her sixteen students through rapid-fire phonics exercises.
At about 9:05 a.m., two minutes after United Flight 175 struck the South Tower, White House chief of staff Andy Card hesitated a moment at the door to the classroom. He collected his thoughts, then walked to Bush’s side. Reporters watching from the back of the classroom perked up, knowing that no one would interrupt the president’s event unless something major happened. Card bent at the waist and whispered in Bush’s ear:
“A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”49
Bush’s eyes widened, and his expression slackened, a moment preserved for posterity by a photographer for The Associated Press. Card purposely stepped back50—he’d say later that he did so so that Bush couldn’t ask him a question with cameras and reporters capturing the president’s every move and word.
Bush remained silently seated in the classroom for roughly seven more minutes, a decision for which he would be harshly criticized as a deer in the headlights of history. He would explain his reaction as responsible leadership, calculated to project calm51 and prevent panic. As those minutes passed, his eyes darted left and right, his mouth turned down at the corners. Bush appeared to follow along as Daniels led her students through a story called “The Pet Goat,” about a girl who defends her ravenous goat, which by the story’s end becomes a hero.
Members of the White House press corps on the other side of the classroom began to receive emergency alerts on wireless pagers clipped to their belts or handbags. Standing among them, Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer held up a handwritten sign instructing the president: don’t say anything yet.
At 9:15 a.m., the school’s principal told the students to close their readers and place them under their chairs. “These are great readers,” Bush said. “Very impressive!”
The president stood and joined Card, Rove, and other top staffers in a secured classroom. There he spoke by phone with Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, while his staff arranged for what they expected would be a fast return to Washington. Secret Service agents wanted to hurry Bush out of the school. The president’s schedule had been publicized well in advance, and they feared that the event might be a target for a terrorist “decapitation” attack. That is, to kill the head of state.
Bush refused to leave—he first wanted to speak to the nation.
At 9:30 a.m., before television cameras and an audience of students, teachers, and reporters in the school’s media center, Bush delivered his first remarks about the attacks of September 11.
“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.
Unaware of the crisis, inside the cockpit of a military cargo plane flying over Washington, Lieutenant Colonel Steven O’Brien53 played tour guide, pointing out the capital’s buildings and monuments to his copilot, Major Robert Schumacher. Their unarmed plane was a lumbering gray four-propeller workhorse called a C-130, a model prized since the 1950s for delivering supplies and soldiers anywhere in the world. The plane’s call sign was Gofer 06.
After a cargo pickup in the Virgin Islands, O’Brien and his crew had spent the previous night at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland before returning home to Minnesota. They took flight about 9:30 a.m. without having heard about hijackings or crashes.
As Gofer 06 flew at an altitude of about 4,000 feet, a large silver passenger jet streaked past the cockpit windshield about four miles ahead of them, descending rapidly. At first, O’Brien and Schumacher thought the jet’s pilot was in trouble, struggling to keep his aircraft aloft. The hairs on the back of Schumacher’s neck stood up. He said a silent prayer: “God, just let them land safely.”54
Their radio came alive with the voice of a Reagan National Airport air traffic controller: “Do you see an airplane?”
That was an understatement, O’Brien answered. The passenger jet was so close to their C-130 it nearly filled their windshield. If Gofer 06 had taken off even a short time earlier,55 the two planes might have collided.
“Can you tell me what kind it is?” the controller asked.
O’Brien said it looked like a Boeing 757 or a 767. Its silver fuselage with a red stripe strongly suggested that it belonged to American Airlines.
The controller gave O’Brien an order he’d never heard in more than two decades of flying: follow that plane. He turned Gofer 06 and gave chase.
Although a civilian air traffic controller had just asked a military C-130 to follow American Flight 77 as it streaked over Washington, still no one at the FAA or any other government agency had informed the U.S. military that a plane that took off more than an hour earlier from Dulles had been hijacked.
Meanwhile, acting on mistaken information they’d been given by the FAA, Nasypany and his NEADS team remained focused on a futile search for the already crashed American Flight 11. Finally, that changed, but only by happenstance, and too late.
At 9:32 a.m., a NEADS technician called the FAA’s Washington Center to ask whether controllers there had seen any sign of American Flight 11.56 Both sides of the conversation ran amok with incomplete or incorrect information.
“There are three aircraft missing out of Boston,” 57 the NEADS technician said at one point, repeating the erroneous information about an extra plane that had prompted the search for the phantom American Flight 11. Soon after, she added incorrectly: “They thought that the American 11 was the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center with the United 175. However, American 11 is not the aircraft that crashed.”
American Flight 11 had in fact crashed into the North Tower roughly forty-five minutes earlier.
The NEADS military technician explained to the civilian Washington Center controller that she called because she “just wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“But again,” she added, “remember, nothing has been confirmed as far as with the aircraft that hit the World Trade Center. But the other one, we have its information, headed toward Washington.” She meant that Flight 11 was still airborne, on an unauthorized flight path to the capital.
After a pause, the Washington Center controller offered news of his own: “Okay. Now let me tell you this. I, I’ll, we’ve been looking. We also lost American 77.”
That bombshell remark came at 9:34 a.m., delivered as an afterthought in a conversation initiated by a NEADS technician about American Flight 11. It represented the first time Nasypany’s team or anyone else in the U.S. military, other than the cargo crew of Gofer 06, heard about a problem with American Flight 77. That, despite the fact that FAA controllers had been searching for the plane ever since the cockpit stopped communicating forty minutes earlier.
The news of another missing plane rocketed through the NEADS center. Trying to play catch-up, the NEADS technician quizzed the Washington Center controller for information about American 77’s origin, destination, aircraft type, last contact, and last known position.
As the conversation between NEADS and the Washington Center ended, from the cockpit of Gofer 06, Lieutenant Colonel Steven O’Brien reported to Reagan National Airport controllers that he had seen the mystery passenger jet make a 330-degree turn, flying at just two thousand feet over downtown Washington.
Meanwhile, Colin Scoggins of Boston Center told Nasypany’s NEADS team at 9:36 a.m. that an unknown plane was six miles from the White House, approaching some of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world.
That, and the earlier call with the Washington Center, prompted Nasypany to take an extraordinary step: he seized control of the airspace58 over Washington from the FAA, to clear a path for the F-16 fighters from Langley to intercept the intruder. Although the question remained unresolved whether the fighter pilots would be authorized to fire a missile at a passenger plane to prevent a potentially greater tragedy, Nasypany wanted them in a position59 where they might have a chance to protect the White House, the U.S. Capitol, or any other Washington-area target.
“We’re gonna turn and burn it—crank it up,” Nasypany ordered. “All right, here we go. . . . Take ’em and run ’em to the White House!”60
But Nasypany’s effort immediately collapsed.
“Where’s Langley at?” Nasypany asked. “Where are the fighters?”
The Langley F-16 fighters were nowhere in range. Unknown to Nasypany, they hadn’t flown the route he’d wanted, a direct path north to intercept the erroneously reported American Flight 11, which no longer existed. Just when they were needed most, when every second and every movement counted, the two Langley F-16s were about one hundred fifty miles away—the result of an incorrect flight plan generated by misunderstandings, a mistake on coordinates61 by a military air traffic controller, and an overall lack of information, communication, and coordination.
Still, with the Twin Towers burning and the capital under threat from an unknown aircraft, Nasypany wouldn’t quit. He wanted the fighters to fly supersonic, faster than the speed of sound, to Washington.
“I don’t care how many windows you break!” Nasypany yelled at 9:36 a.m.
A minute later, a NEADS tracking technician announced that he believed he’d spotted the hijacked plane on radar: “I got him! I got him!” the technician yelled. That meant NEADS might have coordinates to give to the fighters. But just as quickly, NEADS lost track of the plane. It didn’t matter—notice of the threat had come too late. Even if the fighter pilots had broken every window in every building en route to Washington, they wouldn’t have arrived in time.
American Flight 11 was long gone. And time had nearly run out for American Flight 77.
At that moment, Father Stephen McGraw62 was running late for a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington, D.C. Stressed, trying to make up for lost time, the slightly built Catholic priest had made matters worse by taking a wrong turn off the highway into a traffic jam. McGraw stewed in the motionless left lane of Route 27, alongside an expanse of lawn outside the Pentagon. He pressed both hands to his head and moaned aloud: “Oh God, I’m going to miss the graveside service.”63
Still nagging at McGraw’s conscience was an experience from earlier in the summer. Returning to his Virginia parish on a day off, flustered after missing a turn, he drove by without stopping as ambulance workers tended to a man with a bandaged head who’d been injured in a car crash. McGraw had been ordained only three months earlier, at age thirty-five, after giving up a career as a Justice Department lawyer to follow his calling. Immediately after passing the accident, he felt as though he’d failed to live up to his priestly duties to comfort the injured man. Afterward, in his room in the church rectory, McGraw had dropped to his knees, prayed for the man, and resolved before God to never again bypass someone in need.
Now, as he fretted in his car about missing the cemetery service, McGraw knew nothing of the hijackings or the attacks in New York. Suddenly, the air filled with a whirring, whooshing noise, as though he’d been dropped inside a blender. McGraw looked out the passenger window to see an airplane flash by, so low it clipped a light pole as it approached the Pentagon. From the passenger seat, he grabbed his purple satin stole, his green book of prayers for the sick and dying, and a vial of olive oil blessed by his bishop. McGraw jumped out and ran toward the Pentagon, abandoning his car in the traffic jam to fulfill his promise.
After steering American Flight 77 in a looping 330-degree turn, Hani Hanjour or another hijacker in the cockpit put the jet on a collision course with a five-sided, five-story, fortress-like symbol of American military power. He pushed the throttle to maximum power64 and reached a speed of roughly 530 miles per hour. He pointed the jet’s nose downward. Moving at about 780 feet per second, the Boeing 757 flew only a few feet above the ground, its wings momentarily level over a grassy field. A hundred feet from the building, its right wing struck a portable generator, triggering a small explosion of diesel fuel, and the right engine wiped out a chain-link fence and posts around the generator. The right wing rose, the left wing dipped. The left engine struck the ground almost simultaneously with the plane’s nose touching the Pentagon’s limestone-faced west wall just below the second floor.65
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.
Two passengers, Navy physicist William Caswell and Defense Department economist Bryan Jack, died in the building where they worked. Pilot Chic Burlingame had worked for years at the Pentagon as a Navy reserve officer, but his family would feel certain he didn’t die there. The Chic they knew would have fought to the death in the cockpit to save his passengers and crew before giving up the controls.66
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 terrorists silenced Barbara Olson’s fervent voice, robbing Ted Olson of her companionship and denying her followers her insights.
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.
From above, Gofer 06 pilot Steve O’Brien saw the scene through a haze of smoke and the memory of having witnessed a flight school classmate’s fatal crash. He provided the first confirmation to Reagan National Airport controllers about the plane he’d been asked to follow: “Looks like that aircraft crashed67 into the Pentagon, sir.”
Major Kevin Nasypany learned about American Flight 77’s fate from CNN, almost ten minutes68 after it happened. Watching the carnage on television, Nasypany cursed the confusion that had kept the Langley F-16s on the ground longer than he’d wanted and then sent them to a military airspace far from the action.
Nasypany and others could only speculate about what might have been different had the Langley fighters been launched when he first asked for them, at 9:07 a.m., fully a half hour before Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. Some top NEADS officers69 firmly believed that the fighters, if they had taken flight sooner and been given the correct coordinates, might have been able to intercept American Flight 77. They didn’t have authority to use weapons against the passenger plane, but if they couldn’t shoot it down, the NEADS officers believed, the fighters might have forced the plane to the ground.
When he learned of Flight 77’s loss and the damage at the Pentagon, Nasypany erupted in anger. “Goddammit!70 I can’t even protect my NCA!” he said, using a military acronym for the National Capital Area.
Nasypany turned back to the work at hand, directing the Langley F-16s to create a protective cover over Washington. “Talk to me71 about my Langley guys,” Nasypany ordered. “I want them over the NCA—now!” He planned to have the F-16s establish a combat air patrol, or CAP, over Washington, ready to intercept any potentially hostile plane, even though it still remained unknown whether they would have the authority to shoot down a hijacked civilian jet with hostages aboard.
As the Langley fighters belatedly moved toward Washington, unconfirmed reports of other hijacked planes continued to reach NEADS. One report involved another big Boeing 767, Delta Flight 1989, which had taken off from Boston destined for Las Vegas. Another concerned a plane from Canada supposedly headed directly toward Washington.
President Bush learned about the attack on the Pentagon on his ride to the airport,72 shortly after leaving the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. By 9:45 a.m., Bush was aboard Air Force One, where he asked the Secret Service about his family’s safety. Then he called Vice President Cheney, who several minutes earlier73 had reached a bench in the underground tunnel to the White House bunker where he could speak on a secure telephone.
“Sounds like we have a minor war74 going on here,” Bush told his vice president, according to notes an aide made of the call. “I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war. . . . Somebody’s going to pay.”
The attack on the Pentagon scuttled Bush’s initial plan to return to Washington, especially with reports of more hijacked planes headed toward the capital. While Bush and Cheney spoke by phone about where the president should go, Air Force One took off at 9:55 a.m. with no set destination.75 The pilot pointed the nose skyward, determined to get the plane as high as possible as fast as possible.
No one outside al-Qaeda knew how many more planes and targets might be part of the terrorists’ plot, and no one other than the plotters yet knew who was responsible, although speculation focused almost immediately on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. If there were more planes, Bush and Cheney had yet to discuss how far the military should go to stop them. Meanwhile, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who normally would receive orders regarding the use of force from the president and then pass them down the chain of command, hadn’t yet spoken with Bush or Cheney.
Instead, Rumsfeld had rushed to the parking lot of the Pentagon76 to help with rescue efforts.
At 9:42 a.m., five minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney had seen enough. Determined to prevent any potential hijacking plots not yet hatched, he issued a second unprecedented, nationwide edict.
“That’s it!” he cried. “I’m landing everyone!”77
Sliney ordered all FAA facilities nationwide to instruct every aircraft flying over the United States to land as quickly as possible at the nearest airport. He marched through the FAA command center and fielded questions from the forty-plus people on his staff, some of whom wondered if their building might be a target and whether the country was at war. Sliney had a direct answer: we’re safe, so let’s get to work.
“Regardless of destination!”78 Sliney shouted. “Let’s get them on the ground!”
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.