Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

The thirty-seven passengers on Flight 93 would be cared for by CeeCee Lyles and four others: chief flight attendant Deborah Welsh, who loved exotic places and donated extra airline meals to homeless people in her Manhattan neighborhood; Lorraine Bay, an easygoing veteran of thirty-seven years in the sky who mentored younger flight attendants; Sandra Bradshaw, who’d cut back on her schedule to spend more time with her two toddlers, her stepdaughter, and her husband, Phil, a pilot for US Airways; and Wanda Green, who served as a deacon in her church, was a single mother to her daughter and son, and nearly thirty years earlier had become one of United’s first African American flight attendants.

Pilot Jason Dahl learned to fly at thirteen and rose swiftly at United to become a “standards” pilot who trained and tested his fellow pilots. When his son Matt’s sixth-grade class went to Washington, D.C., Jason arranged to fly the plane, to make sure they arrived safely. Whenever he flew, Jason carried a small box of rocks, a treasured keepsake from Matt. Jason planned to be home in Colorado on Friday for his wedding anniversary. He had a cascade of surprises planned for his wife, Sandy, a United flight attendant, starting with a baby grand piano programmed with their wedding song. He’d also arranged a manicure, a pedicure, and massage; after that, he planned to prepare a gourmet dinner for Sandy and sixteen of their friends. Then they’d fly to London.

Jason had never flown with his copilot, LeRoy Homer Jr., but they were cut from the same cloth. LeRoy had filled his boyhood bedroom with model planes and started flying lessons at fifteen. He had graduated from the Air Force Academy, served in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, and flown humanitarian missions in Somalia. Thirty-six, soft-spoken and charming, LeRoy had served as a major in the U.S. Air Force Reserves. He traveled regularly with his wife, Melodie, a nurse he’d met through mutual friends, but they’d scaled back their adventures since the birth of their daughter, Laurel, eleven months earlier. Inscribed inside his wedding band was part of a Bible verse on life’s blessings: faith, hope, and love. The inscription was the next line, “And the greatest of these is love.”

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

Ziad Jarrah, the onetime Lebanese disco habitué who became part of Atta’s extremist Hamburg crew and trained as a pilot, sat in seat 1B, closest to the cockpit.

Before boarding the plane, Jarrah made five telephone calls to Lebanon, one to France, and one to his girlfriend, Aysel Sengün, in Germany, to whom he’d sent a farewell letter and a package of mementos a day earlier. She was in the hospital after having her tonsils removed. The connection was clear, the conversation banal. Sengün heard no noises in the background, and she detected nothing strange or suspicious about the call. He asked how she was doing, then told her, “I love you.”

Sengün asked, “What’s up?” Jarrah said “I love you” again, then hung up.

Ahmed al-Haznawi sat in the last row of first class, in seat 6B, directly behind glassware importer and consultant Mickey Rothenberg. Saeed al-Ghamdi and Ahmed al-Nami sat in 3D and 3C. At least one of the four men possessed the terrorist instruction sheet that began with “The Last Night,” tucked into either his carry-on or his checked luggage. Among the commands for the last phase, once they boarded the plane, were the following:

Pray that you and all your brothers will conquer, win, and hit the target without fear. Ask Allah to bless you with martyrdom, and welcome it with planning, patience, and care… .

When the storming begins, strike like heroes who are determined not to return to this world. Glorify [Allah—that is, cry “Allah is Great”], because this cry will strike terror in the hearts of the infidels. He said, “Strike above the necks. Strike all mortals.” And know that paradise has been adorned for you with the sweetest things. The nymphs, wearing their finest, are calling out to you, “Come hither, followers of Allah!”

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

Waiting in vain that day at the Orlando airport was Mohamed Atta.

AT 8:00 A.M., Flight 93’s scheduled departure time, the 757 pushed back from the Newark gate, but it didn’t get far. It fell into a tarmac conga line with perhaps fifteen other planes, stopping and starting, slowly taxiing toward the runway. Passengers in first class drank juice, while those in coach went thirsty. Ten, twenty, forty minutes crawled past.

A few seconds before 8:42 a.m., pilots Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. heard the command from the tower: “United Ninety-Three … cleared for takeoff.”

Nearly a half hour had elapsed since the start of the hijacking of American Flight 11. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney had already called American Airlines offices in North Carolina and Boston and had provided information about the hijackers’ identities and tactics. Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS had been notified about Flight 11 five minutes earlier. The F-15s at Otis Air Force Base had been ordered to battle stations less than a minute before. The pilots of United Flight 175 had just notified air traffic control about a strange radio transmission they had heard from Flight 11.

At the World Trade Center in New York, a businessman from New Jersey named Ron Clifford straightened his yellow tie and pushed through the revolving doors leading to the lobby of the North Tower. If United Flight 93’s runway delay had lasted a little longer, the pilots, flight attendants, and passengers aboard that plane might have seen American Airlines Flight 11 zooming through cloudless blue skies toward the very tower, only fourteen miles to the northeast, where Ron awaited what he thought would be the most important meeting of his career.

It’s also possible that if Flight 93 had been delayed a bit longer, it would have been caught in a “ground stop” and would never have taken off at all.

AS UNITED FLIGHT 93 took flight and headed west, the men and women on board were in a kind of suspended animation, unaware that the world had already changed.

At 8:52 a.m., ten minutes after Flight 93 became airborne, a male flight attendant aboard United Flight 175 called the airline’s maintenance center to report the murder of both pilots, the stabbing of a flight attendant, and his belief that hijackers were flying the plane. Ten minutes passed, then a maintenance supervisor called United’s operations center in Chicago to report the hijacking of Flight 175. After initial confusion about whether the report actually involved American Flight 11, United’s managers spread word up their chain of command to United’s chief operating officer, Andy Studdert, and the company’s chief executive, James Goodwin. It took another thirty minutes to activate a crisis center at United’s Chicago headquarters.

Beginning at 9:03 a.m., several United flight dispatchers used the cockpit email system called ACARS to inform pilots that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. But those messages didn’t include specifics about hijackings, warnings to enhance cockpit security, or suggestions about other precautions.

At 9:08 a.m., United Airlines flight dispatchers based at the company’s operations headquarters in Chicago sent messages to transcontinental planes waiting to take off, informing crew that a ground stop had been placed on commercial flights at airports around New York.

Still no one sent word to Flight 93 or other vulnerable flights already in the air.

By 9:15 a.m., as the Twin Towers burned, Flight 93 had spent more than ten minutes at its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Flight attendants would have begun cabin service. Pilots Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. engaged the 757’s autopilot as they flew west over Pennsylvania. All seemed normal.

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

During fourteen routine communications from FAA ground controllers in the first minutes of Flight 93’s journey, no one mentioned to Jason Dahl or LeRoy Homer Jr. the crisis affecting at least three other westbound transcontinental flights, the fighter jets patrolling the sky over New York City, or the possibility that other commercial flights might be victimized.

Then, almost simultaneously, worry struck two individuals on the ground who had personal connections to the pilots of Flight 93. Both tried to reach the men in the cockpit.

MELODIE HOMER HEARD her alarm early that morning, then fell back asleep. As always when he flew, her husband, LeRoy, had laid out his uniform the night before, with his epaulets and ID in his pockets, so he could dress silently in the bathroom without waking her. Before he left for the ninety-minute drive from their southern New Jersey home to the Newark airport, LeRoy whispered that he was leaving. He said he’d call when he landed and that he loved her.

Later that morning, after dropping off their infant daughter at a neighbor’s house, Melodie returned home and turned on the television as she made breakfast. She watched, stunned, as a plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As her mind reeled, through her shock Melodie vaguely heard a newscaster say something about a possible problem with air traffic control. She grabbed a sheet of paper from the refrigerator with LeRoy’s flight information and called the United Airlines flight operations office at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, which handled all New York–area flights for the airline. She told a receptionist that LeRoy was the first officer on Flight 93, and that she worried whether he was all right. After a short hold, the receptionist returned and assured her, “I promise you, everything is okay.”

Melodie sobbed with relief. The receptionist thoughtfully asked if she wanted to send LeRoy a message through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS. Melodie took several deep breaths. Her voice cracking, she asked that the message to her husband read, “Just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

As sent by Tara Campbell, a United flight operations service representative, the message read: “LeRoy, Melody [sic] wants to make sure you are O.K.! Send me back a message.”

Melodie’s message reached Flight 93 at 9:22 a.m., the same time as either Jason or LeRoy casually complained about the headwinds to an air traffic controller.

ACARS messages generally arrive in the cockpit in one of two ways: either an indicator light flashes MSG, to alert pilots to a digital message on their screens, or a hard copy automatically prints out at a console between the pilots’ seats. Airline dispatchers can also alert pilots with a bell that chimes when an electronic ACARS message arrives. Campbell had the ability only to send Melodie’s message to the Flight 93 cockpit printer.

Personal messages were unusual on the ACARS system, yet despite the request that he reply, LeRoy didn’t do so. It’s possible that neither he nor Jason noticed the message, as they carried out routine duties. When she didn’t hear back, Tara Campbell sent Melodie’s message to the cockpit printer a second time, and then a third. There was still no response.

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

While she waited, Melodie held tight to the receptionist’s promise that “everything is okay.”

AT NEARLY THE same time, without direction from airline officials, the FAA, or anyone else, one midlevel United Airlines employee felt stirred by the same cautious impulse that seized Melodie Homer.

At sixty-two, balding and ruddy-cheeked, a hobby sailor in his free time, Ed Ballinger had started working for United Airlines in 1958 as a teenage weather clerk. Forty-three years later, he’d risen to transcontinental dispatcher in the airline’s Chicago operations headquarters. Ballinger wasn’t scheduled to work September 11, but he owed his employer a day, so he arrived at eight o’clock Eastern time and began his shift.

Ballinger’s job at United called for him to monitor the progress of flights assigned to him, to inform pilots of safety information, and to cancel or redirect flights that he and the pilots believed couldn’t operate without undue risk. He based his decisions on a company-wide priority list called the Rule of Five: Safety, Service, Profitability, Integrity, and Responsibility to the Passenger.

When he arrived at work, Ballinger harked back to his first job at United and took note of the perfect weather across the United States for the sixteen flights he’d track. Two of those were United 175 from Boston and United 93 from Newark.

Unlike FAA air traffic controllers, Ballinger normally didn’t use radar to track his flights; he followed their progress with a computer system that anticipated where a plane presumably would be along its route based on its flight plan. He focused much of his time on reviewing preflight plans such as fuel load and flight path before approving takeoffs, while keeping track of real and potential delays. Once flights were in the air, United pilots primarily communicated with FAA controllers. Ballinger and other dispatchers couldn’t monitor radio calls between flights and the FAA, so to a large degree he remained in the dark, too.

Sometimes even Ballinger’s fellow United Airlines employees weren’t much help, either. When a flight attendant aboard Flight 175, believed to be Robert Fangman, reported the plane’s hijacking to the United maintenance center in San Francisco, roughly ten minutes passed before that information reached Ballinger in Chicago. Immediately, Ballinger sent a carefully worded, purposely vague ACARS message to the United Flight 175 cockpit: “How is the ride. Any thing [sic] dispatch can do for you.”

If Flight 175 pilots Victor Saracini and Michael Horrocks had been at the controls under duress from hijackers, they might have signaled trouble, perhaps by using the hijack code word “trip.” But based on the telephone calls from United 175’s passengers and crew, the pilots almost certainly were already dead. Either way, they would soon be. Ballinger sent that message at 9:03 a.m., at almost the precise moment that Flight 175 plowed into the South Tower.

Five minutes later, Ballinger learned about the ground stop around New York City, so he sent messages to a half dozen United planes at New York–area airports, telling them to stay put.

As information churned around United’s headquarters, Ballinger pieced together what he knew: two planes had hit the World Trade Center; Flight 175 had been hijacked; and the FAA had ordered a ground stop. The first priority on United’s Rule of Five rang clear in his mind: safety. He needed to spread the word, by alerting “his” pilots to the violent cockpit takeover tactics hijackers had used aboard Flight 175.

At 9:19 a.m., Ballinger hurriedly began to send ACARS messages to his flights, one after another, first to planes that hadn’t yet taken off, and then in order of departure time: “Beware any cockpit introusion [sic]. Two aircraft in NY, hit Trade C[e]nter Builds.” Ballinger sent the message in batches, to several flights at a time. One message went to Flight 175, which had crashed twenty minutes earlier. In the heat of the moment, Ballinger sent the message despite already knowing that Flight 175 had been hijacked; he didn’t yet know that it was the plane that had hit the South Tower.

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

Shortly before he sent the warning to Flight 93, Ballinger received a happy-go-lucky ACARS message from Captain Jason Dahl: “Good morning … Nice clb [climb] outta EWR [Newark Airport].” Jason commented about the sights from the cockpit and the weather, then signed off with his initial, J.

After Ballinger began notifying his flights to guard their cockpits, United’s air traffic control coordinator sent his own message of warning to the airline’s dispatchers: “There may be [additional] hijackings in progress. You may want to advise your [flights] to stay on alert and shut down all cockpit access [inflight].” Ballinger didn’t notice the message; he was already too busy contacting his flights.

While Ballinger progressed through his list, Melodie Homer’s ACARS message reached the Flight 93 cockpit first. One minute later, at 9:23 a.m., Ballinger sent Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. his cautionary message to “beware.”

Less than a minute later, Ballinger and other dispatchers received word from United’s chief operating officer, Andy Studdert, that “Flt 175–11 [denoting the date] BOS/LAX has been involved in an accident at New York.”

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

One minute later, at 9:26 a.m., Ed Ballinger’s intrusion warning registered with the pilots of Flight 93. Jason Dahl’s chatty messaging tone changed. He wrote a hasty, misspelled ACARS reply: “Ed cofirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”

In a stressful atmosphere, it wouldn’t have been hard to overlook the “plz” in Jason Dahl’s reply and focus instead on the misspelled word “confirm.” That was especially true for Ballinger, as he kept track of fifteen flights after having just learned from one of United’s top officials that the sixteenth plane on his roster, United Flight 175, had crashed in New York. Without the word “plz,” the response from Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl could easily read as a simple acknowledgment of a message received—“Ed cofirm latest mssg”—as opposed to a worried request for more information.

Ballinger didn’t immediately reply to Flight 93. In the meantime, at 9:27 a.m., the pilots responded to a routine radio call from a Cleveland air traffic controller, who told them to watch for another plane twelve miles away and two thousand feet above them.

“Negative contact,” Jason Dahl replied. “We’re looking.”

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

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