Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

CHAPTER 2

“HE’S NORDO”

American Airlines Flight 11

September 11, 2001

AMERICAN AIRLINES PILOT JOHN OGONOWSKI ROUSED HIMSELF BEFORE dawn on September 11, 2001, moving quietly in the dark to avoid waking his wife, Peg, or their three daughters. He slipped on his uniform and kissed Peg goodbye as she slept.

As the sun began its rise on that perfect late-summer morning, John stepped out the back door. Coffee would wait until he reached Boston’s Logan International Airport, forty-five minutes away. He climbed into his dirt-caked green Chevy pickup, with hay on the floor and a bumper sticker that read THERE’S NO FARMING WITHOUT FARMERS.

John drove a meandering route as he left the land he loved. He could see the plots he’d set aside for the Cambodian immigrants, plus five acres of ripening pumpkins and ten acres of fodder corn whose stalks would be sold as decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving. John steered down the long dirt driveway, through the white wooden gate that gave the farm its name. He passed the home of his uncle Al and tooted his horn in a ritual family greeting. It was nearly six o’clock.

Under sparkling blue skies, John drove southeast toward the airport, ready to take his seat in the cockpit and his place in a vast national air transport system that flew some 1.8 million passengers daily, aboard more than twenty-five thousand flights, to and from more than 563 U.S. airports.

He expected to be home before the weekend, for a family picnic.

AS JOHN OGONOWSKI neared the airport, Michael Woodward left his sleeping boyfriend at his apartment in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay neighborhood and caught an early train for the twenty-minute ride to Logan. More than six feet tall and 200-plus pounds, Michael had a gentle face and a razor wit. Thirty years old, bright and ambitious, he’d risen from ticket agent to flight service manager for American Airlines, a job in which he ensured that planes were properly catered, serviced, and equipped with a full complement of flight attendants.

A salty breeze from Boston Harbor greeted Michael when he exited the train at the airport station, but that was the last he expected to see of the outdoors until the end of a long day. At 6:45 a.m., dressed in a gray suit and a burgundy tie, Michael walked to his office in the bowels of the airport’s Terminal B, one level below the passenger gates. He wore a serious expression that revealed his discomfort.

Michael remained friends with many of the more than two hundred flight attendants he supervised, and now he had to scold one to get to work on time, keep her uniform blouse properly buttoned, and generally clean up her act or risk being fired. He called her into his office, took a deep breath, and delivered the reprimand. She accepted the criticism and Michael relaxed, confident that he had completed the worst part of his September 11 workday.

Outside Michael’s office, flight attendants milled around a no-frills lounge where airline employees grabbed coffee and signed in by computer before flights. Michael brightened when he saw Betty Ong, a fourteen-year veteran of American Airlines whose friends called her Bee, sitting at a desk in the lounge, enjoying a few minutes of quiet before work.

Tall and willowy, forty-five years old, with shoulder-length black hair, Betty had grown up the youngest of four children in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents ran a deli. Betty loved Chinese opera, carousel horses, Nat King Cole music, and collecting Beanie Babies; she also excelled at sports. Betty walked with a lively hop in her step and had a high-pitched laugh that brought joy to her friends. She ended calls: “I love you lots!” After countless flights together, she’d grown friendly with pilot John Ogonowski and his flight attendant wife, Peg, who often drove Betty home from Logan Airport to her townhouse in suburban Andover, Massachusetts, not far from the Ogonowskis’ farm. Single after a breakup, between flights Betty acted like a big sister to children who lived in her neighborhood and took elderly friends to doctors’ appointments. Betty had returned to Boston the previous day on a flight from San Jose, California. Now she was back at work, piling up extra trips before a Hawaiian vacation later in the week with her older sister, Cathie.

Michael scanned the room and saw Kathleen “Kathy” Nicosia, a green-eyed, no-nonsense senior flight attendant whom he’d taken to dinner recently in San Francisco. Kathy had spent thirty-two of her fifty-four years working the skies, and she’d developed a healthy skepticism about managers, a skepticism that somehow didn’t include Michael. He walked over and she gave him a hug. A whiff of her perfume lingered after Kathy and Betty headed upstairs to the passenger gates.

AROUND 7:15 A.M., on the tarmac outside the terminal at Gate 32, Logan Airport ground crew member Shawn Trotman raised his fuel nozzle and inserted it into an adapter underneath a wing of a wide-bodied Boeing 767. The silver plane had rolled into place a little more than an hour earlier, after an overnight flight from San Francisco. It stretched 180 feet long, with red, white, and blue stripes from nose to tail. The word “American” spanned the top of the first-class windows. Bold red and blue A’s, separated by a stylized blue eagle, adorned a flaglike vertical stabilizer on the tail.

The work done, Trotman snapped shut the fueling panel. The plane’s two enormous wing tanks sloshed with highly combustible Jet A fuel—essentially kerosene refined to burn more efficiently—for the six-hour flight across the country. Trotman had filled the wings with fuel weighing 76,400 pounds, about the same weight as a forty-foot fire truck.

As Trotman moved on to another plane, the ground crew finished loading luggage and delivering catering supplies. While they worked, John Ogonowski walked under the plane to inspect the landing gear, part of a pilot’s routine preflight check.

Meanwhile, inside the 767, flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney was upset. Blond and blue-eyed, thirty-five years old, Amy had recently returned to work after spending the summer at home with her two young children. This would be the first day she wouldn’t be on hand to guide her five-year-old daughter Anna onto the bus to kindergarten. Amy used her cellphone to call her husband, Mike, who comforted her by saying she’d have plenty of days ahead to see their kids off to school.

AMY SWEENEY, BETTY Ong, and Kathy Nicosia were three of the nine flight attendants, eight women and one man, who’d be working with Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr., a former Navy fighter pilot. They were the eleven crew members of American Airlines Flight 11, a daily nonstop flight to Los Angeles with a scheduled 7:45 a.m. departure.

Boarding moved smoothly, a process made easier by the wide-bodied plane’s two aisles between seats and a light load of passengers. The youngest passenger through the cabin door was twenty-year-old Candace Lee Williams of Danbury, Connecticut, a Northeastern University student and aspiring stockbroker en route to visit her college roommate in California. The oldest was eighty-five-year-old Robert Norton, a retiree from Lubec, Maine, heading west with his wife, Jacqueline, to attend her son’s wedding.

Daniel Lee from Van Nuys, California, a roadie for the Backstreet Boys, had slipped away from the pop group’s tour and bought a ticket on Flight 11 so he could be home for the birth of his second child. Cora Hidalgo Holland of Sudbury, Massachusetts, needed to interview health aides for her elderly mother in San Bernardino, California. Actress and photographer Berry Berenson, widow of the actor Anthony Perkins, was headed home to Los Angeles after a vacation on Cape Cod.

Also on board was seventy-year-old electronics consultant Alexander Filipov of Concord, Massachusetts, a gregarious, insatiably curious father of three. He knew how to say “Do you like Chinese food?” in more than a dozen languages, which enabled Filipov to strike up conversations with foreigners on business trips like this one. Nearby, missing his wife, Prasanna, after a three-week work trip, Los Angeles computer technician Pendyala “Vamsi” Vamsikrishna called home and left a message saying he’d be there for lunch.

As boarding continued, thirty-year-old Tara Creamer walked down the aisle and slid into window seat 33J. Tara was a woman who didn’t rattle easily. Years earlier, on a first date, on Valentine’s Day no less, a fellow college student took her to dinner at a red sauce Italian dive called Spaghetti Freddy’s, then to the cannibal-versus-serial-killer movie The Silence of the Lambs. She married him.

Tara had met John Creamer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when she was a vivacious, curly-haired brunette sophomore. John was a shy, blue-eyed football lineman for the UMass Minutemen, named for the Revolutionary War patriots. Tara lived on a dorm floor near some of John’s friends, so he hung around her hallway long enough for her to notice him. After that first date of pasta and fava beans, they were a couple.

Both twenty-three when they wed, Tara and John had scraped together a down payment for a sweet yellow Cape Cod–style house with a screened porch in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where John’s parents lived. They renovated it themselves after long days of work. After one seemingly endless paint-and-wallpaper binge, John lost patience. While he stewed, Tara, several months pregnant, calmly went to their unfinished basement, carrying a wide brush dripping white paint. On a rough gray wall, she painted “Tara

Their son, Colin, arrived in 1997, followed three years later by a daughter, Nora. A fashion merchandising major in college, Tara became a planning manager at TJX Companies in Framingham, Massachusetts, parent firm of the big-box retailer T.J.Maxx. She sang to Colin and Nora on the way to work and spent lunch hours with them in an onsite company daycare center. Tara meticulously updated their milestone books, recording first crawls and first steps, first teeth and first words. When a company supervisor urged Tara to get into the habit of working late, Tara declined. Time with her children came first.

Tara and John never traveled together by air in the years after Colin’s birth. She worried about leaving him, and then both Colin and Nora, in the event of a crash. Tara’s mother died of cancer in 1995, and the loss still ached. But in May 2001, one of John’s closest friends invited them to his wedding in Florida. Before the trip, Tara went on a planning spree, arranging insurance, guardians, and family finances, just in case. She also took the opportunity to explain the concept of death to Colin. He had only one grandmother, Tara told him, because the other one, her mother, was an angel in heaven, looking after him. Colin seemed to understand, but Tara couldn’t be sure.

By late summer 2001, Nora had celebrated her first birthday, and Tara was ready to resume traveling for work. On this trip, Tara had the option of staying in California through the weekend to see a close friend, but she scheduled a red-eye return so she’d be home Friday morning. Packed and ready the night before Flight 11, Tara completed one last task before bed. Fulfilling her self-appointed role as family planning manager, she typed a detailed memo for John. Titled “Normal Daily Schedule,” it was a mother’s guide to caring for their children. It began: “Wake Colin up around 7–7:15. Let him watch a little cartoons (Channel 52). Nora—if she is not up by 7:30—wake her up. Just change her and give her milk in a sippy cup!”

In the seat next to Tara was auburn-haired Neilie Anne Heffernan Casey of Wellesley, Massachusetts, also a TJX Companies planning manager. Two days earlier, Neilie and her husband, Mike, had run a 5K race to raise money for breast cancer research. They ran pushing a stroller with their six-month-old daughter, Riley. In nearby rows were five of their TJX colleagues, also headed to California on business: Christine Barbuto, Linda George, Lisa Fenn Gordenstein, Robin Kaplan, and Susan MacKay.

Susan’s husband, Doug, was an FAA air traffic controller. He’d switched his schedule to an early shift that day so he could attend a nighttime school event for their eight-year-old daughter and make dinner for their thirteen-year-old son. When he got to work, Doug planned to radio American Flight 11’s cockpit to ask Captain John Ogonowski to surprise Susan by saying hi for him.

IN A WIDE leather seat in the first row of first class sat financier David Retik of Needham, Massachusetts, a practical-joking, fly-fishing family man whose wife, Susan, was seven months pregnant with their third child. His colleagues considered David a rare bird: a venture capitalist whom everyone liked. On his drive to the airport, David had spotted a familiar car on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He sped up, pulled alongside, and waved to his surprised father, a doctor on his way to work.

Next to David sat travel industry consultant Richard Ross, whose family in Newton, Massachusetts, counted on him to spontaneously break into Sinatra songs; to raise money for brain cancer research; and to be chronically late. He held true to form this morning, as the last passenger to arrive for Flight 11. A flustered Richard told a gate agent that terrible traffic had made this the worst day of his life. Another agent took pity and upgraded him from business to first class.

One row behind David and Richard sat retired ballet dancer and philanthropist Sonia Puopolo of Dover, Massachusetts, looking elegant with a camel-colored pashmina scarf draped over her blazer. Her luggage bulged with baby pictures and childhood mementos for a visit to her Los Angeles-based son Mark Anthony, whom she called Mookie. A wealthy patron of the arts and Democratic Party politicians, Sonia wore a distinctive wedding band with diamonds embedded in golden columns. The bejeweled shafts looked like the support pillars of a landmark building in miniature.

Nineteen passengers settled into business class, including Paige Farley-Hackel, of Newton, Massachusetts, in window seat 7A. A glamorous spiritual adviser and budding radio host, every night Paige left a five-item “gratitude list” for her husband, Allan, with items that ranged from “justice” to “skinny dipping” to “our happy marriage” to “airplanes.” Paige’s appreciation lists also included the names Ruth and Juliana: her closest friend, Ruth Clifford McCourt, and Ruth’s four-year-old daughter, Juliana, who was Paige’s goddaughter. Paige and Ruth had met years earlier, at a day spa Ruth owned before her marriage, and they considered each other kindred spirits. That morning, a driver delivered all three to Logan Airport after a night in Paige and Allan’s home. Paige, Ruth, and Juliana had planned the trip to California together, but Ruth had mileage points for free tickets on United Airlines. She and Juliana booked a separate flight on United that left Boston at nearly the same time as American Flight 11. When both planes landed in Los Angeles, they planned to drive together to La Jolla for several days at the Center for Well Being, run by Deepak Chopra. Then they intended to reward Juliana with a trip to Disneyland before flying back to Boston.

Behind Paige, bound for home in Pasadena, California, sat humanitarian Lynn Angell and her husband of thirty years, David Angell. David was an award-winning television creator and executive producer of the sitcom Frasier who’d won two Emmys as a writer for Cheers. (By coincidence, in an episode David cowrote for Frasier, a stranger left a telephone message for the title character saying that she’d soon arrive on “American Flight 11.”)

Behind the Angells, in seat 9B, sat a young man with thinning hair in Nike sneakers, jeans, and a green T-shirt who was a star of the new computer age. Daniel Lewin of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had built a business and a fortune before his thirtieth birthday by coinventing a way for the Internet to handle enormous spikes in traffic. But at the moment, Daniel was mired in a rough patch. He was flying west to a computer conference and to sign a $400 million deal he hoped would save his company, Akamai Technologies. Daniel had already seen his formerly billion-dollar fortune plummet as Akamai’s stock fell to about three dollars a share, down from a hundred times that price two years earlier. His brilliant math mind notwithstanding, Daniel defied computer nerd stereotypes: the broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding Internet visionary had won the weightlifting title Mr. Teenage Israel and spent four years as a commando in the Israeli military.

FLIGHT 11 ALSO carried five passengers from the Middle East with no plans to reach Los Angeles. Two were Egypt-born Mohamed Atta and Saudi Arabian native Abdulaziz al-Omari, who had taken that curiously roundabout route to Flight 11. On the evening of September 10 they had driven a rented car from Boston to a Comfort Inn motel in Portland, Maine. There they visited a Pizza Hut, a Walmart, a gas station, and two ATM machines. Before dawn on September 11, they drove to the Portland International Jetport for a US Airways commuter flight back to Boston.

It was something of a mystery why Atta and Omari went to Portland only to fly back to Boston the morning of September 11. One possibility was that they thought they’d seem less suspicious that way than if they drove to Logan Airport and arrived there at the same time as a large group of other Middle Eastern men. It’s also possible that they expected to be subject to less stringent security screening at a smaller airport in Maine.

Once at the Portland airport, Atta checked two suitcases: his black rolling Travelpro and a green rolling bag that apparently belonged to Omari. The green suitcase contained innocuous items including Omari’s Saudi passport and his checkbook, an Arabic-to-English dictionary, three English grammar books, a handkerchief, a twenty-dollar bill, Brylcreem antidandruff hair treatment, and a bottle of perfume.

At the Portland ticket counter, Atta asked an agent for his boarding pass for their next flight, departing Boston: American Flight 11. The agent told Atta he’d have to check in a second time when he reached Logan. Atta clenched his jaw and appeared on the verge of anger. He told the agent that he’d been assured he’d have “one-step check-in.” The agent didn’t budge or rise to Atta’s hostility. He simply told Atta that he’d better hurry if he didn’t want to miss the flight. Although Atta still looked cross, he and Omari left the ticket counter for the Portland airport’s security checkpoint.

At 5:45 a.m., Atta and Omari walked without incident through the metal detector, which was calibrated to detect the amount of metal in a gun or a large knife. Their black carry-on shoulder bags traveled down the moving belt and passed cleanly through the X-ray machine. Omari also carried a smaller black case that looked like a camera bag, which also didn’t raise alarms. Atta wore a stern expression and clothes that resembled a pilot’s uniform: dark blue collared shirt and dark pants. Omari wore a cream-colored shirt and khaki pants. After clearing security, Atta and Omari sat in the last row of the small commuter jet for the short flight to Boston.

Meanwhile, Atta’s checked bags were selected for added security screening, mainly to ensure that they didn’t contain explosives. The selection was made by a program implemented in 1997 called the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, which used an algorithm of classified factors, weighted by a computerized formula. The system also selected some passengers on each flight at random, to minimize complaints about discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin and to prevent terrorists from learning ways to avoid being chosen. The very design of the system, which targeted only passengers who checked bags, reflected the Federal Aviation Administration’s woefully mistaken belief in the summer of 2001 that hijackings were a thing of the past and that sabotage, in the form of a bomb sneaked onto a plane in the luggage of a passenger who didn’t board, represented the greatest threat to air travel. It’s unclear what led the FAA to that conclusion, especially because sixty-four hijackings had occurred worldwide between 1996 and 2001 versus only three cases of sabotage.

The Portland jetport didn’t have explosive detection equipment, and the bags weren’t opened and searched. Under FAA security rules, the only requirement was that the bags be held off the plane until the person who had checked them boarded. After Atta boarded, the ground crew tossed his checked suitcases into the small plane’s luggage compartment.

Under previous, stricter airport security rules, abandoned by the FAA several years earlier, passengers whose bags were selected for explosive screening would also undergo a body pat-down and a thorough search of their carry-on bags. But those measures took time, and the FAA had come under harsh criticism for long airport lines, which led to costly and frustrating delays and declines in on-time arrivals. As a result, those pat-down and bag search rules were eliminated. No one patted down Atta or Omari or searched their carry-on bags.

It’s unclear what effect those added security measures might have had on Atta and Omari’s plans. During the two previous months, Atta had purchased two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multitool with a short knife. During his trip to Spain earlier in the summer, Atta reported to his al-Qaeda contact that he and two fellow pilot trainees, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had been able to carry box cutters onto planes during their test flights. It’s unknown whether Atta or Omari carried those or other weapons through security in Portland or Boston on September 11, but even if they had, it might not have mattered to ground screeners. Federal rules in place in the summer of 2001 allowed airline passengers to carry knives with blades shorter than four inches. Although security screeners had discretion to confiscate short-bladed knives using “common sense,” government studies showed persistent gaps in the performance of low-wage human screeners. They worked for the airlines and consequently were encouraged to keep security lines short and fast-moving. Screeners were supposed to conduct “random and continuous” checks of carry-on bags, but in practice that rarely happened.