Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

Gaps in airport security went deeper than screening rules and personnel. For instance, once a would-be hijacker passed the security checkpoint, he had every reason to think he was in the clear, with no worries about being confronted on a domestic flight by an armed air marshal. In 2001, the FAA employed only thirty-three such marshals, a sharp drop from the 1970s, and they were assigned exclusively to international flights considered to be high risk. That was the case despite a statement published by the FAA just eight weeks before September 11 in the Federal Register: “Terrorism can occur anytime, anywhere in the United States. Members of foreign terrorist groups, representatives from state sponsors of terrorism and radical fundamentalist elements from many nations are present in the United States. Thus, an increasing threat to civil aviation from both foreign sources and potential domestic ones exists and needs to be prevented and countered.”

THE US AIRWAYS flight from Portland landed in Boston at 6:45 a.m., leaving Atta and Omari plenty of time to catch American Flight 11 to Los Angeles, departing from Terminal B. They passed through security screening at Logan Airport, again without incident. Within minutes of arriving in Boston, Atta received a call on his cellphone from a pay phone in Logan’s nearby Terminal C, which served planes from United Airlines, among others. The caller was a key collaborator in Atta’s deadly plan.

The two men waited at Gate 32 with other passengers, but before boarding Flight 11, Atta had a strange interaction. First Officer Lynn Howland had just arrived in Boston after copiloting the red-eye flight from San Francisco on the plane that would be redesignated American Flight 11. As she walked off the 767 and entered the passenger lounge, a man she didn’t know approached her and asked if she’d be flying the plane back across the country. Based on his clothing, he looked like a pilot hoping to catch a ride to Los Angeles on an available jump seat.

“No, I just brought the aircraft in,” Howland told him.

The man abruptly turned his back and walked away. Later she identified him as Mohamed Atta.

As he boarded Flight 11, Atta asked a gate agent whether the two bags he’d checked earlier in Portland had been loaded onto the plane. Atta had reason for concern about his suitcase, especially if someone familiar with Arabic decided to search it prior to Flight 11’s takeoff. Inside his black rolling Travelpro bag was the handwritten instruction letter about how to prepare spiritually and logistically to hijack a plane. Even without knowledge of Arabic, a sharp screener might have grown suspicious when he or she noticed the videotaped lessons on flying Boeing jets, the other pilot gear, the folding knife, and the canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. To track down Atta’s bags, the gate agent called Flight 11’s ground crew chief, Donald Bennett. He reported that the two bags had arrived, but too late. His crew had already loaded and locked the big jet’s luggage compartment, and the airline’s desire for on-time departures prohibited reopening it so close to takeoff. Because the bags had previously passed through security, no one had reason to inspect them just because they arrived late. Atta and Omari’s bags got new tags, for a later flight to Los Angeles.

At 7:39 a.m., Atta and Omari stepped aboard and found seats 8D and 8G, the middle pair of Flight 11’s two-two-two business cabin seat configuration.

Already seated were Saudi Arabian brothers Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, in seats 2A and 2B, in the first row of first class. The plane didn’t have a Row 1, so those seats placed them directly behind the cockpit. Their checked bags were selected for explosives screening at Logan, just as Atta’s and Omari’s had been in Portland. No explosives were found, and the bags were loaded aboard Flight 11. Under the new FAA rules, just like Atta and Omari, neither Shehri brother had to undergo an added personal screening such as a pat-down or carry-on search for weapons or contraband.

The fifth member of their group, Saudi native Satam al-Suqami, didn’t undergo added screening, either. Shortly after Atta and Omari boarded, Suqami made his way to seat 10B, on an aisle in business class.

The five men had chosen their seats aboard Flight 11 in a way that gave them access to the aisles and placed all of them close to the cockpit. By chance, Suqami’s seat in business class put him directly behind tech entrepreneur and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin.

FLIGHT 11 HAD a capacity of 158 passengers, but as the crew prepared for takeoff, only 81 seats were filled: 9 passengers in first class, 19 in business class, and 53 in coach.

Shortly before takeoff, American Airlines flight service manager Michael Woodward walked aboard for a final check.

In first class he found Karen Martin, the Number One, or head flight attendant, who was known for running an especially tight ship. Tall and blond, forty years old and fiercely competitive, Karen was described by friends as “Type A-plus.” Nearby stood thirty-eight-year-old Barbara “Bobbi” Arestegui, the Number Five attendant, petite and patient, known for her ability to calm even the most difficult passenger.

Michael asked if they were ready to go.

“Yep, everything’s fine,” Karen Martin said. Michael spotted his friend Kathy Nicosia, the Number Two attendant, and waved.

Before he left, Michael scanned down the aisle, almost out of habit, to see if the attendants had closed all the overhead bins. As he looked through the business section, Michael locked eyes with the passenger in seat 8D. A chill passed through him, a queasy gut feeling he couldn’t quite place and couldn’t shake. Something about Mohamed Atta’s brooding look seemed wrong. But the flight was already behind schedule, and Michael wouldn’t challenge a passenger simply for glaring at him. He turned and stepped off Flight 11, and a gate agent closed the door behind him.

Buttoned up and ready to go, crew and passengers aboard Flight 11 began the usual drill: seats upright, belts fastened, tray tables secured into place, cellphones switched off. Flight attendants buckled into jump seats. Its wings loaded with fuel, the Boeing 767 rolled back from Gate 32. Inside their locked cockpit, Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr. taxied the silver jet away from the terminal.

Cleared for takeoff, they turned onto Logan’s Runway 4R and checked the wind speed and air traffic. They took flight at 7:59 a.m., becoming one of the roughly forty-five hundred passenger and general aviation planes that would be airborne all across the United States by late morning.

Moments after takeoff, the pilots made a U-turn over Boston Harbor and pointed the plane west, flying through clear skies several miles above the wide asphalt ribbon of the Massachusetts Turnpike, headed toward the New York border.

DURING THE FIRST fourteen minutes of Flight 11, pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness followed instructions from an FAA air traffic controller on the ground and eased the 767 up to 26,000 feet, just under its initial cruising altitude of 29,000 feet. They spoke nineteen times with air traffic control during the first minutes of the flight, all brief, routine exchanges, automatically recorded on the ground, mostly polite hellos and instructions about headings and altitude.

The smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafted through the cabin as flight attendants waited for the pilots to switch off the Fasten Seatbelt signs. First-class passengers would soon enjoy “silver service,” provided by Karen Martin and Bobbi Arestegui, with white tablecloths for continental breakfast. Business passengers would receive similar but less fancy options from attendants Sara Low and Jean Rogér, with help from Dianne Snyder. Muffins, juice, and coffee would have to sustain passengers in coach, served by Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, with Karen Nicosia working in the rear galley. The lone male attendant, Jeffrey Collman, would help in coach or first class as needed. Regardless of seating class, everyone on board would be invited to watch comedian Eddie Murphy talk to animals during the in-flight movie, Dr. Dolittle 2.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, shortly before 8:14 a.m., the pilots verbally confirmed a radioed request from an air traffic controller named Peter Zalewski to make a 20-degree right turn. The plane turned. Sixteen seconds later, Zalewski instructed Flight 11 to climb to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The plane climbed, but only to 29,000 feet. No one in the cockpit replied to Zalewski’s order. Ten seconds passed.

Zalewski tried again. Soft-spoken, forty-three years old, after nineteen years with the FAA, Zalewski had grown accustomed to the relentless pressure of air traffic control. He spent his days in a darkened, windowless room at an FAA facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, known as Boston Center, one of twenty-two regional air traffic control centers nationwide. A simplified way to describe the job done by Zalewski and the 260 other controllers at Boston Center would be to call it flight separation, or doing everything necessary to keep airplanes a safe distance from one another. Zalewski’s assignment called for him to keep watch on his radar screen, or “scope,” for planes flying above 20,000 feet in a defined area west of Boston. When they left his geographic sector, they became another FAA controller’s responsibility.

When Zalewski received no reply from the pilots of Flight 11, he wondered if John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness weren’t paying attention, or perhaps had a problem with the radio frequency. But he didn’t have much time to let the problem sort itself out. He began to grow concerned that, at its current altitude and position, Flight 11 might be on a collision course with planes flying inbound toward Logan. Zalewski checked his equipment, tried the radio frequency Flight 11 used when it first took off, then used an emergency frequency to hail the plane. Still he heard nothing in response.

“He’s NORDO,” Zalewski told a colleague, using controller lingo for “no radio.” That could mean trouble, but this sort of thing happened often enough that it didn’t immediately merit emergency action. Usually it resulted from distracted pilots or technical problems that could be handled with a variety of remedies. Still, silent planes represented potential problems for controllers trying to maintain separation. As one of Zalewski’s colleagues tracked Flight 11 on radar, moving other planes out of the way, Zalewski tried repeatedly to reach the Flight 11 pilots.

8:14:08 a.m.: “American Eleven, Boston.”

Fifteen seconds later, he called out the same message.

Ten seconds later: “American one-one … how do you hear me?”

Four more tries in the next two minutes. Nothing.

8:17:05 a.m.: “American Eleven, American one-one, Boston.”

At one second before 8:18 a.m., flight controllers at Boston Center heard a brief, unknown sound on the radio frequency used by Flight 11 and other nearby flights. They didn’t know where it came from, and they couldn’t be certain, but it sounded like a scream.

ZALEWSKI TRIED AGAIN. And again. And again. Still NORDO.

Another Boston Center controller asked a different American Airlines pilot, on a plane inbound to Boston from Seattle, to try to hail Flight 11, but that didn’t work, either. That pilot reported Flight 11’s failure to respond to an American Airlines dispatcher who oversaw transatlantic flights at the airline’s operations center in Fort Worth, Texas.

Then things literally took a turn for the worse.

Watching on radar, Zalewski saw Flight 11 turn abruptly to the northwest, deviating from its assigned route, heading toward Albany, New York. Again, Boston Center controllers moved away planes in its path, all the way from the ground up to 35,000 feet, just in case. This was strange and troubling, but sometimes technology failed, and still neither Zalewski nor anyone else at Boston Center considered it a reason to declare an emergency.

Then, at 8:21 a.m., twenty-two minutes after takeoff, someone in the cockpit switched off Flight 11’s transponder. Transponders were required for all planes that fly above 10,000 feet, and it would be hard to imagine any reason a pilot of Flight 11 would purposely turn it off.

Without a working transponder, controllers could still see Flight 11 as a dot on their primary radar scopes, but they could only guess at its speed. They also had no idea of its altitude, and it would be easy to “lose” the plane amid the constant ebb and flow of air traffic. Seven minutes had passed since the pilots’ last radio transmission, after which they failed to answer multiple calls from Zalewski in air traffic control and from other planes. The 767 had veered off course and failed to climb to its assigned altitude. Now it had no working transponder. All signs pointed to a crisis of electrical, mechanical, or human origin, but Zalewski still couldn’t be sure.

Zalewski turned to a Boston Center supervisor and said quietly: “Would you please come over here? I think something is seriously wrong with this plane.”

But he refused to think the worst without more evidence. When the supervisor asked if he thought the plane had been hijacked, Zalewski replied: “Absolutely not. No way.” Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it remained possible in Zalewski’s mind that an extraordinarily rare combination of mechanical and technical problems had unleashed havoc aboard Flight 11.

Zalewski’s mindset had roots in his training. FAA controllers were taught to anticipate a specific sign or communication from a plane before declaring a hijacking in progress. A pilot might surreptitiously key in the transponder code “7500,” a universal distress signal, which would automatically flash the word HIJACK on the flight controller’s green-tinted radar screen. If the problem was mechanical, a pilot could key in “7600” for a malfunctioning transponder, or “7700” for an emergency. Otherwise, a pilot under duress could speak the seemingly innocuous word “trip” during a radio call when describing a flight’s course. An air traffic controller would instantly understand from that code word that a hijacker was on board. Boston Center had heard or seen no verbal or electronic tipoffs of a hostile takeover of Flight 11.

But all that training revolved around certain narrow expectations about how hijackings transpired, based on decades of hard-earned experience. Above all, those expectations relied on an assumption that one or both of the pilots, John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness, would remain at the controls.

The idea that hijackers might incapacitate or eliminate the pilots and fly a Boeing 767 themselves didn’t register in the minds of Boston Center controllers. To them, the old rules still applied. Zalewski kept trying to hail the plane.

CHAPTER 3

“A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO FLY”

United Airlines Flight 175

LEE AND EUNICE HANSON SAT IN THE KITCHEN OF THEIR BARN-RED home in Easton, Connecticut, nestled on a winding country road past fruit farms and signs offering fresh eggs and fresh manure. As they ate breakfast, the Hansons talked about their bubbly two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Christine, who that morning was taking her first airplane flight. Christine would be flying from Boston to Los Angeles with her parents, Peter and Sue Kim, Lee and Eunice’s son and daughter-in-law, aboard United Flight 175. Lee and Eunice spent the morning watching the clock and imagining each step along the young family’s journey, turning routine stages of the trip into exciting milestones, as only loving grandparents could.

“Boy, have they got a beautiful day to fly!”

“They’re probably in the tunnel on the way to the airport!”

“I bet they’re boarding!”

Peter, Sue, and Christine were due home in five days, after which they planned to visit Eunice and Lee for a friend’s wedding. As soon as the trio walked through the door, Lee and Eunice intended to quiz them for a minute-by-minute account of their California adventure.

The Hansons didn’t know it, but that morning’s flight path for United Flight 175 crossed the sky directly northwest of their property. If they had stepped away from breakfast, walked outside to their wooden back deck, and looked above the trees on their three sylvan acres, they might have spotted a tiny dot in the morning sky that was their family’s plane. Lee and Eunice could have waved goodbye.

UNITED FLIGHT 175 was the fraternal twin of American Flight 11: a wide-bodied Boeing 767, bound for Los Angeles, fully loaded with fuel and partly filled with passengers. The two planes left the ground fifteen minutes apart.

Minutes after its 8:14 a.m. takeoff, United Flight 175 crossed the Massachusetts border and cruised smoothly in the thin air nearly six miles above northwestern Connecticut. The blue skies ahead were “severe clear,” with unlimited visibility, as Captain Victor Saracini gazed through the cockpit window.

Saracini, a former Navy pilot, had earned a reputation as the “Forrest Gump Captain” for entertaining delayed passengers with long passages of memorized movie dialogue. Alongside him sat First Officer Michael Horrocks, a former Marine Corps pilot who called home before the flight to urge his nine-year-old daughter to get up for school. “I love you up to the moon and back,” he told her. With that, she rose from bed.

The calm in the cockpit was broken when, more than twenty minutes after takeoff, a Boston Center air traffic controller working alongside Peter Zalewski asked the Flight 175 pilots to scour the skies for the unresponsive American Flight 11. Saracini and Horrocks’s initial hunt for the American plane failed, but after a second request from air traffic control, at 8:38 a.m., the United pilots spotted the silver 767 five to ten miles away, two to three thousand feet below them.

They reported their discovery, then followed the controller’s instructions to ease their jet 30 degrees to the right, to keep away from the American Airlines plane. Whatever was happening aboard Flight 11, Boston Center controllers continued to want other planes to give it wide berth.

Saracini and Horrocks acknowledged the controller’s orders and turned Flight 175 to veer away from Flight 11. As they did, something nagged at the United pilots. They didn’t mention it to their Boston Center air traffic controllers, but shortly after taking flight, Saracini and Horrocks had heard a strange and troubling transmission on a radio frequency they shared with nearby planes, including Flight 11.

LIKE AMERICAN FLIGHT 11, United Flight 175 had lots of empty seats, flying at about one-third capacity. The fifty-six passengers were in the hands of nine crew members: the two pilots plus seven flight attendants. Perhaps the biggest difference between the United and American flights to Los Angeles on the morning of September 11 was the sounds inside the cabins: only adults boarded Flight 11, while the high-pitched voices of young children rang through United 175.

Heading home to California from a vacation on Cape Cod, three-year-old David Gamboa Brandhorst, who had a cleft chin and a deep love of Legos, sat in business class Row 8 between his fathers. To his left sat his serious “Papa,” Daniel Brandhorst, a lawyer and accountant. To his right sat his happy-go-lucky “Daddy,” Ronald Gamboa, manager of a Gap store in Santa Monica.

Nestled in 26A and 26B of coach were Ruth Clifford McCourt and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana. They’d driven to the airport and spent the previous night with Ruth’s best friend and Juliana’s godmother, Paige Farley-Hackel, who was heading to Los Angeles aboard American Flight 11. Blond and big-eyed, with porcelain skin, Juliana loved creatures large and small. She’d tell anyone who’d listen that she had recently learned to ride a pony. That day she’d smuggled aboard an unticketed passenger: a green praying mantis she’d found in the garden of her family’s Connecticut home. It resided in an ornate little cage on Juliana’s lap, her companion for when they reached California. Her mother, Ruth, a striking woman who spoke with a trace of her native Ireland, carried a special item, too: a papal coin from her wedding at the Vatican, tucked safely into her Hermès wallet.

The third little passenger of Flight 175 sat in Row 19: Lee and Eunice Hanson’s granddaughter, Christine Lee Hanson, flanked by Peter and Sue. Surrounding the Hansons and the other families on United Flight 175 were a mix of business and pleasure travelers.

The Reverend Francis Grogan, heading west to visit his sister, occupied a first-class seat with a ticket given to him by a friend. After serving as a sonar expert on a Navy destroyer during World War II, Father Grogan had traded conflict for conciliation. He spent his life as a teacher, a chaplain, and a parish priest.

In business class sat former pro hockey player Garnet “Ace” Bailey, a fierce competitor who spent ten seasons in the National Hockey League and won two Stanley Cups with the Boston Bruins in the 1970s. Hardly a delicate ice dancer, Bailey served a total of eleven hours in the penalty box during his bruising NHL career. At fifty-three, still tough, Ace Bailey had become director of scouting for the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL. He’d also cemented a relationship as friend and mentor to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, in part by helping Gretzky to overcome his fear of flying. When Ace wasn’t on the road, he treated his wife, Kathy, and son, Todd, to a dish he called “Bailey-baisse,” a medley of sautéed meats baked with onions and tomatoes. A few rows back, in coach, sat the Kings’ amateur scout, Mark Bavis, a former hockey standout at Boston University. Training camp would soon begin, and Bailey and Bavis were needed on the ice in Los Angeles.

Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi expected to be home in Beverly Hills by the afternoon, after visiting her daughter and grandsons in Boston. An Iranian-born Muslim, she’d fled to the United States two decades earlier when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini closed the schools. Touri added to Flight 175’s international mix: also aboard were three German businessmen, an Israeli woman, and a British man.

Among the crew members were two flight attendants in love: Michael Tarrou, a part-time musician, and Amy King, a onetime homecoming queen. They’d recently moved in together, and they had arranged to work the same flight so they could spend time together during a layover. All signs pointed to marriage.

Two other flight attendants had recently switched careers: Alfred Marchand had turned in his badge and gun as a police officer to become a flight attendant a year earlier; and Robert Fangman had begun flying for United just eight months earlier. He gave up half his income and a job he hated, as a cellphone salesman, to follow his dream of international travel.

Airplanes bring together people from different worlds and worldviews. On Flight 175, that held true for two strangers, Robert LeBlanc and Brian “Moose” Sweeney, one old, one young, one a pacifist, the other a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War who considered himself a warrior and imagined himself to be the descendant of Vikings. The two men sat in window seats on opposite sides of the coach cabin.

THE PREVIOUS DAY, with many miles ahead on a seven-hour drive, Robert LeBlanc gripped the steering wheel of his Audi sedan and prepared to pop the question. He was seventy years old, spry and fit, a snowy beard and tanned, craggy face giving him the look of an arctic explorer.

After a weekend visiting Rochester, New York, Bob and his driving companion were headed home to the little town of Lee, New Hampshire. A retired professor, Bob would be leaving before dawn the next day, September 11, for a geography conference on the West Coast. Now he’d reached a decision: he knew how he wanted to spend his remaining seasons, and with whom. He turned toward the woman he loved.

“I have a ten-year plan,” Bob said. “I know you might not be ready, but I want you with me.”

Sitting in the passenger seat, Andrea LeBlanc understood what Bob was asking. After all, she’d been married to him for twenty-eight years. Bob hoped Andrea would dramatically scale back her busy veterinary practice so they could travel the world together. Bob’s ten-year plan involved “hard” trips to developing countries at the farthest corners of the globe, after which they’d ideally spend a decade visiting the “easy places.” That is, if Andrea would agree.