Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

If the takeover of Flight 11 followed that “traditional” hijacking approach, a delay of a few minutes when sharing information shouldn’t have been a significant problem. There would have been plenty of time to seek military help or assistance from the FAA once the hijackers issued demands and announced a destination. But this hijacking didn’t follow “normal” rules. No demands were forthcoming, and no one in contact with Flight 11 anticipated that hijackers might kill or incapacitate the pilots and fly the plane.

Meanwhile, American Airlines employees at the airline’s control center in Texas tried multiple times, including at 8:23 a.m. and 8:25 a.m., to reach the original Flight 11 pilots. They used a dedicated messaging system that linked the ground and the cockpit, known as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS.

“Plz contact Boston Center ASAP,” one ACARS message read. “They have lost radio contact and your transponder signal.”

Flight 11 didn’t reply.

AS FLIGHT 11 flew erratically through the sky, flight attendant Amy Sweeney sat in a rear jump seat next to Betty Ong. Amy had called her husband an hour earlier, upset about missing their daughter’s sendoff to kindergarten. Now she tried to call the American Airlines flight services office in Boston with horrific news.

After two failed tries, Amy sought help from fellow flight attendant Sara Low, a high-spirited, athletic young woman with a pixie haircut who’d left a job at her father’s Arkansas mining company to satisfy her desire for adventure. Sara gave Amy a calling card number that allowed her to charge the call to Sara’s parents.

On her third try, at 8:25 a.m., Amy got through to Boston and reported that someone was hurt on what she mistakenly called Flight 12, an error that Betty also made early in her call.

A manager on duty, Evelyn “Evy” Nunez, asked for more details. “What, what, what? … Who’s hurt? … What?” She got some information, but the call was cut off. Overhearing the loud conversation, flight services manager Michael Woodward asked what was happening. Nunez said she’d received a strange call about a stabbing on Flight 12.

The report was confusing, so Michael and another Boston-based American Airlines employee ran upstairs to Logan’s Terminal B gates to see if there was maybe a case of “air rage” on a parked plane, or a violent person wandering drunk in the terminal. But all was quiet, and all morning flights had already left. Then it dawned on him.

“Wait a minute,” Michael told his colleague. “Flight 12 comes in at night. It hasn’t even left Los Angeles yet.”

They rushed back to the office, where Michael learned that another emergency call had come in. This time they quickly understood that the caller was flight attendant Amy Sweeney, whom Michael had known for a decade. He’d seen off Flight 11 less than a half hour earlier, after that disturbing moment when he locked eyes with Mohamed Atta.

Michael took over the call.

“Amy, sweetie, what’s going on?” he asked.

In a tightly controlled voice, Amy answered: “Listen to me very, very carefully.”

Michael grabbed a pad of paper to take notes.

AT 8:29 A.M., a half hour after takeoff, American Flight 11 turned south-southeast, putting it more directly on a route to Manhattan. The 767 climbed to 30,400 feet. Two minutes after adjusting course, it descended to 29,000 feet.

One second before 8:34 a.m., air traffic controllers at Boston Center heard a third disturbing transmission from the cockpit, a lie apparently intended for the passengers and crew but never heard by them: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

Controllers at Boston Center fell silent. Then they decided to do something: FAA air traffic control managers called in the military.

Normally, if the system had worked as designed, top officials at the FAA in Washington would contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, which in turn would call the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization responsible for protecting the skies over the United States and Canada. NORAD, in turn, would ask approval from the Secretary of Defense to use military jets to intervene in the hijacking of a commercial passenger jet. None of that was necessarily a smooth or rapid process.

Boston Center controllers concluded that it would take too long to bob and weave through the FAA bureaucracy, to get approval from someone in the Defense Department, to scramble fighter planes to chase Flight 11. They knew it wasn’t correct protocol, but they took matters into their own hands. First, they called their colleagues at an air traffic control facility on Cape Cod and asked them to place a direct call seeking help from fighter jets stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base. Then they concluded that even that wasn’t enough. As Flight 11 streaked toward Manhattan, Boston Center air traffic controllers urgently wanted to get the military involved. At the very least, the military might have better luck tracking the hijacked plane; some Boston Center controllers knew that the military had radar that could reveal a plane’s altitude even with its transponder turned off.

They tried to call a NORAD military alert site in Atlantic City, unaware that it had been shut down as part of the post–Cold War cuts in rapid air defense. Then, at 8:37 a.m., three minutes after first seeking help through controllers on Cape Cod, a supervisor at Boston Center named Dan Bueno called the Otis Air National Guard base directly. At roughly the same time, a Boston Center air traffic controller named Joseph Cooper called NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS, in Rome, New York. That’s where Major Kevin Nasypany had arrived earlier that morning expecting to put his team through the training exercise called Vigilant Guardian.

A few seconds before 8:38 a.m., Cooper made the first direct notification of a crisis on board American Flight 11 to the U.S. military: “[W]e have a problem here,” Cooper said. “We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there. Help us out.”

“Is this real-world, or exercise?” asked NEADS Technical Sergeant Jeremy Powell. Powell’s question reflected the fact that he knew Vigilant Guardian was planned for later in the day, and he wondered if it had begun early.

“No,” Cooper answered, “this is not an exercise, not a test.”

The air traffic controllers’ calls to the military sent the nation’s air defense system into high gear. But it did so outside of normal operating procedures, with delayed or at times nonexistent communications with the FAA, and without anything remotely resembling a well-defined response plan. Nasypany and his team at NEADS would have to rely on training and instinct, reacting moment by moment and making it up as they went along.

WHEN JOSEPH COOPER of the FAA’s Boston Center called for military help with Flight 11, Nasypany wasn’t on the NEADS Operations Floor among the radar scopes. When no one could find him, a voice boomed over the loudspeaker: “Major Nasypany, you’re needed in Ops, pronto!”

The hijacking of Flight 11 surprised America’s airline, air traffic, airport security, political, intelligence, and military communities. But it literally caught Nasypany with his pants down. Roused by the public address announcement, he zippered his flight suit and rushed from the men’s room to the war room: the NEADS Operations Floor, or Ops, a dimly lit hall with four rows of radar and communications work stations that faced several fifteen-foot wall-mounted screens. A glassed-in command area called the Battle Cab watched over the men and women scanning the electronic sky for danger.

When Nasypany reached the Ops floor, he felt annoyed by his team’s talk of a hijacking. Nasypany thought that someone had prematurely triggered the Vigilant Guardian exercise. He growled at no one in particular, “The hijack’s not supposed to be for another hour!”

Nasypany quickly discovered that the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 was “real-world,” and that Cooper had skipped protocol and called NEADS directly for help. Hijackings were on Nasypany’s list of potential threats, but they weren’t a top priority in his normal routine. Later, when one of his subordinates seemed on the verge of falling apart under the stress of the day’s events, Nasypany tried to lighten the mood by publicly admitting that he’d been “on the shitter” when summoned by the loudspeaker. At a more reflective moment, Nasypany confessed that he’d remember that announcement for the rest of his life.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER COOPER’S call for help, a young NEADS identification technician named Shelley Watson spoke with Boston Center’s military liaison, Colin Scoggins. Watson quizzed Scoggins for whatever information he possessed about Flight 11, a rushed conversation that revealed how little the air traffic controllers on the ground knew about what was happening in the air.

Watson: “Type of aircraft?”

Scoggins: “It’s a—American Eleven.”

Watson: “American Eleven?”

Scoggins: “Type aircraft is a 767 …”

Watson: “And tail number, do you know that?”

Scoggins: “I, I don’t know—hold on.”

Scoggins turned to air traffic supervisor Dan Bueno to ask for more information, including the number of “souls on board.” But Bueno didn’t know either.

Scoggins: “No, we—we don’t have any of that information.”

Watson: “You don’t have any of that?”

Scoggins explained that someone had turned off the cockpit transponder, so they didn’t have the usual tracking information. Boston Center could see Flight 11 only on what was called primary radar, which made it difficult to keep track of it among the constellations of radar dots representing the many planes in the sky.

Watson: “And you don’t know where he’s coming from or destination?”

Scoggins: “No idea. He took off out of Boston originally, heading for, ah, Los Angeles.”

NASYPANY QUICKLY RECEIVED authorization from his boss, Colonel Robert Marr, to prepare to launch the two F-15 fighter jets on alert at Otis on Cape Cod, roughly one hundred fifty miles from New York City.

The call from NEADS triggered a piercing klaxon alarm at Otis, and a voice blared on the public address system: “Alpha kilo one and two, battle stations.” The on-alert fighter pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy and Major Daniel Nash, ran into a locker room to pull on their G-suits and grab their helmets. Then they sprinted to a Ford pickup and raced a half mile to the hangar housing their F-15s, strapped in, and waited for further orders.

At a top speed of more than twice the speed of sound, an F-15 Eagle fighter jet could reach New York from Cape Cod in ten minutes. But the F-15s from Otis were fourteen years old and loaded with extra fuel tanks, so it would take them perhaps twice as long. And they weren’t going anywhere until Duffy and Nash received orders to scramble, or launch.

If orders did come, based on expectations of a “traditional” hijacking, the fighter pilots would try to quickly locate the commandeered plane. Then they would act only as military escorts, with orders to “follow the flight, report anything unusual, and aid search and rescue in the event of an emergency.” While following the flight, Duffy and Nash would be expected to position their F-15s five miles directly behind the hijacked plane, to monitor its flight path until, presumably, the hijackers ordered the pilots to land. Under the most extreme circumstances envisioned, the fighter pilots might be ordered to fly close alongside, to force a hijacked plane to descend safely to the ground.

But with Flight 11’s transponder turned off, the F-15 pilots would have problems doing any of that. No one knew exactly where to send the fighter jets. Although military radar could track a plane with its transponder off, military air controllers needed to locate it first and mark its coordinates. As minutes ticked by, controllers working for Major Nasypany at NEADS searched their radar screens in a frustrating attempt to find the hijacked passenger jet.

Complicating matters, the FAA and NEADS used different radar setups to track planes. In key respects, they spoke what amounted to different controller languages. At one point during the search, a civilian air traffic controller from New York Center told a NEADS weapons controller that his radar showed Flight 11 “tracking coast.” To an FAA controller, the phrase described a computer projection of a flight path for a plane that didn’t appear on radar. But that wasn’t a term used by military controllers. NEADS controllers thought “tracking coast” meant that Flight 11 was flying along the East Coast.

“I don’t know where I’m scrambling these guys to,” complained Major James Fox, a NEADS weapons officer whose job was to direct the Otis fighters from the ground. “I need a direction, a destination.”

Nasypany gave Fox a general location, just north of New York City. That way, until someone located the hijacked plane, the fighter jets would be in the general vicinity of Flight 11.

Meanwhile, Colonel Marr called NORAD’s command center in Florida to speak with Major General Larry Arnold, the commanding general of the First Air Force. Marr asked permission to scramble the fighters without going through the usual complex Defense Department channels and without clear orders about how to engage the plane.

Arnold made a series of quick calculations. Hijackers had seized control of a passenger jet headed toward New York. They’d made the plane almost invisible to radar by turning off its transponder. They wouldn’t answer radio calls and showed no sign of landing safely or making demands. This didn’t seem like a traditional hijacking, though he couldn’t be sure. He wouldn’t wait to find out—they’d worry about getting permission later.

Arnold told Marr: “[G]o ahead and scramble the airplanes.”

UNDER THE HIJACKERS’ command, American Flight 11 adjusted its route again, turning more directly to the south. The plane slowed and began a sharp but controlled descent, dropping at a rate of 3,200 feet per minute.

With its transponder switched off, Flight 11 remained largely a mystery to air traffic controllers. If they could see it at all, it appeared as little more than a green blip on their screens. Trying to determine its speed and altitude, they sought help from other pilots. When Flight 11 turned to the south and began to descend, a controller from Boston Center named John Hartling called a nearby plane that had taken off from Boston minutes after Flight 11 and was headed in the same general direction. That plane was United Airlines Flight 175.

Hartling asked the United 175 pilots if they could see American Flight 11 through their cockpit windshield.

At first the sky looked empty, so Hartling asked again.

“Okay, United 175, do you have him at your twelve o’clock now, and five, ten miles [ahead]?”

“Affirmative,” answered Captain Victor Saracini. “We have him, uh, he looks, ah, about twenty, uh, yeah, about twenty-nine, twenty-eight thousand [feet].”

Hartling instructed United 175 to turn right: “I want to keep you away from this traffic.”

Saracini and his first officer, Michael Horrocks, banked the plane to the right, as told. They didn’t ask why, and Hartling didn’t tell them.

As far as anyone knew, the only action needed to keep United Flight 175 and every other plane safe would be separation—that is, steering them away from hijacked American Flight 11. No one had yet deciphered the first sentence of the hijackers’ first radio transmission from Flight 11: “We have some planes.” No one imagined that more than one flight might soon be in danger.

The concept of more than one hijacking simultaneously and in coordination wasn’t on anyone’s radar, literally or figuratively. Years had passed since the last hijacking of a U.S. air carrier, and coordinated multiple hijackings had never happened in the United States. Almost no one in the FAA, the airlines, or the military had dealt with such a scenario or considered it a likely threat. The last organized multiple hijackings anywhere in the world had occurred more than three decades earlier, in September 1970, when Palestinian militants demanding the release of prisoners in Israel seized five passenger jets bound from European cities to New York and London. They diverted three planes to a Jordanian desert and one to Cairo. The crew and passengers of the fifth jet, from the Israeli airline El Al, subdued the hijackers, killing one, and regained control of their plane. No passengers or crew members aboard those hijacked planes died.

AS FLIGHT 11 bore down on New York City, flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney sat side by side in the back of the plane. During separate, overlapping calls, they provided a chilling account of the crisis around them. The calls alone were acts of extraordinary bravery. Flight attendants were trained to anticipate that hijackers might have “sleeper” comrades embedded among the passengers, waiting to attack anyone who posed a threat or disobeyed commands.

Just as the military operated under certain expectations about how hijackings played out, aircrews were taught that they should refrain from trying to negotiate with or overpower hijackers, to avoid making things worse. Under a program known as the Common Strategy, crews were told to focus on attempts to “resolve hijackings peacefully” and to get the plane and its passengers on the ground safely. The counterstrategy to a hijacking also called for delays, and if that didn’t work, cooperation and accommodation when necessary. In these scenarios, “suicide wasn’t in the game plan,” as one study phrased it. Neither was a hijacker piloting the plane. Further, no one considered the possibility that a hijacked airplane would attempt to disappear from radar by someone in the cockpit turning off a transponder.

Still operating under the old set of beliefs, some air traffic controllers predicted that Flight 11 would land at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, although at least one put his money on the plane making a run for Cuba. But the old playbook on hijackings had become dangerously obsolete. That was clear as soon as Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney revealed details of a precise, multilayered plot aboard Flight 11.

AFTER THE LAST routine contact between pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness and Boston Center’s Peter Zalewski at 8:13 a.m., Atta and his men pounced. Based on the timing, about fifteen minutes into the flight, they might have used a predetermined signal: when the pilots turned off the Fasten Seatbelt signs.

One or more of the hijackers, possibly the brothers Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, who were sitting in the first row of first class, sprayed Mace or pepper spray to create confusion and force passengers and flight attendants away from the cockpit door.

Using weapons smuggled aboard, perhaps the short-bladed knives bought in the months before September 11, they stabbed or slashed first-class flight attendants Karen Martin and Bobbi Arestegui. Amy Sweeney told Michael Woodward in Boston that Karen was critically injured and being given oxygen. Betty Ong told Nydia Gonzalez in Fort Worth that Karen was down on the floor in bad shape. Both said Bobbi Arestegui was hurt but not as seriously as Karen. They didn’t say what kind of knives or weapons the hijackers used. Neither indicated that the terrorists had guns or other weapons.

All nine flight attendants had keys to the cockpit, but it’s not clear how the hijackers gained entry—Atta and his crew might have attacked Karen and Bobbi to steal their keys, or the hijackers might have gotten into the cockpit another way. When the plane dipped and pitched erratically, Betty suspected that a hijacker was already in control. She said she thought they had “jammed the way up there.” In fact, the cockpit doors were relatively flimsy and weren’t strong enough to prevent forced entry. Another possibility was that the hijackers stabbed the first-class flight attendants to induce the pilots to open the cockpit door. Or maybe it was even simpler: In September 2001, one key opened the cockpit doors of all Boeing planes. Maybe the hijackers brought a key on board with them.

Whichever way Atta and the others gained access, no one who knew John Ogonowski, the Vietnam veteran who farmed when he wasn’t flying, or Tom McGuinness, the former Navy pilot, would believe that either went down quietly. Possible evidence of that came during Betty Ong’s call. She said she heard loud arguing after the hijackers entered the cockpit. If Ogonowski and McGuinness were in their seats, low and strapped in, they would have been at a distinct disadvantage against knife-wielding attackers coming at them from behind with the element of surprise.

As the only hijacker with pilot training, Mohamed Atta almost certainly took control of the plane after the hijackers killed or disabled the pilots. He spoke English fluently, so he likely made the radio transmissions heard by Peter Zalewski in Boston Center. It’s also possible that Atta’s seatmate, Abdulaziz al-Omari, accompanied him into the cockpit.

Betty Ong reported to Nydia Gonzalez that a passenger’s throat had been slashed and that the man appeared to be dead. On her call to Michael Woodward, Amy Sweeney said the passenger was in first class. Betty told Nydia Gonzalez the passenger’s name was “Levin or Lewis” and that he’d been seated in business class seat 9B. In her first, brief call, Amy identified the attacker as the passenger who’d been seated in 10B.

Nydia Gonzalez tried to confirm the killer’s identity. She asked Betty: “Okay, you said Tom Sukani?”—a name phonetically similar to that of “muscle” hijacker Satam al-Suqami. “Okay—okay, and he was in 10B. Okay, okay, so he’s one of the persons that are in the cockpit. And as far as weapons, all they have are just knives?”

Based on Betty and Amy’s calls, it’s possible that the brilliant computer entrepreneur and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin saw the hijackers attack the flight attendants and heroically leapt into action. But unknown to Lewin, seated directly behind him was the fifth hijacker, Satam al-Suqami, whose name Nydia Gonzalez heard as “Tom Sukani.” In that scenario, when Lewin rose to fight back, Suqami slit his throat, making Lewin perhaps the first casualty of 9/11. Another possibility was that the hijackers had planned all along to begin the takeover by attacking crew members and at least one passenger, to frighten the rest into compliance. In that scenario, Lewin would have been an unwitting victim who happened to be sitting in the targeted seat.

Amy told Michael Woodward the three hijackers in business class were Middle Eastern and gave him their seat numbers, key pieces of evidence to identify the terrorists. Betty identified the seat numbers of the two hijackers in first class, the Shehri brothers.

Amy told Michael she saw one of the hijackers with a device with red and yellow wires that appeared to be a bomb. He wrote “#cockpit bomb” on his notepad. Betty didn’t mention a bomb, and no one knew if whatever Amy saw was real or a decoy.

On their separate calls, the two flight attendants said they didn’t know whether coach passengers fully understood the peril. Amy told Michael that she believed the coach passengers thought the problem was a routine medical emergency in the front section of the plane. First-class passengers were herded into coach, but in the uproar, it wasn’t clear whether former ballet dancer Sonia Puopolo, business consultant Richard Ross, venture capitalist David Retik, or anyone else who’d been up front mentioned the violence they’d seen.

Amy told Michael that in addition to Betty, the flight attendants who weren’t injured—Kathy Nicosia, Sara Low, Dianne Snyder, Jeffrey Collman, and Jean Rogér—kept working throughout the crisis, helping passengers and finding medical supplies.

Betty and Amy relayed all the information they could, as quickly and completely as they could, for as long as they could. At 8:43 a.m., roughly a half hour after the hijacking began, Flight 11 changed course again, to the south-southwest. The move put the Boeing 767, still heavy with fuel, on a direct course for Lower Manhattan, the heart of America’s financial community.