Читать книгу Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 - MItchell Zuckoff - Страница 14
Оглавление“I THINK WE’RE BEING HIJACKED”
American Airlines Flight 11
WHEN AMERICAN FLIGHT 11 TOOK OFF, FLIGHT ATTENDANT BETTY “Bee” Ong sat buckled into a jump seat in the tail section, on the left side of the plane, ready to begin her onboard routine. From that vantage point, she had a direct view up an aisle through coach and business into first class.
Less than twenty minutes after takeoff, just as she normally would have begun serving passengers breakfast, Betty witnessed the reason why Flight 11 changed direction without authorization, why someone switched off the transponder, why the cockpit stopped communicating with air traffic controller Peter Zalewski at the FAA’s Boston Center, and why it didn’t answer calls from other planes.
At 8:19 a.m., six minutes after Flight 11 pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness stopped responding to Zalewski’s calls, Betty grabbed an AT&T telephone called an Airfone, built into the 767. Airfones were common on cross-country flights in 2001, and many planes had an Airfone, for use by passengers with credit cards, on the back of every middle seat in coach. Betty dialed a toll-free reservations number for American Airlines, a number she often used to help passengers make connecting flights. The call went through to the airline’s Southeastern Reservations Office in central North Carolina, where a reservations agent named Vanessa Minter answered.
“I think we’re being hijacked,” Betty said, her voice calm but fearful.
Vanessa Minter asked Betty to hold. She searched for an emergency button on her phone but couldn’t find one. Instead, she speed-dialed the American Airlines international resolution desk on the other side of her office and told agent Winston Sadler what Betty had said. Sadler jumped onto the call and pressed an emergency button on his phone. That allowed the airline’s call system to record about four minutes of what would be a more than twenty-five-minute call from Betty that would provide crucial information about what occurred and who was responsible. Sadler also sent an alarm that notified Nydia Gonzalez, the reservations office supervisor, who also joined the call.
“Um, the cockpit’s not answering,” Betty said. “Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and, um, I think there is Mace—that we can’t breathe. I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.”
For employees of a call center who normally helped stranded travelers find new flights, Betty’s call was beyond shocking. After some confusion about who Betty was and what flight she was on, during which the airline employees asked Betty to repeat herself several times, eventually they understood that Betty was the Number Three flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11. Once that was established, Betty stammered at times as she did her best to describe a bloody, chaotic scene.
“Our, our Number One got stabbed. Our purser is stabbed. Ah, nobody knows who stabbed who and we can’t even get up to business class right now because nobody can breathe. Our Number One is, is stabbed right now. And our Number Five. Our first-class passenger that, ah, first, ah, class galley flight attendant and our purser has been stabbed and we can’t get to the cockpit, the door won’t open. Hello?”
She remained polite and self-possessed, even as her throat tightened with fear. Betty repeated herself several more times in response to the questions of reservation office employees.
Supervisor Nydia Gonzalez asked if Betty heard any announcements from the cockpit, and Betty said there had been none.
Two minutes into Betty’s call, at 8:21 a.m., Gonzalez called Craig Marquis, the manager on duty at American Airlines’ operations control headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, to report an emergency aboard Flight 11, with stabbings and an unresponsive cockpit.
Meanwhile, Betty turned to other flight attendants clustered around her at the back of the plane: “Can anybody get up to the cockpit? Can anybody get up to the cockpit?” Then she returned to the call: “We can’t even get into the cockpit. We don’t know who’s up there.”
At that point, reservations agent Winston Sadler displayed the widely held but tragically mistaken belief that only the airline’s pilots could fly a Boeing 767. “Well,” Sadler told Betty, “if they were shrewd”—meaning the original crew—“they would keep the door closed and …”
Betty: “I’m sorry?”
Sadler: “Well, would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?”
Betty: “I think the guys [hijackers] are up there. They might have gone there, jammed their way up there, or something. Nobody can call the cockpit. We can’t even get inside.”
Sadler went silent.
Betty: “Is anybody still there?”
Sadler: “Yes, we’re still here.”
Betty: “Okay. I’m staying on the line as well.”
Sadler: “Okay.”
Nydia Gonzalez returned to the call. After asking Betty to repeat herself several times, Gonzalez asked: “Have you guys called anyone else?”
“No,” Betty answered. “Somebody’s calling medical and we can’t get a doc—”
The tape ended, but the call continued for more than twenty minutes as Nydia Gonzalez and Vanessa Minter took notes and relayed information from Betty to Craig Marquis at the airline’s control headquarters in Fort Worth. Throughout, Gonzalez reassured Betty, urging her to stay calm and telling her she was doing a wonderful job.
“Betty, how are you holding up, honey?” Gonzalez asked. “Okay. You’re gonna be fine… . Relax, honey. Betty, Betty.”
Several times Betty reported that the plane was flying erratically, almost turning sideways.
“Please pray for us,” Betty asked. “Oh God … oh God.”
EVEN AS HIS anxiety rose about American Flight 11, Boston Center air traffic controller Peter Zalewski knew nothing about Betty Ong’s anguished, ongoing call. No one from American Airlines’ Fort Worth operations control headquarters relayed information to the FAA’s Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, to FAA headquarters in Washington, or to anyone else. As minutes passed and commandeered Flight 11 flew west across Massachusetts and over New York, communications among the airline, the FAA, and U.S. military officials were sporadic at best, incomplete or nonexistent at worst.
Adding to the stress, Zalewski couldn’t devote his entire attention to the troubled American Airlines flight. Other planes continued to take off from Logan Airport and enter Zalewski’s assigned geographic sector. One of those flights was United Airlines Flight 175. For eleven minutes, an unusually long time, Zalewski had no contact with Flight 11.
Then, at 8:24 a.m., five minutes after the start of Betty Ong’s ongoing call to American Airlines’ reservations center, Zalewski heard three strange clicks on the radio frequency assigned to Flight 11 and numerous other flights in his sector.
“Is that American Eleven, trying to call?” Zalewski asked.
Five seconds passed. Then Zalewski heard an unknown male voice with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. Zalewski handled a great deal of international air traffic, so an Arab pilot’s voice wasn’t entirely unexpected. The unknown man’s radio message wasn’t clear, and Zalewski didn’t comprehend it.
Unknown at that point to anyone at Boston Center, the foreign-sounding man, almost spitting his words directly into the microphone, had said: “We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and we’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport.”
The comment apparently wasn’t intended for Zalewski or other FAA ground controllers. Rather, it sounded like a message from the cockpit intended to pacify Flight 11’s passengers and crew, none of whom heard it. The person in the pilot’s seat—almost certainly Mohamed Atta—keyed the mic in a way that transmitted the message to air traffic control on the ground, as well as to other planes using the same radio frequency, and not to passengers and crew in the cabin behind him. To have been heard inside the plane, the hijacker-pilot would have needed to flip a switch on the cockpit radio panel.
At a time when every piece of information counted, and every minute was crucial, the fact that Zalewski couldn’t quite hear that chilling message marked a major misfortune on a day filled with them. The first sentence of the hijackers’ first cockpit transmission at 8:24:38 a.m. not only announced the terror aboard American Flight 11, it included a seemingly unintentional warning about an unknown number of similar, related plots already in motion, but not yet activated, on other early-morning transcontinental flights. Whoever was flying Flight 11 didn’t simply say that he and his fellow hijackers had seized control of that plane. He said: “We have some planes.”
If the message had been caught immediately, the plural use of “planes” conceivably might have prompted Zalewski and other air traffic controllers to warn other pilots to enforce heightened cockpit security. Those pilots, in turn, might have told flight attendants to be on guard for trouble. But that’s a best-case scenario. It’s also possible that the comment would have been overlooked or dismissed as an empty boast or downplayed as a misstatement by a hijacker with limited English skills. There was no way to know, because Zalewski couldn’t catch it.
Zalewski answered: “And, uh, who’s trying to call me here? … American Eleven, are you trying to call?”
Seconds later, Zalewski heard another communication from the cockpit, also apparently intended for the passengers and crew of Flight 11: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourselves and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”
Zalewski heard that message loud and clear. He screamed for his supervisor, Jon Schippani: “Jon, get over here right now!”
Zalewski announced to the room of flight controllers that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Feeling ignored, as though not everyone at Boston Center appreciated the urgency, Zalewski flipped a switch to allow all the air traffic controllers around him to hear all radio communications with Flight 11. He handed off his other flights to fellow controllers. All the while, Zalewski wondered what essential information he might have missed in the first radio transmission. On the verge of panic, Zalewski turned to another Boston Center employee, a quality assurance supervisor named Bob Jones.
“Someone has to pull these fucking tapes—right now!” Zalewski told Jones.
Jones rushed to the basement to find the recording on the center’s old-fashioned reel-to-reel recording machines so he could decipher the hijacker’s first message.
Zalewski’s first thought was that the hijackers of Flight 11 might make a U-turn and return to Logan Airport, putting the plane dangerously in the path of departing westbound flights. But the radicals in the cockpit had another destination in mind.
The Boeing 767 turned sharply south over Albany, New York. Its flight path followed the Hudson River Valley in the general direction of New York City at a speed of perhaps 600 miles per hour. Even if the plane slowed somewhat, it could fly from Albany to Manhattan in as little as twenty minutes.
Between 8:25 and 8:32 a.m., Boston Center managers alerted their superiors within the FAA that American Flight 11 had been hijacked and was heading toward New York City. Zalewski felt what he could only describe as terror.
Yet just as American Airlines employees failed to immediately pass along information from Betty Ong’s call, more than twelve minutes passed before anyone at Boston Center or the FAA called the U.S. military for help.
One explanation for the delay was a hardwired belief among airline, government, and many military officials that hijackings followed a set pattern, in which military reaction time wasn’t the most important factor. The established playbook for hijackings went something like this: Driven by financial or political motives, such as seeking asylum, ransom, or the release of prisoners, hijackers took control of a passenger plane. Once in command, they used the radio to announce their intentions to government officials or media on the ground. They ordered the airline’s pilots to fly toward a new destination, using threats to passengers and crews as leverage. Eventually the hijackers ordered the pilots to land so they could refuel, escape, arrange for their demands to be met, or some combination. Under those circumstances, the appropriate, measured response from ground-based authorities was to clear other planes from the hijacked plane’s path and to seek a peaceful resolution that would protect innocent victims.
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.
At the American Airlines center in Fort Worth, Nydia Gonzalez begged for information: “What’s going on, Betty? … Betty, talk to me… . Betty, are you there? … Betty?”
Betty didn’t answer.
Nydia turned to her colleagues: “Do you think we lost her? Okay, so we’ll like—we’ll stay open.”
Then Nydia Gonzalez added an unintentionally haunting coda to Betty Ong’s bravery: “We—I think we might have lost her.”
AROUND THE SAME time, Amy Sweeney told Michael Woodward: “Something is wrong. We’re in a rapid descent… . We are all over the place.” Another American Airlines employee who overheard the call said she heard Amy scream.
Michael tried his best to calm Amy. He told her to look out the window and tell him what she saw. “We are flying low,” she said. Amy told Michael she saw water and buildings. “We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low!”
Amy paused. Powerless on the other end of the phone, Amy’s colleague and friend Michael Woodward waited, every second stretching into a lifetime. Less than an hour earlier, he’d stood inside the plane, locked eyes with Mohamed Atta, and waved goodbye to his friends.
Michael heard Amy’s last words, before the call dissolved into static: “Oh my God!—We are way too low!”
UNDER THE COMMAND and control of fanatics bent on murder and determined to commit suicide, American Airlines Flight 11 had been transformed from a passenger jet into a guided missile. Atta’s radio transmissions about returning to the airport and everything being okay were elements of a cruel ruse to pacify passengers and to prevent an uprising against his outnumbered men. He had played on old beliefs about how hijackings occurred and were usually resolved without violence. Even though his lies weren’t heard by Flight 11’s passengers, the radio calls and the hijackers’ advance training and in-flight actions revealed a carefully calibrated plan built on surprise, violence, trickery, and a studied understanding of their targets, all to achieve a barbaric goal.
The Boeing 767 that was American Airlines Flight 11 completed an unapproved, L-shaped path through bright blue skies that covered roughly three hundred miles from Boston, west to Albany, then south over the streets of Manhattan. At the last millisecond of its trip, at a speed estimated at 440 miles per hour, the silver plane’s nose touched the glass and steel of the north face of the 96th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
TJX planning manager Tara Creamer’s instructions to her husband, John, on how to care for their children would need to last a lifetime.
Cambodian farmers who relied on John Ogonowski would have to find a new teacher and patron. His wife and daughters would be set adrift without their anchor.
Amy Sweeney’s children would have to get to school, and through life, without her.
Betty Ong’s elderly friends would need new rides to doctors’ appointments. Her sister Cathie would never again hear her say “I love you lots.”
Robert Norton’s stepson would have to get married without him.
Daniel Lee’s soon-to-be-born daughter would spend her entire life without him.
Daniel Lewin’s family and his company would have to forge new paths without his genius or his guidance.
Someone else would have to find a health aide for Cora Hidalgo Holland’s mother.
Susan MacKay’s air traffic controller husband, Doug, who planned to have John Ogonowski say hi for him, would have to live with the knowledge that Susan passed through airspace over the Hudson River Valley that he normally controlled.
Dozens of children would grow up without a mother or a father, an aunt or uncle, a grandmother or grandfather. Parents would grow old without a daughter or a son; husbands, wives, and partners would be forced to carry on alone. Grief would grip untold families, friends, colleagues, and strangers, wounded by the deaths of seventy-six passengers and eleven crew members, all murdered by five al-Qaeda hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11.
The time of their deaths was 8:46:25 a.m.
More than six minutes later, the two F-15 fighter jets from Otis took flight. They soared south toward New York in pursuit of a passenger jet that no longer existed.
But something terrible was happening on another passenger plane also bound from Boston to Los Angeles.
