MItchell Zuckoff - Fall and Rise - The Story of 9/11

Live on the air, Lin and her viewers heard a first-person account via telephone from CNN’s vice president of finance, Sean Murtagh, who’d been in a meeting on the 21st floor of a building facing the World Trade Center. Murtagh was conscripted by circumstance into working as a reporter: “I just witnessed a plane that appeared to be cruising at slightly lower than normal altitude over New York City, and it appears to have crashed into—I don’t know which tower it is—but it hit directly in the middle of one of the World Trade Center towers.”

Lin: “Sean, what kind of plane was it? Was it a small plane, a jet?”

Murtagh: “It was a jet. It looked like a two-engine jet, maybe a 737.”

Lin: “You are talking about a large passenger commercial jet.”

Murtagh: “A large passenger commercial jet.”

They discussed Murtagh’s location and other details. Then Lin asked a question that suggested she suspected that the crash was caused by a mechanical failure: “Did you see any smoke, any flames coming out of engines of that plane?”

“No, I did not,” Murtagh answered. “The plane just was coming in low, and the wingtips tilted back and forth, and it flattened out. It looks like it hit at a slight angle into the World Trade Center. I can see flames coming out of the side of the building, and smoke continues to billow.”

Other than the exact model of the plane, CNN immediately got the basics right about Flight 11’s crash, although they didn’t yet know the flight number or much else. But several other early media reports suggested that it might have been a small commuter plane. As every broadcast and print newsroom leapt onto the story, early speculation raged that the crash was an accident, caused by a lost or inexperienced pilot. Americans old enough to remember perhaps flashed back to July 28, 1945, when a B-25 bomber lost in morning fog crashed into the Empire State Building, killing three crew members and eleven others.

Confusion reigned in the government as well, including at the FAA and the FBI, as officials struggled to confirm that a plane had in fact hit the North Tower. Others questioned whether it wasn’t a plane at all, but a bomb more powerful than the one driven by truck into an underground World Trade Center garage in February 1993.

One example of the confusion: Around 8:55 a.m., the flight control manager at New York Center tried to notify regional FAA officials that United Flight 175 had apparently been hijacked. But the regional FAA officials refused to be disturbed. They were too busy discussing the hijacking of American Flight 11, which they didn’t realize had scythed into the North Tower almost ten minutes earlier.

During the first frenzied minutes before and after 9 a.m. on September 11, only a few people recognized the enormity of the unfolding catastrophe. Tragically, some of those who best understood key pieces of the crisis were inside American Flight 11 before it crashed and United Flight 175 as it sped toward New York City.

AT NEARLY THE same time as Peter Hanson called his parents’ Connecticut home, a telephone rang at a United Airlines facility in San Francisco where in-flight crews called to report minor maintenance problems. Flight attendants knew they could dial “f-i-x,” using the corresponding numbers on the keypad, 3-4-9, and automatically be connected to the airline’s maintenance center.

From an Airfone near the rear of Flight 175, a male flight attendant, believed to be former cellphone salesman Robert Fangman, reported details of the hijacking to a maintenance worker. The information dovetailed with the report Peter Hanson gave his father. The flight attendant said that both pilots of United Flight 175 had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and hijackers were probably flying the plane.

The unrecorded call cut off after about two minutes. The United maintenance worker and a colleague tried to recontact the flight using the ACARS digital message system linked to the cockpit: “I heard of a reported incident aboard your [aircraft],” they wrote. “Plz verify all is normal.”

They received no reply. Minutes passed before someone from the San Francisco maintenance center reported the call to United headquarters in Chicago.

Not every attempt to sound the alarm or to reach loved ones from Flight 175 proved successful. Between 8:52 a.m. and 8:59 a.m., former pro hockey player Garnet “Ace” Bailey tried four times to call his wife, Kathy, on her business and home phones. The calls dropped or didn’t connect. He never got through.

FLIGHT 175 COMPLETED a fishhook turn over Allentown, Pennsylvania, banking to the left and descending as it crossed back over New Jersey, and headed toward New York City. The pilot almost certainly was Marwan al-Shehhi, the companion of Mohamed Atta and the only one of the five Flight 175 hijackers trained to fly a passenger jet.

Nothing was safe in their path. A New York Center controller watched as the United plane turned toward a Delta 737 flying southwest at 28,000 feet.

“Traffic two o’clock! Ten miles,” the controller warned the Delta pilots. “I think he’s been hijacked. I don’t know his intentions. Take any evasive action necessary.”

The Delta flight ducked away from United 175, but soon after, the hijacked plane put itself on a collision course with a US Airways flight. An alarm sounded in the US Airways cockpit, and the pilots dived to avoid a midair crash.

AFTER DROPPING HER husband, Brian “Moose” Sweeney, at the Hyannis airport, Julie Sweeney got ready for her fifth day of work as a high school health teacher on Cape Cod. She’d already left for work when the phone rang in the home she shared with the former Navy F-14 pilot, Top Gun instructor, “Twin Tower” college football player, and costume-party Viking.

Brian’s call, at shortly before 8:59 a.m., went to their answering machine.

He spoke in a calm, serious tone, and his message echoed what he’d told Julie weeks earlier about how he wanted her to “celebrate life” if anything happened to him:

“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”

Brian hung up. Then he punched in the numbers for another telephone call.

AS LOUISE SWEENEY prepared to leave home to run errands, the phone rang. She picked up to hear her son’s voice: “Mom, It’s Brian. I’m on a hijacked plane and it doesn’t look good. I called to say I love you and I love my family.”

Brian told his mother that he didn’t know who the hijackers were. Calling from the rear of the plane, he said he thought they might come back, so he might have to hang up quickly. He told her he believed that they might be flying somewhere over Ohio. Brian said he and other passengers might storm the cockpit.

Louise knew her son, and she recognized how he sounded when he became “pissed off.” He had that tone.

Before ending the call, Brian told her, “Remember Crossing Over . Don’t forget Crossing Over .”

Louise remembered, and she wouldn’t forget. As Flight 175 streamed toward New York City, descending by the second, flying erratically, the original pilots apparently dead and a flight attendant wounded, Brian tried to comfort his mother. Crossing Over was a book and television program featuring a self-professed psychic named John Edward, who claimed to communicate with the dead. Brian wanted his mother to know that somehow, someday, he would see her again.