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

Also working the flight was a couple whose friends called them Kennifer. Married for eight years, flight attendants Ken and Jennifer Lewis normally flew separately, but they used their seniority to mesh their schedules so they could vacation when they reached Los Angeles, their favorite city. A magnet on their refrigerator read HAPPINESS IS BEING MARRIED TO YOUR BEST FRIEND. When they were home, in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Ken and Jennifer liked to drag lawn chairs to the end of their driveway, trailed by their five cats. As night fell, they would gaze at the stars.

ALSO ON BOARD were five young Saudi Arabian zealots who’d pledged their lives to al-Qaeda. Like their collaborators on American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, the men chose seats strategically, clustered toward the front of the plane.

Unlike their associates aboard the other two flights, three of the al-Qaeda members on American Flight 77 nearly had their plans foiled by airport security.

At 7:18 a.m., Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdhar set off alarms when they walked through a Dulles Airport metal detector. Security workers sent them to a second metal detector. Mihdhar passed, but Moqed failed again. A private security officer hired by a contractor for United Airlines scanned Moqed with a metal detection wand and sent him on his way. Neither was patted down.

Almost twenty minutes later, Nawaf al-Hazmi set off alarms at both metal detectors at the same security checkpoint. Two weeks earlier, he’d purchased Leatherman multitool knives, and a security video showed that he had an unidentified item clipped onto his rear pants pocket. A security officer hand-wanded Hazmi and swiped his shoulder bag with an explosive trace detector. No one patted him down, and he walked on toward Flight 77 with his brother, Salem al-Hazmi.

All five were chosen for another security screening, three by the CAPPS computer algorithm and two, the Hazmi brothers, because an airline customer service representative judged them to be suspicious. One, apparently Salem al-Hazmi, offered an identification card without a photograph and didn’t seem to understand English. The airline worker who checked them in thought he seemed anxious or excited.

In the end, the selection of all five men for a second layer of security screening proved meaningless. Just as with their collaborators, it only meant that their checked bags were held off the plane until after they boarded.

Hani Hanjour, who’d trained as a pilot, took seat 1B in first class. Four rows back in the same cabin, in seats 5E and 5F, sat the Hazmi brothers. They were the only two passengers on Flight 77 to request special meals: the Hindu option, with no pork.

On the opposite side of the plane, in coach seat 12A sat Majed Moqed. Next to him, in 12B, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, slim and dark-haired, a man who U.S. intelligence officials had known for several years was a member of al-Qaeda, yet who traveled under his real name.

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77 pushed back from Dulles Gate D-26 at 8:09 a.m. It was airborne eleven minutes later.

At that moment, United Flight 175 had been in flight for six minutes, with no signs of trouble. American Flight 11 had already stopped communicating with air traffic controllers, and soon after, flight attendant Betty Ong began her distress call to American Airlines.

THREE MINUTES INTO their flight from Cape Cod to New York in pursuit of American Flight 11, Otis F-15 pilots Tim Duffy and Dan Nash learned that the World Trade Center had been struck by a plane, presumably the one they were supposed to find. They saw rising smoke from more than a hundred miles away. The clouds of smoke intensified minutes later with the strike on the South Tower.

As the fighter pilots approached a crime scene of almost unimaginable proportions, NEADS Major Kevin Nasypany ordered them to fly in a holding pattern in military-controlled airspace off Long Island. That way, they’d stay clear of scores of passenger planes that still flew nearby.

At 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the crash of United Flight 175, FAA controllers issued an order that barred all nonmilitary aircraft from taking off, landing, or flying through New York Center’s airspace until further notice. Meanwhile, Boston Center had stopped all departures from its airports. Soon after, all departures were stopped nationwide for planes heading toward or through New York or Boston airspace.

Around the same time, fearing more hijackings, the operations manager at Boston Center told the controllers he supervised to warn airborne pilots by radio to heighten security, with the aim of preventing potential intruders from gaining access to cockpits. He urged the national FAA operations center in Virginia to issue a similar cockpit safety notice nationwide, but there’s no evidence that that happened.

As the NEADS team absorbed news of the second crash into the World Trade Center, a technician uttered an offhand comment charged with insight: “This is a new type of war, that’s what it is.”

At first, almost no one could fathom the idea of terrorist hijackers who’d been trained as pilots at U.S. flight schools. Several technicians at NEADS held on to the idea that the original pilots had somehow remained at the controls, flying under duress from the terrorists and unable to use their transponders to issue an alert, or “squawk,” using the universal hijacking code 7500.

“We have smart terrorists today,” a NEADS surveillance officer said. “They’re not giving them [the pilots] a chance to squawk.”

Shortly before 9:08 a.m., five minutes after the South Tower explosion, Nasypany decided that he wanted the Otis fighter jets to be ready for whatever might come next from the terrorists. No simulations, exercises, or history had prepared any of them for this, and other than Boston Center’s unapproved calls to NEADS, the FAA still had yet to make contact with the military. Nasypany improvised.

“We need to talk to FAA,” Nasypany told his team. “We need to tell ’em if this stuff is gonna keep on going, we need to take those fighters, put ’em over Manhattan. That’s the best thing, that’s the best play right now. So, coordinate with the FAA. Tell ’em if there’s more out there, which we don’t know, let’s get ’em over Manhattan. At least we got some kind of play.”

Nasypany wanted to launch two more fighter jets, the pair of on-alert F-16s ready and waiting at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The fighters were part of the North Dakota Air National Guard’s 119th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Happy Hooligans.

But Colonel Marr rejected that plan. He wanted the Langley fighters to remain on the ground, on runway alert. With only four ready-to-launch fighter jets in his arsenal, the colonel didn’t want all of them to run out of fuel at the same time. Unaware that airborne fuel tankers would have been available, Marr thought that putting the Langley fighters in the air might leave the skies relatively unprotected if something else happened in the huge area of sky that NEADS was sworn to protect.

Nasypany’s mind kept churning. Two suicide hijackers in fuel-laden jets had slammed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, both of which burned on television screens all around him. They’d killed everyone on board and an unknown number of people in the buildings. Nasypany had positioned two F-15s in the sky over New York, and it remained anyone’s guess if they’d soon be chasing other hijacked planes with similar deadly intentions.

“We need to do more than fuck with this,” Nasypany declared.

Nasypany wondered aloud how he and his team would respond if the nation’s military commanders, starting with the president of the United States, gave a shoot-down order for a plane filled with civilians. He asked members of his staff how they would react to such an order. As they scrambled to absorb the moral and practical implications, Nasypany focused on the weaponry they would use, if necessary.