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

Pray that you and all your brothers will conquer, win, and hit the target without fear. Ask Allah to bless you with martyrdom, and welcome it with planning, patience, and care… .

When the storming begins, strike like heroes who are determined not to return to this world. Glorify [Allah—that is, cry “Allah is Great”], because this cry will strike terror in the hearts of the infidels. He said, “Strike above the necks. Strike all mortals.” And know that paradise has been adorned for you with the sweetest things. The nymphs, wearing their finest, are calling out to you, “Come hither, followers of Allah!”

If the group of terrorists on United Flight 93 tried to follow the pattern of their collaborators aboard Flights 11, 175, and 77, they were clearly one hijacker short. A Saudi man who authorities later suspected was supposed to have been the twentieth hijacker had landed a month earlier at Florida’s Orlando International Airport, arriving on a flight from London. He landed with no return ticket or hotel reservations, carried $2,800 in cash and no credit cards, spoke no English, and claimed he didn’t know his next destination after he intended to spend six days in the United States. He grew angry when questioned by an alert immigrations inspector named José E. Melendez-Perez, who suspected that the man was trying to immigrate illegally. Melendez-Perez thought the Saudi fit the profile of a “hit man.” He consulted with supervisors, then forced the man onto a flight to Dubai, via London.

Waiting in vain that day at the Orlando airport was Mohamed Atta.

AT 8:00 A.M., Flight 93’s scheduled departure time, the 757 pushed back from the Newark gate, but it didn’t get far. It fell into a tarmac conga line with perhaps fifteen other planes, stopping and starting, slowly taxiing toward the runway. Passengers in first class drank juice, while those in coach went thirsty. Ten, twenty, forty minutes crawled past.

A few seconds before 8:42 a.m., pilots Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. heard the command from the tower: “United Ninety-Three … cleared for takeoff.”

Nearly a half hour had elapsed since the start of the hijacking of American Flight 11. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney had already called American Airlines offices in North Carolina and Boston and had provided information about the hijackers’ identities and tactics. Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS had been notified about Flight 11 five minutes earlier. The F-15s at Otis Air Force Base had been ordered to battle stations less than a minute before. The pilots of United Flight 175 had just notified air traffic control about a strange radio transmission they had heard from Flight 11.

At the World Trade Center in New York, a businessman from New Jersey named Ron Clifford straightened his yellow tie and pushed through the revolving doors leading to the lobby of the North Tower. If United Flight 93’s runway delay had lasted a little longer, the pilots, flight attendants, and passengers aboard that plane might have seen American Airlines Flight 11 zooming through cloudless blue skies toward the very tower, only fourteen miles to the northeast, where Ron awaited what he thought would be the most important meeting of his career.

It’s also possible that if Flight 93 had been delayed a bit longer, it would have been caught in a “ground stop” and would never have taken off at all.

AS UNITED FLIGHT 93 took flight and headed west, the men and women on board were in a kind of suspended animation, unaware that the world had already changed.

At 8:52 a.m., ten minutes after Flight 93 became airborne, a male flight attendant aboard United Flight 175 called the airline’s maintenance center to report the murder of both pilots, the stabbing of a flight attendant, and his belief that hijackers were flying the plane. Ten minutes passed, then a maintenance supervisor called United’s operations center in Chicago to report the hijacking of Flight 175. After initial confusion about whether the report actually involved American Flight 11, United’s managers spread word up their chain of command to United’s chief operating officer, Andy Studdert, and the company’s chief executive, James Goodwin. It took another thirty minutes to activate a crisis center at United’s Chicago headquarters.

Beginning at 9:03 a.m., several United flight dispatchers used the cockpit email system called ACARS to inform pilots that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. But those messages didn’t include specifics about hijackings, warnings to enhance cockpit security, or suggestions about other precautions.

At 9:08 a.m., United Airlines flight dispatchers based at the company’s operations headquarters in Chicago sent messages to transcontinental planes waiting to take off, informing crew that a ground stop had been placed on commercial flights at airports around New York.

Still no one sent word to Flight 93 or other vulnerable flights already in the air.

By 9:15 a.m., as the Twin Towers burned, Flight 93 had spent more than ten minutes at its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Flight attendants would have begun cabin service. Pilots Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. engaged the 757’s autopilot as they flew west over Pennsylvania. All seemed normal.

They remained oblivious to the hijackings and suicide-murder crashes of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 by men from the Middle East who sat in first class and business, who killed passengers and crew members, who forced their way into cockpits and took control. No one told them that a hijacker on Flight 11 had said “planes,” plural. They also hadn’t been told about the disappearance of American Flight 77, which had occurred roughly twenty minutes earlier. During communications with ground controllers, the Flight 93 pilots’ biggest worry seemed to be some light chop and a headwind that might hinder their plan to make up for the ground delay and land in San Francisco close to their scheduled arrival time of 11:14 a.m.

During fourteen routine communications from FAA ground controllers in the first minutes of Flight 93’s journey, no one mentioned to Jason Dahl or LeRoy Homer Jr. the crisis affecting at least three other westbound transcontinental flights, the fighter jets patrolling the sky over New York City, or the possibility that other commercial flights might be victimized.

Then, almost simultaneously, worry struck two individuals on the ground who had personal connections to the pilots of Flight 93. Both tried to reach the men in the cockpit.

MELODIE HOMER HEARD her alarm early that morning, then fell back asleep. As always when he flew, her husband, LeRoy, had laid out his uniform the night before, with his epaulets and ID in his pockets, so he could dress silently in the bathroom without waking her. Before he left for the ninety-minute drive from their southern New Jersey home to the Newark airport, LeRoy whispered that he was leaving. He said he’d call when he landed and that he loved her.

Later that morning, after dropping off their infant daughter at a neighbor’s house, Melodie returned home and turned on the television as she made breakfast. She watched, stunned, as a plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As her mind reeled, through her shock Melodie vaguely heard a newscaster say something about a possible problem with air traffic control. She grabbed a sheet of paper from the refrigerator with LeRoy’s flight information and called the United Airlines flight operations office at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, which handled all New York–area flights for the airline. She told a receptionist that LeRoy was the first officer on Flight 93, and that she worried whether he was all right. After a short hold, the receptionist returned and assured her, “I promise you, everything is okay.”