It’s unclear what effect those added security measures might have had on Atta and Omari’s plans. During the two previous months, Atta had purchased two Swiss Army knives42 and a Leatherman multitool with a short knife. During his trip to Spain earlier in the summer, Atta reported to his al-Qaeda contact that he and two fellow pilot trainees, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had been able to carry box cutters43 onto planes during their test flights. It’s unknown whether Atta or Omari carried those or other weapons through security in Portland or Boston on September 11, but even if they had, it might not have mattered to ground screeners. Federal rules in place in the summer of 2001 allowed airline passengers to carry knives with blades shorter than four inches. Although security screeners had discretion to confiscate short-bladed knives using “common sense,”44 government studies showed persistent gaps in the performance of low-wage human screeners. They worked for the airlines and consequently were encouraged to keep security lines short and fast-moving. Screeners were supposed to conduct “random and continuous” checks of carry-on bags, but in practice that rarely happened.
Gaps in airport security went deeper than screening rules and personnel. For instance, once a would-be hijacker passed the security checkpoint, he had every reason to think he was in the clear, with no worries about being confronted on a domestic flight by an armed air marshal. In 2001, the FAA employed only thirty-three such marshals,45 a sharp drop from the 1970s, and they were assigned exclusively to international flights considered to be high risk. That was the case despite a statement published by the FAA just eight weeks before September 11 in the Federal Register: “Terrorism can occur46 anytime, anywhere in the United States. Members of foreign terrorist groups, representatives from state sponsors of terrorism and radical fundamentalist elements from many nations are present in the United States. Thus, an increasing threat to civil aviation from both foreign sources and potential domestic ones exists and needs to be prevented and countered.”
The US Airways flight from Portland landed in Boston at 6:45 a.m., leaving Atta and Omari plenty of time to catch American Flight 11 to Los Angeles, departing from Terminal B. They passed through security screening at Logan Airport, again without incident. Within minutes of arriving in Boston, Atta received a call on his cellphone from a pay phone in Logan’s nearby Terminal C, which served planes from United Airlines, among others. The caller was a key collaborator in Atta’s deadly plan.
The two men waited at Gate 32 with other passengers, but before boarding Flight 11, Atta had a strange interaction.47 First Officer Lynn Howland had just arrived in Boston after copiloting the red-eye flight from San Francisco on the plane that would be redesignated American Flight 11. As she walked off the 767 and entered the passenger lounge, a man she didn’t know approached her and asked if she’d be flying the plane back across the country. Based on his clothing, he looked like a pilot hoping to catch a ride to Los Angeles on an available jump seat.
“No, I just brought48 the aircraft in,” Howland told him.
The man abruptly turned his back and walked away. Later she identified him as Mohamed Atta.
As he boarded Flight 11, Atta asked a gate agent49 whether the two bags he’d checked earlier in Portland had been loaded onto the plane. Atta had reason for concern about his suitcase, especially if someone familiar with Arabic decided to search it prior to Flight 11’s takeoff. Inside his black rolling Travelpro bag was the handwritten instruction letter50 about how to prepare spiritually and logistically to hijack a plane. Even without knowledge of Arabic, a sharp screener might have grown suspicious when he or she noticed the videotaped lessons51 on flying Boeing jets, the other pilot gear, the folding knife, and the canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. To track down Atta’s bags, the gate agent called Flight 11’s ground crew chief, Donald Bennett. He reported that the two bags had arrived, but too late. His crew had already loaded and locked the big jet’s luggage compartment, and the airline’s desire for on-time departures prohibited reopening it so close to takeoff. Because the bags had previously passed through security, no one had reason to inspect them just because they arrived late. Atta and Omari’s bags got new tags, for a later flight to Los Angeles.
At 7:39 a.m., Atta and Omari stepped aboard and found seats 8D and 8G, the middle pair of Flight 11’s two-two-two business cabin seat configuration.
Already seated52 were Saudi Arabian brothers Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, in seats 2A and 2B, in the first row of first class. The plane didn’t have a Row 1, so those seats placed them directly behind the cockpit. Their checked bags were selected for explosives screening at Logan, just as Atta’s and Omari’s had been in Portland. No explosives were found, and the bags were loaded aboard Flight 11. Under the new FAA rules, just like Atta and Omari, neither Shehri brother had to undergo an added personal screening such as a pat-down or carry-on search for weapons or contraband.
The fifth member of their group, Saudi native Satam al-Suqami, didn’t undergo added screening, either. Shortly after53 Atta and Omari boarded, Suqami made his way to seat 10B, on an aisle in business class.
The five men had chosen their seats aboard Flight 11 in a way that gave them access to the aisles and placed all of them close to the cockpit. By chance, Suqami’s seat in business class put him directly behind tech entrepreneur and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin.
Flight 11 had a capacity of 15854 passengers, but as the crew prepared for takeoff, only 81 seats were filled: 9 passengers in first class, 19 in business class, and 53 in coach.
Shortly before takeoff, American Airlines flight service manager Michael Woodward walked aboard55 for a final check.
In first class he found Karen Martin, the Number One, or head flight attendant, who was known for running an especially tight ship. Tall and blond, forty years old and fiercely competitive, Karen was described by56 friends as “Type A-plus.” Nearby stood thirty-eight-year-old Barbara “Bobbi” Arestegui, the Number Five attendant, petite and patient,57 known for her ability to calm even the most difficult passenger.
Michael asked if they were ready to go.
“Yep, everything’s fine,” Karen Martin said. Michael spotted his friend Kathy Nicosia, the Number Two attendant, and waved.
Before he left, Michael scanned down the aisle, almost out of habit, to see if the attendants had closed all the overhead bins. As he looked through the business section, Michael locked eyes with the passenger in seat 8D. A chill passed through him, a queasy gut feeling he couldn’t quite place and couldn’t shake. Something about Mohamed Atta’s brooding look seemed wrong. But the flight was already behind schedule, and Michael wouldn’t challenge a passenger simply for glaring at him. He turned and stepped off Flight 11, and a gate agent closed the door behind him.
Buttoned up and ready to go, crew and passengers aboard Flight 11 began the usual drill: seats upright, belts fastened, tray tables secured into place, cellphones switched off. Flight attendants buckled into jump seats. Its wings loaded with fuel, the Boeing 767 rolled back from Gate 32. Inside their locked cockpit, Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr. taxied the silver jet away from the terminal.
Cleared for takeoff, they turned onto Logan’s Runway 4R58 and checked the wind speed and air traffic. They took flight at 7:59 a.m.,59 becoming one of the roughly forty-five hundred60 passenger and general aviation planes that would be airborne all across the United States by late morning.
Moments after takeoff, the pilots made a U-turn over Boston Harbor and pointed the plane west, flying through clear skies several miles above the wide asphalt ribbon of the Massachusetts Turnpike, headed toward the New York border.
During the first fourteen minutes of Flight 11, pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness followed instructions from an FAA air traffic controller on the ground and eased the 767 up to 26,000 feet, just under its initial cruising altitude of 29,000 feet. They spoke nineteen times61 with air traffic control during the first minutes of the flight, all brief, routine exchan
ges, automatically recorded on the ground, mostly polite hellos and instructions about headings and altitude.
The smell of fresh-brewed coffee62 wafted through the cabin as flight attendants waited for the pilots to switch off the Fasten Seatbelt signs. First-class passengers would soon enjoy “silver service,”63 provided by Karen Martin and Bobbi Arestegui, with white tablecloths for continental breakfast. Business passengers would receive similar but less fancy options from attendants Sara Low and Jean Rogér, with help from Dianne Snyder. Muffins, juice, and coffee would have to sustain passengers in coach, served by Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, with Karen Nicosia working in the rear galley. The lone male attendant, Jeffrey Collman, would help in coach or first class as needed. Regardless of seating class, everyone on board would be invited to watch comedian Eddie Murphy talk to animals during the in-flight movie, Dr. Dolittle 2.
Fifteen minutes into the flight, shortly before 8:14 a.m., the pilots verbally confirmed a radioed request from an air traffic controller named Peter Zalewski to make a 20-degree right turn. The plane turned. Sixteen seconds later,64 Zalewski instructed Flight 11 to climb to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The plane climbed, but only to 29,000 feet. No one in the cockpit replied to Zalewski’s order. Ten seconds passed.
Zalewski tried again. Soft-spoken, forty-three years old, after nineteen years65 with the FAA, Zalewski had grown accustomed to the relentless pressure of air traffic control. He spent his days in a darkened, windowless room at an FAA facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, known as Boston Center, one of twenty-two regional air traffic control centers nationwide. A simplified way to describe the job done by Zalewski and the 260 other controllers66 at Boston Center would be to call it flight separation, or doing everything necessary to keep airplanes a safe distance from one another. Zalewski’s assignment called for him to keep watch on his radar screen, or “scope,” for planes flying above 20,000 feet in a defined area west of Boston. When they left his geographic sector, they became another FAA controller’s responsibility.
When Zalewski received no reply from the pilots of Flight 11, he wondered67 if John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness weren’t paying attention, or perhaps had a problem with the radio frequency. But he didn’t have much time to let the problem sort itself out. He began to grow concerned that, at its current altitude and position, Flight 11 might be on a collision course68 with planes flying inbound toward Logan. Zalewski checked his equipment, tried the radio frequency Flight 11 used when it first took off, then used an emergency frequency to hail the plane. Still he heard nothing in response.
“He’s NORDO,”69 Zalewski told a colleague, using controller lingo for “no radio.” That could mean trouble, but this sort of thing happened often enough70 that it didn’t immediately merit emergency action. Usually it resulted from distracted pilots or technical problems that could be handled with a variety of remedies. Still, silent planes represented potential problems for controllers trying to maintain separation. As one of Zalewski’s colleagues tracked Flight 11 on radar, moving other planes out of the way, Zalewski tried repeatedly to reach the Flight 11 pilots.
8:14:08 a.m.: “American Eleven, Boston.”71
Fifteen seconds later, he called out the same message.
Ten seconds later: “American one-one . . . how do you hear me?”
Four more tries in the next two minutes. Nothing.
8:17:05 a.m.: “American Eleven, American one-one, Boston.”
At one second before 8:18 a.m., flight controllers at Boston Center heard a brief, unknown sound72 on the radio frequency used by Flight 11 and other nearby flights. They didn’t know where it came from, and they couldn’t be certain, but it sounded like a scream.
Zalewski tried again. And again. And again. Still NORDO.
Another Boston Center controller asked a different American Airlines pilot, on a plane inbound to Boston from Seattle, to try to hail Flight 11, but that didn’t work, either. That pilot reported Flight 11’s failure to respond to an American Airlines dispatcher who oversaw transatlantic flights at the airline’s operations center in Fort Worth, Texas.
Then things literally took a turn for the worse.
Watching on radar, Zalewski saw Flight 11 turn abruptly to the northwest, deviating from its assigned route, heading toward Albany, New York. Again, Boston Center controllers moved away planes in its path, all the way from the ground up to 35,000 feet, just in case. This was strange and troubling, but sometimes technology failed, and still neither Zalewski nor anyone else at Boston Center considered it a reason to declare an emergency.
Then, at 8:21 a.m.,73 twenty-two minutes after takeoff, someone in the cockpit switched off Flight 11’s transponder. Transponders were required for all planes that fly above 10,000 feet, and it would be hard to imagine any reason a pilot of Flight 11 would purposely turn it off.
Without a working transponder, controllers could still see Flight 11 as a dot on their primary radar scopes, but they could only guess at its speed. They also had no idea of its altitude, and it would be easy to “lose” the plane amid the constant ebb and flow of air traffic. Seven minutes had passed since the pilots’ last radio transmission, after which they failed to answer multiple calls from Zalewski in air traffic control and from other planes. The 767 had veered off course and failed to climb to its assigned altitude. Now it had no working transponder. All signs pointed to a crisis of electrical, mechanical, or human origin, but Zalewski still couldn’t be sure.
Zalewski turned to a Boston Center supervisor and said quietly:74 “Would you please come over here? I think something is seriously wrong with this plane.”
But he refused to think the worst without more evidence. When the supervisor asked if he thought the plane had been hijacked, Zalewski replied: “Absolutely not.75 No way.” Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it remained possible in Zalewski’s mind that an extraordinarily rare combination of mechanical and technical problems had unleashed havoc aboard Flight 11.
Zalewski’s mindset had roots in his training. FAA controllers were taught to anticipate a specific sign or communication from a plane before declaring a hijacking76 in progress. A pilot might surreptitiously key in the transponder code “7500,” a universal distress signal, which would automatically flash the word hijack on the flight controller’s green-tinted radar screen. If the problem was mechanical, a pilot could key in “7600” for a malfunctioning transponder, or “7700” for an emergency. Otherwise, a pilot under duress could speak the seemingly innocuous word “trip” during a radio call when describing a flight’s course. An air traffic controller would instantly understand from that code word that a hijacker was on board. Boston Center had heard or seen no verbal or electronic tipoffs of a hostile takeover of Flight 11.
But all that training revolved around certain narrow expectations about how hijackings transpired, based on decades of hard-earned experience. Above all, those expectations relied on an assumption that one or both of the pilots, John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness, would remain at the controls.
The idea that hijackers might incapacitate or eliminate the pilots and fly a Boeing 767 themselves didn’t register in the minds of Boston Center controllers. To them, the old rules still applied. Zalewski kept trying to hail the plane.
Chapter 3
“A Beautiful Day to Fly”
United Airlines Flight 175
Lee and Eunice Hanson sat in the kitchen of their barn-red home in Easton, Connecticut, nestled on a winding country road past fruit farms and signs offering fresh eggs and fresh manure. As they ate1 breakfast, the Hansons talked about their bubbly two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Christine, who that morning was taking her first airplane flight. Christine would be flying from Boston to Los Angeles with her parents, Peter and Sue Kim, Lee and Eunice’s son and daughter-in-law, aboard United Flight 175. Lee and Eunice spent the morning watching the clock and imagining each step along the young family’s journey, turning routine stages of the trip into exciting milestones, as only loving g
randparents could.
“Boy, have they got a beautiful day to fly!”
“They’re probably in the tunnel on the way to the airport!”
“I bet they’re boarding!”
Peter, Sue, and Christine were due home in five days, after which they planned to visit Eunice and Lee for a friend’s wedding. As soon as the trio walked through the door, Lee and Eunice intended to quiz them for a minute-by-minute account of their California adventure.
The Hansons didn’t know it, but that morning’s flight path2 for United Flight 175 crossed the sky directly northwest of their property. If they had stepped away from breakfast, walked outside to their wooden back deck, and looked above the trees on their three sylvan acres, they might have spotted a tiny dot in the morning sky that was their family’s plane. Lee and Eunice could have waved goodbye.
United Flight 175 was the fraternal twin of American Flight 11: a wide-bodied Boeing 767, bound for Los Angeles, fully loaded with fuel and partly filled with passengers. The two planes left the ground fifteen minutes apart.
Minutes after its 8:14 a.m. takeoff, United Flight 175 crossed the Massachusetts border and cruised smoothly in the thin air nearly six miles above northwestern Connecticut. The blue skies ahead were “severe clear,” with unlimited visibility, as Captain Victor Saracini gazed through the cockpit window.
Saracini,3 a former Navy pilot, had earned a reputation as the “Forrest Gump Captain” for entertaining delayed passengers with long passages of memorized movie dialogue. Alongside him sat First Officer Michael Horrocks,4 a former Marine Corps pilot who called home before the flight to urge his nine-year-old daughter to get up for school. “I love you up to the moon and back,” he told her. With that, she rose from bed.
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