“Really good readers, whew! These must be sixth-graders!” the President effused. “Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills. I bet they practice, too. Don’t you? Reading more than they watch TV? Anybody do that? Read more than you watch TV?”
The U.S. military command was equally out of touch as the horror continued to unfold on television. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Henry Shelton, was somewhere over the Atlantic en route to Europe. That left his deputy, Air Force General Richard Myers, the Vice Chairman, in charge of the country’s armed forces. But incredibly, he would remain unaware of what was going on around him during the entire series of attacks.
Myers was on Capitol Hill waiting to meet with Georgia Senator Max Cleland about his upcoming confirmation hearings to become the new Joint Chiefs chairman. While in Cleland’s outer office, he watched live television reports following the first crash into the World Trade Center and then went into Cleland’s office for his routine meeting. There he would remain for the next forty-five minutes, self-promoting his talents to lead the military as the rest of the targets were attacked and the country succumbed to enormous death and destruction.
Through it all, the general in charge of the country’s military was completely ignorant of the fact that the United States was under its worst attack in nearly two centuries. Nor did he know that about forty minutes earlier, the President had decided to declare war. “It was initially pretty confusing,” Myers later said. “You hate to admit it, but we hadn’t thought about this.”
As President Bush continued reading with the second-graders, the situation within the burning towers of the World Trade Center was becoming ever more desperate. At 9:06, NYPD helicopter pilot Timothy Hayes radioed the message “Unable to land on roof. . . . Captain, this is impossible. This is undoable. I can’t see the roof.” He later added, “The smoke had covered 90 percent of the entire roof, so I couldn’t even see the roof to make an evaluation of where we could go. We were looking at probably fifteen to twenty stories burning simultaneously. Probably well over a thousand degrees, you know, if not more. I never felt so helpless and guilty in my life. When you get there with these millions of dollars of equipment . . . and there was absolutely nothing we could do. There was nothing. We couldn’t get on that roof, we couldn’t get people out of that building.”
Hayes could actually see people inside the buildings, leaving him with the heart-wrenching feeling that people were trapped and he couldn’t reach them. As he pulled away, the hundreds or thousands still trapped on the upper floors of the towers saw their last hope disappear. Some flapped draperies to try to attract attention. Without someone to break open the locked doors to the roof or pluck them from it, all they could do was hang out of windows trying to find some smoke-free air to breath. The towers had now become sky-high chimneys.
Within minutes, people began jumping, preferring a quick death to burning alive or suffocating from the smoke. “People falling out of building,” said the pilot of the chopper. “Jumper,” he added. And they just kept coming. “Several jumpers from the Window [Windows on the World] at One World Trade Center.” By 9:09, people were also beginning to throw themselves out of Tower Two. “People are jumping out the side of a large hole,” said a caller to fire rescue. “Possibly no one catching them.”
On the street, Port Authority police officers reported the horrible scene unfolding in front of them. “There’s body parts all over the place,” said one officer. “So much—bodies blew out of the building. . . . There’s got to be hundreds of people killed in there. There’s body parts like five blocks away.” Another reported, “I’ve got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building onto . . . in front of One World Trade . . . bodies are just coming from out of the sky.”
“Christian! Christian! Christian!,” Mable Chan began yelling on the sidewalk of Greenwich Street near Tower One. Minutes before, the NBC
Dateline
producer had heard the second plane thunder past the window of her apartment and then the giant BOOM as it smashed into Tower Two. Now she had just spotted her colleague Christian Martin, also an NBC producer, whom she was trying to locate in order to begin covering the story.
Unable to find their camera crew, Chan and Martin offered a tourist $500 for a one-day rental of his small video camera. Then they began realizing the horror taking place around them. “Christian, I just saw an elbow!” Chan said. “Over there on the roadside, it’s charred.” Christian Martin looked where Chan was pointing. “Shit!” he said in disgust. “This shit has to be a terrorist act.” “And we’re in the middle of it,” added Chan.
Like people trapped on a sinking ship seeking the highest point above the water, those in the twin towers, blocked from going down, were climbing up as high as they could go. But it would be a climb to nowhere. “A hundred and twenty people trapped on the 106th floor,” exclaimed a caller in Windows on the World. “A lot of smoke . . . Can’t go down the stairs!” “Evacuation to the top floor of World Trade Center,” said another caller a few seconds later. The problem was the same at Tower Two. “Hundred and fifth floor,” a caller yelled. “People trapped! Open roof to gain access!” But, ironically, although some would make it to the roof through open doors, other doors were locked to keep potential jumpers, and simple spectators, off. Nevertheless, because of the dense smoke, even those who made it to the roof were doomed. “The roof of the South Tower,” said NYPD helicopter pilot Timothy Hayes, “was totally obscured.”
At 9:13, the photo op over, Bush rose to his feet to leave the classroom—seven minutes after being notified of the attacks by Card and deciding to go to war. And eleven minutes after possibly seeing the second attack himself.
For more than half an hour, air traffic controllers in both Washington and Indianapolis had been searching madly for American Flight 77, which took off from Washington’s Dulles Airport for Los Angeles at 8:16
A.M
. At 8:56, all contact was lost. “You guys never been able to raise him at all?” asked a radar operator at Indianapolis Control. “No,” said the air traffic controller. “We called [the] company. They can’t even get ahold of him, so there’s no, no, uh, no radio communications and no radar.”
At the heart of the FAA’s massive nationwide network is its control center in Herndon, Virginia, a NASA-like Mission Control facility with walls covered with video screens and small blinking lights on expansive electronic maps. Hours earlier, Ben Sliney arrived for his first day at work as national operations manager, the person responsible for juggling all the flights in the air and making sure they land safely. A lawyer, he once brought the FAA to court on behalf of air traffic controllers.
By 9:15, with two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and another still missing, the FAA was in full crisis mode. At the front of the control room, flight numbers were quickly scribbled on a white dry-erase board. They belonged to planes suspected of being hijacked. Other staff workers manned telephones, calling airlines to determine the status of various questionable flights. As aircraft were checked out, their flight numbers were scratched off the list. By 9:20, there were still eleven flight numbers on the list, including American 77.
After taking a quick survey of the most experienced controllers in the room and talking with others across the country during a massive conference call, Sliney began seeing the pattern as a possible wave of terrorist attacks. His first move was to immediately halt all flights bound for New York and New England. Then Washington, D.C., was added to the list, followed by Los Angeles, where the two planes that crashed into the Trade Center were bound. Finally, at 9:25, with Flight 77 growing more worrisome, Sliney made a bold decision. He ordered a full groundstop—all commercial and private flight activity across the country was grounded; no flights were to take off for any reason. At that moment, there were 4,452 planes over America.
A moment earlier, at 9:24, the FAA had alerted officials at NORAD about the missing American Flight 77. Officials there immediately sent out a scramble order to their Air National Guard unit at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. At 129 miles away, it was the closest alert base to Washington.
As Langley’s scramble horn blared and the battle stations light turned yellow, Maj. Dean Eckmann, a Northwest Airlines pilot serving his regular National Guard rotation, ran for his fighter. Joining him were Maj. Brad Derrig and Capt. Craig Borgstrom. Six minutes later, NORAD’s three F-16s, each loaded with six missiles, were wheels up. The mission for Eckmann and his two fellow pilots was to somehow find Flight 77 before it found its target, and possibly shoot it down. But that would require the authorization of the President, still in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida. “I don’t think any fighter pilot in the United States would have ever thought they would be flying combat air patrols over American cities,” Eckmann said. “That was huge, huge culture shock.”
At 9:29, Dulles tower air traffic control operator Danielle O’Brien spotted an unidentified blip on her radar screen. Although she didn’t know it at the time, it was the missing Flight 77. Seventy minutes earlier, she had bid farewell to the flight crew with her uncustomary “good luck.” The alarmed controllers quickly called to warn their colleagues at Reagan National Airport, which was located close to downtown Washington. “Fast-moving primary target,” they said, indicating that a plane without a transponder was heading their way.
At the time, the plane was about twelve to fourteen miles southwest of Dulles and moving at lightning speed. Tom Howell, the controller next to O’Brien, glanced over at her screen and his eyes grew wide. “Oh my God!” he yelled. “It looks like he’s headed to the White House! We’ve got a target headed right for the White House!” At full throttle, American Flight 77 was traveling at about 500 miles per hour directly toward P-56, the prohibited airspace surrounding the White House and the Capitol. Because of its speed and the way it maneuvered and turned, everyone in the radar room of Dulles Airport’s tower assumed it was a military jet.
Among the passengers on Flight 77 were the hijackers from the Valencia Motel in Laurel, Maryland, and Barbara Olson, wife of U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson. Originally, Barbara Olson had planned to fly to Los Angeles the day before, on Monday, September 10. But because her husband’s birthday was on the eleventh, she decided to leave the next morning so she could spend a little time with him on that day. After saying good-bye early in the morning, she called him at the Justice Department about 7:40, just before boarding the plane, which was scheduled to depart at 8:10.
Shortly after nine, Olson heard about the hijackings and quickly turned on his office television, worried that one of the planes might be Barbara’s. But after a brief mental calculation, he figured her plane could not have gotten to New York that quickly.
Suddenly, a secretary rushed in. “Barbara is on the phone,” she said. Olson jumped for the receiver. “Our plane has been hijacked!” she said quickly, but after a few seconds the phone went dead. Olson immediately called the command center at Justice and alerted them to the fact that there was yet another hijacked plane—and that his wife was on it. He also said she was able to communicate, though her first call had been cut off.
Minutes later, Barbara called back. Speaking very quietly, she said the hijackers did not know she was making this call. All the passengers, she said, had been herded to the back by men who had used knives and box cutters to hijack the plane. The pilot, she said, had announced that the plane had been hijacked shortly after takeoff.
Ted Olson then told her about the two other planes that had been hijacked that morning and flown into the World Trade Center. “I think she must have been partially in shock from the fact that she was on a hijacked plane,” Olson recalled. “She absorbed the information.”
“What shall I tell the pilot? What can I tell the pilot to do?” Barbara said, trying to remain calm. Ted asked if she could tell where the plane was at that moment. She said she could see houses and, after asking someone, said she thought the plane was heading northeast.
Then they reassured each other that the plane was still up in the air, still flying, and that it would come out all right. “It’s going to come out okay,” Olson told his wife, who agreed. But Ted Olson knew the situation was anything but all right. “I was pretty sure everything was not going to be okay,” he recalled. “I, by this time, had made the calculation that these were suicide persons, bent on destroying as much of America as they could.” “I love you,” she said as they exchanged feelings for each other. Then the phone suddenly went dead again. While waiting for another call, Olson remained glued to the television. It was now about 9:30.
In Florida at that moment, far away from the madness in New York, President Bush had finished his photo op and had been given a quick update on the state of the crisis. Then he strolled into the school’s library, where he had originally planned to give a speech promoting his education policies. Instead, he told the children and teachers that he would have to leave.
“I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington,” he said, because the country had suffered “an apparent terrorist attack.” With one brief exception, that was the last anyone would see of either the President or Vice President until long after the crisis ended.
Within the tower at Dulles Airport, the tension rippling through the air was almost visible. The supervisor in the radar room began a countdown as the unknown plane got closer and closer to the White House. “He’s twelve miles west,” he said. “He’s moving very fast eastbound— Okay, guys, where is he now? . . . Eleven miles west, ten miles west, nine miles west.” About that point, John picked up the phone to the Secret Service office at the White House. “We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity,” he said, counting down the miles. “Eight miles west. Seven miles west.”