Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

Nineteen passengers settled into business class, including Paige Farley-Hackel, of Newton, Massachusetts, in window seat 7A. A glamorous spiritual adviser and budding radio host, every night Paige left a five-item “gratitude list” for her husband, Allan, with items that ranged from “justice” to “skinny dipping” to “our happy marriage” to “airplanes.” Paige’s appreciation lists also included the names Ruth and Juliana: her closest friend, Ruth Clifford McCourt, and Ruth’s four-year-old daughter, Juliana, who was Paige’s goddaughter. Paige and Ruth had met years earlier, at a day spa Ruth owned before her marriage, and they considered each other kindred spirits. That morning, a driver delivered all three to Logan Airport after a night in Paige and Allan’s home. Paige, Ruth, and Juliana had planned the trip to California together, but Ruth had mileage points for free tickets on United Airlines. She and Juliana booked a separate flight on United that left Boston at nearly the same time as American Flight 11. When both planes landed in Los Angeles, they planned to drive together to La Jolla for several days at the Center for Well Being, run by Deepak Chopra. Then they intended to reward Juliana with a trip to Disneyland before flying back to Boston.

Behind Paige, bound for home in Pasadena, California, sat humanitarian Lynn Angell and her husband of thirty years, David Angell. David was an award-winning television creator and executive producer of the sitcom Frasier who’d won two Emmys as a writer for Cheers. (By coincidence, in an episode David cowrote for Frasier, a stranger left a telephone message for the title character saying that she’d soon arrive on “American Flight 11.”)

Behind the Angells, in seat 9B, sat a young man with thinning hair in Nike sneakers, jeans, and a green T-shirt who was a star of the new computer age. Daniel Lewin of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had built a business and a fortune before his thirtieth birthday by coinventing a way for the Internet to handle enormous spikes in traffic. But at the moment, Daniel was mired in a rough patch. He was flying west to a computer conference and to sign a $400 million deal he hoped would save his company, Akamai Technologies. Daniel had already seen his formerly billion-dollar fortune plummet as Akamai’s stock fell to about three dollars a share, down from a hundred times that price two years earlier. His brilliant math mind notwithstanding, Daniel defied computer nerd stereotypes: the broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding Internet visionary had won the weightlifting title Mr. Teenage Israel and spent four years as a commando in the Israeli military.

FLIGHT 11 ALSO carried five passengers from the Middle East with no plans to reach Los Angeles. Two were Egypt-born Mohamed Atta and Saudi Arabian native Abdulaziz al-Omari, who had taken that curiously roundabout route to Flight 11. On the evening of September 10 they had driven a rented car from Boston to a Comfort Inn motel in Portland, Maine. There they visited a Pizza Hut, a Walmart, a gas station, and two ATM machines. Before dawn on September 11, they drove to the Portland International Jetport for a US Airways commuter flight back to Boston.

It was something of a mystery why Atta and Omari went to Portland only to fly back to Boston the morning of September 11. One possibility was that they thought they’d seem less suspicious that way than if they drove to Logan Airport and arrived there at the same time as a large group of other Middle Eastern men. It’s also possible that they expected to be subject to less stringent security screening at a smaller airport in Maine.

Once at the Portland airport, Atta checked two suitcases: his black rolling Travelpro and a green rolling bag that apparently belonged to Omari. The green suitcase contained innocuous items including Omari’s Saudi passport and his checkbook, an Arabic-to-English dictionary, three English grammar books, a handkerchief, a twenty-dollar bill, Brylcreem antidandruff hair treatment, and a bottle of perfume.

At the Portland ticket counter, Atta asked an agent for his boarding pass for their next flight, departing Boston: American Flight 11. The agent told Atta he’d have to check in a second time when he reached Logan. Atta clenched his jaw and appeared on the verge of anger. He told the agent that he’d been assured he’d have “one-step check-in.” The agent didn’t budge or rise to Atta’s hostility. He simply told Atta that he’d better hurry if he didn’t want to miss the flight. Although Atta still looked cross, he and Omari left the ticket counter for the Portland airport’s security checkpoint.

At 5:45 a.m., Atta and Omari walked without incident through the metal detector, which was calibrated to detect the amount of metal in a gun or a large knife. Their black carry-on shoulder bags traveled down the moving belt and passed cleanly through the X-ray machine. Omari also carried a smaller black case that looked like a camera bag, which also didn’t raise alarms. Atta wore a stern expression and clothes that resembled a pilot’s uniform: dark blue collared shirt and dark pants. Omari wore a cream-colored shirt and khaki pants. After clearing security, Atta and Omari sat in the last row of the small commuter jet for the short flight to Boston.

Meanwhile, Atta’s checked bags were selected for added security screening, mainly to ensure that they didn’t contain explosives. The selection was made by a program implemented in 1997 called the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, which used an algorithm of classified factors, weighted by a computerized formula. The system also selected some passengers on each flight at random, to minimize complaints about discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin and to prevent terrorists from learning ways to avoid being chosen. The very design of the system, which targeted only passengers who checked bags, reflected the Federal Aviation Administration’s woefully mistaken belief in the summer of 2001 that hijackings were a thing of the past and that sabotage, in the form of a bomb sneaked onto a plane in the luggage of a passenger who didn’t board, represented the greatest threat to air travel. It’s unclear what led the FAA to that conclusion, especially because sixty-four hijackings had occurred worldwide between 1996 and 2001 versus only three cases of sabotage.

The Portland jetport didn’t have explosive detection equipment, and the bags weren’t opened and searched. Under FAA security rules, the only requirement was that the bags be held off the plane until the person who had checked them boarded. After Atta boarded, the ground crew tossed his checked suitcases into the small plane’s luggage compartment.

Under previous, stricter airport security rules, abandoned by the FAA several years earlier, passengers whose bags were selected for explosive screening would also undergo a body pat-down and a thorough search of their carry-on bags. But those measures took time, and the FAA had come under harsh criticism for long airport lines, which led to costly and frustrating delays and declines in on-time arrivals. As a result, those pat-down and bag search rules were eliminated. No one patted down Atta or Omari or searched their carry-on bags.

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 knives 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 cutters 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,” 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, 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 occur 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. 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 brought 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 agent 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 letter 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 lessons 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 seated 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 after 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 158 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 aboard 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 by friends as “Type A-plus.” Nearby stood thirty-eight-year-old Barbara “Bobbi” Arestegui, the Number Five attendant, petite and patient, 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 4R and checked the wind speed and air traffic. They took flight at 7:59 a.m., becoming one of the roughly forty-five hundred 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 times with air traffic control during the first minutes of the flight, all brief, routine exchanges, automatically recorded on the ground, mostly polite hellos and instructions about headings and altitude.

The smell of fresh-brewed coffee 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,” 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, 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 years 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 controllers 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 wondered 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 course 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,” Zalewski told a colleague, using controller lingo for “no radio.” That could mean trouble, but this sort of thing happened often enough 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.”

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 sound 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., 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: “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. 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 hijacking 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.