Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  None of the five men or their luggage was chosen by the computerized system or by airport workers for additional security screenings.34

  Chapter 4

  “I Think We’re Being Hijacked”

  American Airlines Flight 11

  When American Flight 11 took off, flight attendant Betty “Bee” Ong sat buckled into a jump seat in the tail1 section, on the left side of the plane, ready to begin her onboard routine. From that vantage point, she had a direct view up an aisle through coach and business into first class.

  Less than twenty minutes after takeoff, just as she normally would have begun serving passengers breakfast, Betty witnessed the reason why Flight 11 changed direction without authorization, why someone switched off the transponder, why the cockpit stopped communicating with air traffic controller Peter Zalewski at the FAA’s Boston Center, and why it didn’t answer calls from other planes.

  At 8:19 a.m., six minutes after Flight 11 pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness stopped responding to Zalewski’s calls, Betty grabbed an AT&T telephone called an Airfone, built into the 767. Airfones were common on cross-country flights in 2001, and many planes had an Airfone, for use by passengers with credit cards, on the back of every middle seat in coach. Betty dialed a toll-free reservations number for American Airlines, a number she often used to help passengers make connecting flights. The call2 went through to the airline’s Southeastern Reservations Office in central North Carolina, where a reservations agent named Vanessa Minter answered.

  “I think we’re being hijacked,”3 Betty said, her voice calm but fearful.

  Vanessa Minter asked Betty to hold. She searched for an emergency button on her phone but couldn’t find one. Instead, she speed-dialed the American Airlines international resolution desk on the other side of her office and told agent Winston Sadler what Betty had said. Sadler jumped onto the call and pressed an emergency button on his phone. That allowed the airline’s call system to record about four minutes of what would be a more than twenty-five-minute call from Betty that would provide crucial information about what occurred and who was responsible. Sadler also sent an alarm that notified Nydia Gonzalez, the reservations office supervisor, who also joined the call.

  “Um, the cockpit’s not answering,” Betty said. “Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and, um, I think there is Mace—that we can’t breathe. I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.”

  For employees of a call center who normally helped stranded travelers find new flights, Betty’s call was beyond shocking. After some confusion about who Betty was and what flight she was on, during which the airline employees asked Betty to repeat herself several times, eventually they understood that Betty was the Number Three flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11. Once that was established, Betty stammered at times as she did her best to describe a bloody, chaotic scene.

  “Our, our Number One got stabbed. Our purser is stabbed. Ah, nobody knows who stabbed who and we can’t even get up to business class right now because nobody can breathe. Our Number One is, is stabbed right now. And our Number Five. Our first-class passenger that, ah, first, ah, class galley flight attendant and our purser has been stabbed and we can’t get to the cockpit, the door won’t open. Hello?”

  She remained polite and self-possessed, even as her throat tightened with fear. Betty repeated herself several more times in response to the questions of reservation office employees.

  Supervisor Nydia Gonzalez asked if Betty heard any announcements from the cockpit, and Betty said there had been none.

  Two minutes into Betty’s call, at 8:21 a.m., Gonzalez called Craig Marquis, the manager on duty at American Airlines’ operations control headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, to report an emergency aboard Flight 11, with stabbings and an unresponsive cockpit.

  Meanwhile, Betty turned to other flight attendants clustered around her at the back of the plane: “Can anybody get up to the cockpit? Can anybody get up to the cockpit?” Then she returned to the call: “We can’t even get into the cockpit. We don’t know who’s up there.”

  At that point, reservations agent Winston Sadler displayed the widely held but tragically mistaken belief that only the airline’s pilots could fly a Boeing 767. “Well,” Sadler told Betty, “if they were shrewd”—meaning the original crew—“they would keep the door closed and . . .”

  Betty: “I’m sorry?”

  Sadler: “Well, would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?”

  Betty: “I think the guys [hijackers] are up there. They might have gone there, jammed their way up there, or something. Nobody can call the cockpit. We can’t even get inside.”

  Sadler went silent.

  Betty: “Is anybody still there?”

  Sadler: “Yes, we’re still here.”

  Betty: “Okay. I’m staying on the line as well.”

  Sadler: “Okay.”

  Nydia Gonzalez returned to the call. After asking Betty to repeat herself several times, Gonzalez asked: “Have you guys called anyone else?”

  “No,” Betty answered. “Somebody’s calling medical and we can’t get a doc—”

  The tape ended, but the call continued for more than twenty minutes as Nydia Gonzalez and Vanessa Minter took notes and relayed information from Betty to Craig Marquis at the airline’s control headquarters in Fort Worth. Throughout, Gonzalez reassured Betty, urging her to stay calm and telling her she was doing a wonderful job.4

  “Betty, how are you holding up, honey?” Gonzalez asked. “Okay. You’re gonna be fine. . . . Relax, honey. Betty, Betty.”

  Several times Betty reported that the plane was flying erratically, almost turning sideways.

  “Please pray for us,”5 Betty asked. “Oh God . . . oh God.”

  Even as his anxiety rose about American Flight 11, Boston Center air traffic controller Peter Zalewski knew nothing about Betty Ong’s anguished, ongoing call. No one from American Airlines’ Fort Worth operations control headquarters relayed information6 to the FAA’s Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, to FAA headquarters in Washington, or to anyone else. As minutes passed and commandeered Flight 11 flew west across Massachusetts and over New York, communications among the airline, the FAA, and U.S. military officials were sporadic at best, incomplete or nonexistent at worst.

  Adding to the stress, Zalewski couldn’t devote his entire attention to the troubled American Airlines flight. Other planes continued to take off from Logan Airport and enter Zalewski’s assigned geographic sector. One of those flights was United Airlines Flight 175. For eleven minutes, an unusually long time, Zalewski had no contact with Flight 11.

  Then, at 8:24 a.m., five minutes after the start of Betty Ong’s ongoing call to American Airlines’ reservations center, Zalewski heard three strange clicks on the radio frequency assigned to Flight 11 and numerous other flights in his sector.

  “Is that American Eleven, trying to call?” Zalewski asked.

  Five seconds passed. Then Zalewski heard an unknown male voice with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. Zalewski handled a great deal of international air traffic, so an Arab pilot’s voice wasn’t entirely unexpected. The unknown man’s radio message wasn’t clear, and Zalewski didn’t comprehend it.

  Unknown at that point to anyone at Boston Center, the foreign-sounding man, almost spitting7 his words directly into the microphone, had said: “We have some planes.8 Just stay quiet, and we’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport.”

  The comment apparently wasn’t intended for Zalewski or other FAA ground controllers. Rather, it sounded like a message from the cockpit intended to pacify Flight 11’s passengers and crew, none of whom heard it. The person in the pilot’s seat—almost certainly Mohamed Atta—keyed the mic in a way that transmitted the message to air traffic control on the ground, as well as to other planes using the same radio frequency, and not to passengers and crew in the cabin behind him. To have been heard inside the plane, the hijacker-pilot would have needed to flip a switch on the cockpit radio p
anel.

  At a time when every piece of information counted, and every minute was crucial, the fact that Zalewski didn’t comprehend that chilling message marked a major misfortune on a day filled with them. The first sentence of the hijackers’ first cockpit transmission at 8:24:38 a.m. not only announced the terror aboard American Flight 11, it included a seemingly unintentional warning about an unknown number of similar, related plots already in motion, but not yet activated, on other early-morning transcontinental flights. Whoever was flying Flight 11 didn’t simply say that he and his fellow hijackers had seized control of that plane. He said: “We have some planes.”

  If the message had been understood immediately, the plural use of “planes” conceivably might have prompted Zalewski and other air traffic controllers to warn other pilots to enforce heightened cockpit security. Those pilots, in turn, might have told flight attendants to be on guard for trouble. But that’s a best-case scenario. It’s also possible that the comment would have been overlooked or dismissed as an empty boast or downplayed as a misstatement by a hijacker with limited English skills. There was no way to know, because Zalewski didn’t catch it.

  Zalewski answered: “And, uh, who’s trying to call me here? . . . American Eleven, are you trying to call?”

  Seconds later, Zalewski heard another communication from the cockpit, also apparently intended for the passengers and crew of Flight 11: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourselves and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

  Zalewski heard that message loud and clear. He screamed for his supervisor,9 Jon Schippani: “Jon, get over here right now!”

  Zalewski announced to the room of flight controllers that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Feeling ignored, as though not everyone at Boston Center appreciated the urgency, Zalewski flipped a switch to allow all the air traffic controllers around him to hear all radio communications with Flight 11. He handed off his other flights to fellow controllers. All the while, Zalewski wondered what essential information he might have missed in the first radio transmission. On the verge of panic,10 Zalewski turned to another Boston Center employee, a quality assurance supervisor named Bob Jones.

  “Someone has to pull these fucking tapes—right now!” Zalewski told Jones.

  Jones rushed to the basement to find the recording on the center’s old-fashioned reel-to-reel recording machines so he could decipher the hijacker’s first message.

  Zalewski’s first thought was that the hijackers of Flight 11 might make a U-turn and return to Logan Airport, putting the plane dangerously in the path of departing westbound flights. But the radicals in the cockpit had another destination in mind.

  The Boeing 767 turned sharply south over Albany, New York. Its flight path followed the Hudson River Valley in the general direction of New York City at a speed of perhaps 600 miles per hour. Even if the plane slowed somewhat, it could fly from Albany to Manhattan in as little as twenty minutes.

  Between 8:25 and 8:32 a.m., Boston Center managers alerted their superiors within the FAA that American Flight 11 had been hijacked11 and was heading toward New York City. Zalewski felt what he could only describe as terror.12

  Yet just as American Airlines employees failed to immediately pass along information from Betty Ong’s call, more than twelve minutes passed before anyone at Boston Center or the FAA called the U.S. military for help.

  One explanation for the delay was a hardwired belief among airline, government, and many military officials that hijackings followed a set pattern,13 in which military reaction time wasn’t the most important factor. The established playbook for hijackings went something like this: Driven by financial or political motives, such as seeking asylum, ransom, or the release of prisoners, hijackers took control of a passenger plane. Once in command, they used the radio to announce their intentions to government officials or media on the ground. They ordered the airline’s pilots to fly toward a new destination, using threats to passengers and crews as leverage. Eventually the hijackers ordered the pilots to land so they could refuel, escape, arrange for their demands to be met, or some combination. Under those circumstances, the appropriate, measured response from ground-based authorities was to clear other planes from the hijacked plane’s path and to seek a peaceful resolution that would protect innocent victims.

  If the takeover of Flight 11 followed that “traditional” hijacking approach, a delay of a few minutes when sharing information shouldn’t have been a significant problem. There would have been plenty of time to seek military help or assistance from the FAA once the hijackers issued demands and announced a destination. But this hijacking didn’t follow “normal” rules. No demands were forthcoming, and no one in contact with Flight 11 anticipated that hijackers might kill or incapacitate the pilots and fly the plane.

  Meanwhile, American Airlines employees at the airline’s control center in Texas tried multiple times, including at 8:23 a.m. and 8:25 a.m., to reach the original Flight 11 pilots. They used a dedicated messaging system14 that linked the ground and the cockpit, known as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS.

  “Plz contact Boston Center ASAP,” one ACARS message read. “They have lost radio contact and your transponder signal.”

  Flight 11 didn’t reply.

  As Flight 11 flew erratically through the sky, flight attendant Amy Sweeney sat in a rear jump seat next to Betty Ong. Amy had called her husband an hour earlier, upset about missing their daughter’s sendoff to kindergarten. Now she tried to call the American Airlines flight services office in Boston with horrific news.

  After two failed tries, Amy sought help from fellow flight attendant Sara Low, a high-spirited, athletic young woman with a pixie haircut who’d left a job at her father’s Arkansas mining company to satisfy her desire for adventure. Sara gave Amy a calling card15 number that allowed her to charge the call to Sara’s parents.

  On her third try,16 at 8:25 a.m., Amy got through to Boston and reported that someone was hurt on what she mistakenly called Flight 12, an error that Betty also made early in her call.

  A manager on duty, Evelyn “Evy” Nunez, asked for more details. “What, what, what?17 . . . Who’s hurt? . . . What?” She got some information, but the call was cut off. Overhearing the loud conversation, flight services manager Michael Woodward asked what was happening. Nunez said she’d received a strange call about a stabbing on Flight 12.

  The report was confusing, so Michael and another Boston-based American Airlines employee ran upstairs to Logan’s Terminal B gates to see if there was maybe a case of “air rage” on a parked plane, or a violent person wandering drunk in the terminal. But all was quiet, and all morning flights had already left. Then it dawned on him.

  “Wait a minute,” Michael told his colleague. “Flight 12 comes in at night. It hasn’t even left Los Angeles yet.”

  They rushed back to the office, where Michael learned that another emergency call had come in. This time they quickly understood that the caller was flight attendant Amy Sweeney, whom Michael had known for a decade. He’d seen off Flight 11 less than a half hour earlier, after that disturbing moment when he locked eyes with Mohamed Atta.

  Michael took over the call.

  “Amy, sweetie, what’s going on?” he asked.

  In a tightly controlled voice, Amy answered: “Listen to me very, very carefully.”

  Michael grabbed a pad of paper to take notes.

  At 8:29 a.m.,18 a half hour after takeoff, American Flight 11 turned south-southeast, putting it more directly on a route to Manhattan. The 767 climbed to 30,400 feet. Two minutes after adjusting course, it descended to 29,000 feet.

  One second before 8:34 a.m., air traffic controllers at Boston Center heard a third disturbing transmission from the cockpit, a lie apparently intended for the passengers and crew but never heard by them: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

  Controllers at Bosto
n Center fell silent.19 Then they decided to do something: FAA air traffic control managers called in the military.

  Normally, if the system had worked as designed, top officials at the FAA in Washington would contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, which in turn would call the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization responsible for protecting the skies over the United States and Canada. NORAD, in turn, would ask approval from the Secretary of Defense to use military jets to intervene in the hijacking of a commercial passenger jet. None of that was necessarily a smooth or rapid process.

  Boston Center controllers concluded that it would take too long20 to bob and weave through the FAA bureaucracy, to get approval from someone in the Defense Department, to scramble fighter planes to chase Flight 11. They knew it wasn’t correct protocol,21 but they took matters into their own hands. First, they called their colleagues at an air traffic control facility on Cape Cod and asked them to place a direct call seeking help from fighter jets stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base. Then they concluded that even that wasn’t enough. As Flight 11 streaked toward Manhattan, Boston Center air traffic controllers urgently wanted to get the military involved. At the very least, the military might have better luck tracking the hijacked plane; some Boston Center controllers knew that the military had radar that could reveal a plane’s altitude even with its transponder turned off.22

  They tried to call a NORAD military alert site in Atlantic City, unaware that it had been shut down as part of the post–Cold War cuts in rapid air defense. Then, at 8:37 a.m., three minutes after first seeking help through controllers on Cape Cod, a supervisor at Boston Center named Dan Bueno called the Otis Air National Guard base23 directly. At roughly the same time, a Boston Center air traffic controller named Joseph Cooper called NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS, in Rome, New York. That’s where Major Kevin Nasypany had arrived earlier that morning expecting to put his team through the training exercise called Vigilant Guardian.