Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Two National Geographic staff members also found seats aboard Flight 77, along with two other pairs from Washington schools: teacher James Debeuneure and eleven-year-old Rodney Dickens, and teacher Sarah Clark and eleven-year-old Asia Cottom.

  Bernard had been nervous about his first flight, but he felt reassured by Big Bernard, who coached his precocious son in basketball and life. For added confidence, and to stay true to his alternate career choice, Little Bernard marched down the aisle toward seat 20E wearing a new pair of Air Jordan sneakers.

  Barbara Olson, Bernard Brown II, and the National Geographic group were among the fifty-eight passengers9 who filed through the door onto Flight 77, less than one-third the plane’s capacity. They ranged across every age, stage, and station in life.

  In the seat next to Bernard was Mari-Rae Sopper,10 who before boarding wrote an email to family and friends with the subject line “New Job New City New State New Life.” Thirty-five years old, she’d quit working as a lawyer to head west for her dream job: women’s gymnastics coach at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Five foot two, so determined that even her mother called her bullheaded, Mari-Rae had been an All-American gymnast at Iowa State University. She upended her life and accepted the coaching job even though she knew the school intended to phase out women’s gymnastics after one year. Mari-Rae had a stubborn plan: she intended to persuade her new bosses to reverse the decision and continue the women’s gymnastics program.

  Scrambling into four seats of Row 23 were economist Leslie Whittington, her husband, Charles Falkenberg, and their daughters, Zoe and Dana,11 about to begin a two-month adventure in Australia. An associate dean and associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, Leslie had accepted a visiting fellowship at Australian National University in Canberra. Along with teaching, the trip would allow her to test theories for a book she was writing about women, work, and families. A computer engineer and scientist, Charles took a leave from his work developing software that organized and managed scientific data. Earlier in his career, he developed a software system for researchers in Alaska trying to measure impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. At eight, Zoe was a Girl Scout, a swim team member, a ballet student, an actress in school musicals, and a devoted reader of the Harry Potter books. At three, curly-haired, irrepressible Dana found comfort in her stuffed lamb and joy in stories about princesses. (She regularly dressed as one.)

  A married couple occupied the other two seats in Row 23: quiet, retired chemist Yugang Zheng and his outgoing, retired pediatrician wife, Shuying Yang.12 They were on their way home to China after a nearly yearlong visit with their daughter, a medical student and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They’d just returned from a week of sightseeing, hiking, and swimming in Maine and had delayed their flight to spend one more day with their daughter and her husband. As a wedding gift, they’d given the young couple a statue of the goddess of compassion, Bodhisattva Guanyin, who hears the cries of the world and brings care to those in need.

  In the row in front of them, Retired Rear Admiral Wilson “Bud” Flagg and Darlene “Dee” Flagg13 had plans for a family gathering in California. Both sixty-two, the high school sweethearts had recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and Bud’s fortieth reunion at the U.S. Naval Academy. One story that made the rounds at the reunion explained how Bud had stopped his classmates from raiding his stash of Dee’s cookies: he substituted a batch he’d baked with laxatives. (It was a lesson he didn’t have to teach twice.) Bud served three tours as a fighter pilot in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Later, he had a dual career as a pilot for American Airlines and an officer in the Naval Reserve. The Flaggs had two sons and four grandchildren, and together they ran a Virginia cattle farm.

  In a window seat seven rows away sat Dr. Yeneneh Betru.14 He’d moved to the United States from Ethiopia as a teenager in order to fulfill a promise to his grandmother that he would become a doctor and cure whatever ailed her. Soft-spoken but determined, thirty-five years old, Yeneneh traveled throughout the United States training other doctors in the care of hospitalized patients, while spending his personal time and money assembling equipment to create the first public kidney dialysis center in Addis Ababa.

  In 5B of business class sat a man known for his dapper clothes and mastery of dominoes and whist: Eddie Dillard.15 At fifty-four, Eddie had retired four years earlier from a career as a district manager for the tobacco company Philip Morris. Since then, he’d transformed into a savvy real estate investor. He was flying to California to work on a rental property he owned with his wife, Rosemary, an American Airlines base manager at Reagan National Airport in Washington.

  In first class, newlyweds Zandra and Robert Riis Ploger III16 buckled into second-row seats on the first leg of a two-week honeymoon to Hawaii. Despite previous marriages and four grown children between them, Zandra and Robert acted like teenagers, holding hands and exchanging pet names: Pretty for her, Love for him. He was a systems architect at Lockheed Martin, she was a manager at IBM. Both were dedicated fans of Star Trek.

  Predictably for a flight from Washington, spread throughout the cabin were passengers with connections to the government17 and the military. Bryan Jack was a PhD numbers cruncher for the Defense Department who’d won the department’s Exceptional Service Medal twice in the past three years. William Caswell was a physicist with a PhD from Princeton who served in the Army during Vietnam and now worked for the Navy as a civilian. Both men were on official business trips that took them away from their offices in the Pentagon.

  Dr. Paul Ambrose was a fellow at the Department of Health and Human Services, on his way to California for a conference on how to prevent youth obesity; Charles Droz was a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy who’d built a career in computer technology; Dong Chul Lee spent eighteen years working for the U.S. Air Force and the National Security Agency before taking an engineering job with Boeing; consultant Richard Gabriel had lost a leg in battle during the Vietnam War; and John Yamnicky Sr. was a barrel-chested retired Navy captain who flew fighter jets in Korea and on three tours in Vietnam.

  In the cockpit, Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame formerly flew F-4 Phantom fighters as a medal-winning pilot and honors graduate of the Navy’s “Top Gun” school. Married to an American Airlines flight attendant, Chic Burlingame was an Eagle Scout, an Annapolis graduate, a father, a grandfather, and a stepfather of two. He was one day shy of fifty-two. Tucked in his wallet was a laminated prayer card from his mother’s funeral, ten months earlier, with part of a poem: “I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there, I did not die.”18 Joining him at the controls was First Officer David Charlebois, a young pilot dedicated to his partner. Together they enjoyed their row house in Washington, D.C., and the border collie he’d rescued when it was a puppy.

  Strapped into a jump seat in the back of the plane was senior flight attendant Michele Heidenberger, wife of a US Airways pilot and mother of two, who’d been flying for thirty-one years. Before takeoff she called her husband, Thomas, to make sure their fourteen-year-old son was awake and had packed a lunch for school.

  Serving first class, flight attendant Renée May was an artist who knitted blankets for her friends and had recently accepted her boyfriend’s proposal. At thirty-nine, Renée had learned only a day earlier that she was seven weeks pregnant.19 After landing in Los Angeles, she planned to hop a quick flight20 to visit her parents in Las Vegas. She’d spoken with them twice in the past two days but had told them only that she had big news to share.

  Also working the flight was a couple whose friends called them Kennifer. Married for eight years, flight attendants Ken and Jennifer Lewis21 normally flew separately, but they used their seniority to mesh their schedules so they could vacation when they reached Los Angeles, their favorite city. A magnet on their refrigerator read happiness is being married to your best friend. When they were home, in the foothills of Virginia
’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Ken and Jennifer liked to drag lawn chairs to the end of their driveway, trailed by their five cats. As night fell, they would gaze at the stars.22

  Also on board were five young Saudi Arabian zealots who’d pledged their lives to al-Qaeda. Like their collaborators on American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, the men chose seats strategically, clustered toward the front of the plane.

  Unlike their associates aboard the other two flights, three of the al-Qaeda members on American Flight 77 nearly had their plans foiled by airport security.23

  At 7:18 a.m., Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdhar set off alarms when they walked through a Dulles Airport metal detector. Security workers sent them to a second metal detector. Mihdhar passed, but Moqed failed again. A private security officer hired by a contractor for United Airlines scanned Moqed with a metal detection wand and sent him on his way. Neither was patted down.

  Almost twenty minutes later, Nawaf al-Hazmi set off alarms at both metal detectors at the same security checkpoint. Two weeks earlier, he’d purchased Leatherman multitool knives,24 and a security video showed that he had an unidentified item clipped onto his rear pants pocket. A security officer hand-wanded Hazmi and swiped his shoulder bag with an explosive trace detector. No one patted him down, and he walked on toward Flight 77 with his brother, Salem al-Hazmi.

  All five were chosen for another security screening, three by the CAPPS computer algorithm and two, the Hazmi brothers, because an airline customer service representative judged them to be suspicious. One, apparently Salem al-Hazmi, offered an identification card without a photograph and didn’t seem to understand English. The airline worker who checked them in thought he seemed anxious or excited.25

  In the end, the selection of all five men for a second layer of security screening proved meaningless. Just as with their collaborators, it only meant that their checked bags were held off the plane until after they boarded.

  Hani Hanjour, who’d trained as a pilot, took seat 1B in first class. Four rows back in the same cabin, in seats 5E and 5F, sat the Hazmi brothers. They were the only two passengers on Flight 77 to request special meals: the Hindu option,26 with no pork.

  On the opposite side of the plane, in coach seat 12A sat Majed Moqed. Next to him, in 12B, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, slim and dark-haired, a man who U.S. intelligence officials had known for several years was a member of al-Qaeda, yet who traveled under his real name.

  American Airlines Flight 77 pushed back from Dulles Gate D-26 at 8:09 a.m. It was airborne eleven minutes later.

  At that moment, United Flight 175 had been in flight for six minutes, with no signs of trouble. American Flight 11 had already stopped communicating with air traffic controllers, and soon after, flight attendant Betty Ong began her distress call to American Airlines.

  Three minutes into their flight from Cape Cod to New York in pursuit of American Flight 11, Otis F-15 pilots Tim Duffy and Dan Nash learned that the World Trade Center had been struck by a plane, presumably the one they were supposed to find. They saw rising smoke from more than a hundred miles away. The clouds of smoke intensified minutes later with the strike on the South Tower.

  As the fighter pilots approached a crime scene of almost unimaginable proportions, NEADS Major Kevin Nasypany ordered them to fly in a holding pattern in military-controlled airspace off Long Island. That way, they’d stay clear of scores of passenger planes that still flew nearby.

  At 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the crash of United Flight 175, FAA controllers issued an order27 that barred all nonmilitary aircraft from taking off, landing, or flying through New York Center’s airspace until further notice. Meanwhile, Boston Center had stopped all departures from its airports. Soon after, all departures were stopped nationwide for planes heading toward or through New York or Boston airspace.

  Around the same time, fearing more hijackings, the operations manager at Boston Center told the controllers he supervised to warn airborne pilots by radio to heighten security, with the aim of preventing potential intruders from gaining access to cockpits. He urged the national FAA operations center in Virginia to issue a similar cockpit safety notice nationwide,28 but there’s no evidence that that happened.

  As the NEADS team absorbed news of the second crash into the World Trade Center, a technician uttered an offhand comment charged with insight: “This is a new type of war,29 that’s what it is.”

  At first, almost no one could fathom the idea of terrorist hijackers who’d been trained as pilots at U.S. flight schools. Several technicians at NEADS held on to the idea that the original pilots had somehow remained at the controls, flying under duress from the terrorists and unable to use their transponders to issue an alert, or “squawk,” using the universal hijacking code 7500.

  “We have smart terrorists today,”30 a NEADS surveillance officer said. “They’re not giving them [the pilots] a chance to squawk.”

  Shortly before 9:08 a.m., five minutes after the South Tower explosion, Nasypany decided that he wanted the Otis fighter jets to be ready for whatever might come next from the terrorists. No simulations, exercises, or history had prepared any of them for this, and other than Boston Center’s unapproved calls to NEADS, the FAA still had yet to make contact with the military. Nasypany improvised.

  “We need to talk to FAA,”31 Nasypany told his team. “We need to tell ’em if this stuff is gonna keep on going, we need to take those fighters, put ’em over Manhattan. That’s the best thing, that’s the best play right now. So, coordinate with the FAA. Tell ’em if there’s more out there, which we don’t know, let’s get ’em over Manhattan. At least we got some kind of play.”

  Nasypany wanted to launch two more fighter jets, the pair of on-alert F-16s ready and waiting at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The fighters were part of the North Dakota Air National Guard’s 119th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Happy Hooligans.

  But Colonel Marr rejected that plan. He wanted the Langley fighters to remain on the ground, on runway alert. With only four ready-to-launch fighter jets in his arsenal, the colonel didn’t want all of them to run out of fuel at the same time. Unaware that airborne fuel tankers would have been available, Marr thought that putting the Langley fighters in the air might leave the skies relatively unprotected if something else happened in the huge area of sky that NEADS was sworn to protect.

  Nasypany’s mind kept churning. Two suicide hijackers in fuel-laden jets had slammed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, both of which burned on television screens all around him. They’d killed everyone on board and an unknown number of people in the buildings. Nasypany had positioned two F-15s in the sky over New York, and it remained anyone’s guess if they’d soon be chasing other hijacked planes with similar deadly intentions.

  “We need to do more than fuck with this,”32 Nasypany declared.

  Nasypany wondered aloud how he and his team would respond if the nation’s military commanders, starting with the president of the United States, gave a shoot-down order for a plane filled with civilians. He asked members of his staff how they would react to such an order. As they scrambled to absorb the moral and practical implications, Nasypany focused on the weaponry they would use, if necessary.

  “My recommendation,” Nasypany told his team, “if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft, we use AIM-9s in the face.”33

  The AIM-9 is a short-range, air-to-air missile known as the Sidewinder,34 with a twenty-pound warhead and an infrared guidance system that locks onto its target. Each fully armed F-16 fighter carried six of them, while each F-15 carried two Sidewinders and two larger missiles called Sparrows.35

  Nasypany made the comment with the professional air of a military airman who might receive a wrenching command. Then he paused a moment, as though unsettled, and added more obliquely, “If need be . . .”

  The potential need to shoot down a commercial airliner filled with innocent men, women, and children remained unresolved. A short time later, a female NEADS staffer said to
no one in particular: “Oh God, they better call the president.”36

  Another staffer said: “Believe me, he knows.”

  In fact, President George W. Bush had learned about the World Trade Center crashes only minutes earlier, and no discussions had yet taken place about what action the military should take if more terrorists turned passenger jets into weapons of mass destruction.

  Still, at NEADS they wanted to be ready. On Nasypany’s orders, Otis F-15 fighter pilots Duffy and Nash left their holding pattern and established a CAP, or Combat Air Patrol, over Manhattan. A staffer from NEADS radioed Duffy to ask if he’d have a problem with an order to shoot down37 a hijacked passenger jet. Having seen the destruction already caused by suicide hijackers, Duffy answered flatly: “No.”

  Nash looked down from his cramped cockpit at the burning towers. Thick black smoke spiraled upward to space. Nash thought: “That was the start of World War III.”38

  If Nash was correct, the next battle had already begun, and the battlefield would be Washington, D.C.

  The skies were blue, the air was smooth, and all was normal during the first half hour of American Flight 77’s voyage west.

  Shortly after the flight took off from Dulles, before the hijackings of Flight 11 or Flight 175 were known beyond a tiny circle of people, an FAA flight controller at the Washington Center, Danielle O’Brien, made a routine handoff of Flight 77 to a colleague at the FAA’s Indianapolis Center. For reasons she couldn’t explain and would never fully understand, O’Brien didn’t use one of her normal sendoffs to the pilots: “Good day,” or “Have a nice flight.” Instead she told them, “Good luck.”39