Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  At the agency’s operations center in Herndon, Virginia, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney knew about the North Tower crash and had seen United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on CNN some twenty minutes earlier. He worried about the disappearance of Flight 7733 and feared that more hijackings might be under way. Sliney also had heard about Mohamed Atta’s “We have some planes” remark. He felt haunted by the question34 of how high the hijacking total might eventually reach. He couldn’t undo what already happened, but Sliney hoped that he might help prevent the next attack.

  Fifty-five years old, with a shock of white hair, an Air Force veteran and a lawyer by training, Sliney concluded that he had both the authority and the responsibility to take drastic action. Accordingly, he declared a “nationwide ground stop,”35 the first order of its kind in U.S. aviation history, which prevented all commercial and private aircraft from taking off anywhere in the United States.

  Making Sliney’s order even more remarkable, he had only recently returned to the FAA after several years in a private law practice. The morning of September 11 was Sliney’s first shift on his first day in his new job36 as the FAA’s National Operations Manager, boss of the agency’s command center.

  Meanwhile, between about 9:23 and 9:28 a.m., American Flight 77 dropped from an altitude of 25,000 feet37 to about 7,000 feet as it continued on its undetected eastward path. By about 9:29 a.m., while controllers fruitlessly searched the Midwest, the Boeing 757 was almost on the East Coast, about thirty-eight miles west of the Pentagon, the physical and symbolic heart of the U.S. military, located a short hop across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

  Hani Hanjour—or whoever was in the cockpit—disengaged the autopilot destination that he’d previously set to Reagan National Airport and took manual control of the plane.

  As American Flight 77 approached the prohibited airspace of the nation’s capital, confusion about the plane spread further through the U.S. government.

  At 9:31 a.m., an agent from the FBI office in Boston called the FAA seeking information on the planes that had hit the World Trade Center.

  An FAA official told him: “We have two reports,38 preliminary information, ah, believe to be American Airlines Flight 77 and Flight 11, collided with World Trade Center. Also, a preliminary report, ah, United Airlines Flight 175 off radar. Ah, no further information.”

  At 9:32 a.m., air traffic controllers at Dulles airport saw a green dot on their radar screens that no one expected, traveling eastbound at the surprisingly fast speed of about 500 miles per hour.

  Among those who noticed the unidentified aircraft was Danielle O’Brien, the air traffic controller who for some reason had wished Flight 77’s pilots “good luck” when she handed them off an hour earlier. From its speed and how it turned and slashed across the sky, she and other controllers initially thought the object on their radar was a nimble military jet.39

  O’Brien slid to her left and pointed it out to the controller next to her, her fiancé,40 Tom Howell, who recognized it as a threat. “Oh my God,”41 Howell said. He yelled to the room: “We’ve got a target headed right for the White House!”

  A Dulles manager called the FAA’s control center and controllers at Reagan airport in Washington to warn them. Still no one from the FAA called NEADS or anyone else in the military’s air defense system. An FAA supervisor at Dulles, John Hendershot, used a dedicated phone line to alert the Secret Service of the incoming danger. He told the men and women who protect the president and the vice president: “We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft42 inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west.”

  President Bush wasn’t in Washington, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in his White House office. Secret Service agents rushed in, lifted Cheney from his chair, and hustled him to a tunnel leading to an underground bunker beneath the White House called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The agents also told White House staffers to run from the building.

  Simultaneously, Reagan airport officials sought urgent help identifying the mystery jet. They called the closest plane in the sky: a military cargo plane that had just taken off from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, fifteen miles from the District of Columbia. The FAA’s newly issued ban on takeoffs didn’t apply to military planes, and the cargo plane’s pilots hadn’t heard about it, anyway.

  As the FAA tried to identify the plane approaching the White House, little more than ten minutes had passed since Major Kevin Nasypany speculated about using a Sidewinder missile “in the face” to stop terrorists from creating another large-scale disaster.

  The F-16s from Langley were airborne by 9:30 a.m. with orders from NEADS to fly to Washington. But no one briefed them about exactly why they were scrambled. The pilots defaulted to an old Cold War plan and flew out to sea, to a training area known as Whiskey 386. The lead pilot, who’d heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center but knew nothing about hijackings, thought he and his two wingmen were supposed to defend the capital against Russian planes or cruise missiles.43

  As the Langley F-16s took flight, headed the wrong way, a member of Nasypany’s team pressed the issue of how they’d respond if they encountered a hijacked passenger jet being readied for use as a weapon.

  “Have you asked . . . the question what you’re gonna do if we actually find this guy?” wondered Major James Anderson. “Are we gonna shoot him down44 if they got passengers on board? Have they talked about that?”

  At that moment, the man on whom shootdown authority rested stood before two hundred students, a handful of teachers, and a clutch of reporters in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida.

  President Bush began his September 11 at 6 a.m. with a four-mile run at a golf course with his Secret Service protectors. Afterwards he showered, dressed, and sat for a routine, fifteen-minute intelligence briefing from CIA official Mike Morell in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s swanky Colony Beach Resort. Many of the president’s summer 2001 briefings had included mentions of a heightened terrorism risk.45

  One of those briefings, received by the president on August 6, marked the first time that Bush had been told of a possible plan by al-Qaeda to attack inside the United States. Titled “Bin Laden Determined46 to Strike in US,” the memo read in part: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’”

  But there wasn’t a word about terrorism47 in Bush’s security briefing on the morning of September 11. Much of it focused instead on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  By 8:40 a.m., Bush’s motorcade had left the resort for the nine-mile drive to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. The president intended to use the school as a backdrop to promote his “No Child Left Behind” education policy with a press-friendly event: a reading lesson with a diverse class of second graders.

  On his way into the school, Bush shook hands with teachers and students. Meanwhile, senior White House adviser Karl Rove answered a call from his assistant: a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Rove passed the information to the president but said he didn’t have details and didn’t know what type of plane. Three decades earlier, during the Vietnam era, Bush had served as a fighter pilot in the Texas National Guard. He’d later say that his first thought was pilot error involving a light airplane. Bush also would say he wondered, “How could the guy have gotten so off course48 [as] to hit the towers?”

  Bush ducked away from the receiving line into a classroom. At 8:55 a.m., less than ten minutes after the first crash, he spoke on a secure phone line with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. A half hour had passed since the FAA first learned about the hijacking of Flight 11, but no one had immediately informed the White House, the nation’s national security agencies, or the Secret Service. Rice didn’t know much more than
Bush’s other aides.

  Bush told the school’s principal the situation, then walked to teacher Kay Daniels’s classroom. “Good to meet you all!” he said as he entered. “It’s really exciting for me to be here.” Bush smiled, clapped, and followed along as Daniels led her sixteen students through rapid-fire phonics exercises.

  At about 9:05 a.m., two minutes after United Flight 175 struck the South Tower, White House chief of staff Andy Card hesitated a moment at the door to the classroom. He collected his thoughts, then walked to Bush’s side. Reporters watching from the back of the classroom perked up, knowing that no one would interrupt the president’s event unless something major happened. Card bent at the waist and whispered in Bush’s ear:

  “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”49

  Bush’s eyes widened, and his expression slackened, a moment preserved for posterity by a photographer for The Associated Press. Card purposely stepped back50—he’d say later that he did so so that Bush couldn’t ask him a question with cameras and reporters capturing the president’s every move and word.

  Bush remained silently seated in the classroom for roughly seven more minutes, a decision for which he would be harshly criticized as a deer in the headlights of history. He would explain his reaction as responsible leadership, calculated to project calm51 and prevent panic. As those minutes passed, his eyes darted left and right, his mouth turned down at the corners. Bush appeared to follow along as Daniels led her students through a story called “The Pet Goat,” about a girl who defends her ravenous goat, which by the story’s end becomes a hero.

  Members of the White House press corps on the other side of the classroom began to receive emergency alerts on wireless pagers clipped to their belts or handbags. Standing among them, Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer held up a handwritten sign instructing the president: don’t say anything yet.

  At 9:15 a.m., the school’s principal told the students to close their readers and place them under their chairs. “These are great readers,” Bush said. “Very impressive!”

  The president stood and joined Card, Rove, and other top staffers in a secured classroom. There he spoke by phone with Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, while his staff arranged for what they expected would be a fast return to Washington. Secret Service agents wanted to hurry Bush out of the school. The president’s schedule had been publicized well in advance, and they feared that the event might be a target for a terrorist “decapitation” attack. That is, to kill the head of state.

  Bush refused to leave—he first wanted to speak to the nation.

  At 9:30 a.m., before television cameras and an audience of students, teachers, and reporters in the school’s media center, Bush delivered his first remarks about the attacks of September 11.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,52 this is a difficult moment for America,” the president began. “Today we’ve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand.”

  Bush asked for a moment of silence, then said: “May God bless the victims and their families and America.” Then he left.

  Unaware of the crisis, inside the cockpit of a military cargo plane flying over Washington, Lieutenant Colonel Steven O’Brien53 played tour guide, pointing out the capital’s buildings and monuments to his copilot, Major Robert Schumacher. Their unarmed plane was a lumbering gray four-propeller workhorse called a C-130, a model prized since the 1950s for delivering supplies and soldiers anywhere in the world. The plane’s call sign was Gofer 06.

  After a cargo pickup in the Virgin Islands, O’Brien and his crew had spent the previous night at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland before returning home to Minnesota. They took flight about 9:30 a.m. without having heard about hijackings or crashes.

  As Gofer 06 flew at an altitude of about 4,000 feet, a large silver passenger jet streaked past the cockpit windshield about four miles ahead of them, descending rapidly. At first, O’Brien and Schumacher thought the jet’s pilot was in trouble, struggling to keep his aircraft aloft. The hairs on the back of Schumacher’s neck stood up. He said a silent prayer: “God, just let them land safely.”54

  Their radio came alive with the voice of a Reagan National Airport air traffic controller: “Do you see an airplane?”

  That was an understatement, O’Brien answered. The passenger jet was so close to their C-130 it nearly filled their windshield. If Gofer 06 had taken off even a short time earlier,55 the two planes might have collided.

  “Can you tell me what kind it is?” the controller asked.

  O’Brien said it looked like a Boeing 757 or a 767. Its silver fuselage with a red stripe strongly suggested that it belonged to American Airlines.

  The controller gave O’Brien an order he’d never heard in more than two decades of flying: follow that plane. He turned Gofer 06 and gave chase.

  Although a civilian air traffic controller had just asked a military C-130 to follow American Flight 77 as it streaked over Washington, still no one at the FAA or any other government agency had informed the U.S. military that a plane that took off more than an hour earlier from Dulles had been hijacked.

  Meanwhile, acting on mistaken information they’d been given by the FAA, Nasypany and his NEADS team remained focused on a futile search for the already crashed American Flight 11. Finally, that changed, but only by happenstance, and too late.

  At 9:32 a.m., a NEADS technician called the FAA’s Washington Center to ask whether controllers there had seen any sign of American Flight 11.56 Both sides of the conversation ran amok with incomplete or incorrect information.

  “There are three aircraft missing out of Boston,” 57 the NEADS technician said at one point, repeating the erroneous information about an extra plane that had prompted the search for the phantom American Flight 11. Soon after, she added incorrectly: “They thought that the American 11 was the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center with the United 175. However, American 11 is not the aircraft that crashed.”

  American Flight 11 had in fact crashed into the North Tower roughly forty-five minutes earlier.

  The NEADS military technician explained to the civilian Washington Center controller that she called because she “just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  “But again,” she added, “remember, nothing has been confirmed as far as with the aircraft that hit the World Trade Center. But the other one, we have its information, headed toward Washington.” She meant that Flight 11 was still airborne, on an unauthorized flight path to the capital.

  After a pause, the Washington Center controller offered news of his own: “Okay. Now let me tell you this. I, I’ll, we’ve been looking. We also lost American 77.”

  That bombshell remark came at 9:34 a.m., delivered as an afterthought in a conversation initiated by a NEADS technician about American Flight 11. It represented the first time Nasypany’s team or anyone else in the U.S. military, other than the cargo crew of Gofer 06, heard about a problem with American Flight 77. That, despite the fact that FAA controllers had been searching for the plane ever since the cockpit stopped communicating forty minutes earlier.

  The news of another missing plane rocketed through the NEADS center. Trying to play catch-up, the NEADS technician quizzed the Washington Center controller for information about American 77’s origin, destination, aircraft type, last contact, and last known position.

  As the conversation between NEADS and the Washington Center ended, from the cockpit of Gofer 06, Lieutenant Colonel Steven O’Brien reported to Reagan National Airport controllers that he had seen the mystery passenger jet make a 330-degree turn, fly
ing at just two thousand feet over downtown Washington.

  Meanwhile, Colin Scoggins of Boston Center told Nasypany’s NEADS team at 9:36 a.m. that an unknown plane was six miles from the White House, approaching some of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world.

  That, and the earlier call with the Washington Center, prompted Nasypany to take an extraordinary step: he seized control of the airspace58 over Washington from the FAA, to clear a path for the F-16 fighters from Langley to intercept the intruder. Although the question remained unresolved whether the fighter pilots would be authorized to fire a missile at a passenger plane to prevent a potentially greater tragedy, Nasypany wanted them in a position59 where they might have a chance to protect the White House, the U.S. Capitol, or any other Washington-area target.

  “We’re gonna turn and burn it—crank it up,” Nasypany ordered. “All right, here we go. . . . Take ’em and run ’em to the White House!”60

  But Nasypany’s effort immediately collapsed.

  “Where’s Langley at?” Nasypany asked. “Where are the fighters?”

  The Langley F-16 fighters were nowhere in range. Unknown to Nasypany, they hadn’t flown the route he’d wanted, a direct path north to intercept the erroneously reported American Flight 11, which no longer existed. Just when they were needed most, when every second and every movement counted, the two Langley F-16s were about one hundred fifty miles away—the result of an incorrect flight plan generated by misunderstandings, a mistake on coordinates61 by a military air traffic controller, and an overall lack of information, communication, and coordination.

  Still, with the Twin Towers burning and the capital under threat from an unknown aircraft, Nasypany wouldn’t quit. He wanted the fighters to fly supersonic, faster than the speed of sound, to Washington.