That message was quickly followed by another. As Flight 93 cruised 35,000 feet over eastern Ohio, it received the warning dispatcher Ballinger was by now sending to all United aircraft: “Beware any cockpit intrusion—two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.”
Captain Jason Dahl was evidently nonplussed. “Ed,” he messaged back, “confirm latest mssg plz.” It was 9:26, and clarification came swift and savage.
At 9:28, the sound of mayhem crackled over the radio from Flight 93. Cleveland control heard a shout of “Mayday!”; then, “Hey! Get out of here!”; and finally, sounds of physical struggle. Thirty-two seconds later, more fighting. Again, three times: “Get out of here! … Get out of here! … Get out of here!” And screaming.
Melodie Homer never would receive the reassuring reply for which she had hoped. Ballinger’s warning had been in vain, and there would be no more legitimate transmissions from Flight 93.
Instead, at 9:32, came a stranger’s voice, panting as though out of breath. It intoned: “Ladies and gentlemen. Here the captain. Please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So sit.” Some investigators would surmise that lack of familiarity with the communications system led this hijack pilot—and, earlier, his accomplice on Flight 11—to transmit not to the passengers as intended, but to ground control.
Though the United pilots could no longer transmit, we know a good deal of what went on in the cockpit. Unlike voice recorders on board the three other hijacked flights, all either never found or irreparably damaged, Flight 93’s Cockpit Voice Recorder survived. So did the Flight Data Recorder. Though often difficult to interpret, the voice recorder made for a unique partial record of the final thirty-one minutes aboard the plane.
The cockpit recording began four minutes into the hijack, as the hijacker “captain” tried to tell passengers to remain seated. The microphones picked up a clattering sound, followed by the voice of someone giving orders: “Don’t move … Come on. Come … Shut up! … Don’t move! … Stop!”
Then the sound of an airline seat moving, and more commands: “Sit, sit, sit down! … Sit down!” More of the same, and a voice repeating in Arabic, “That’s it, that’s it …” Then in English, loudly, “SHUT UP!” Someone other than the terrorists was alive in the cockpit, and evidently captive.
Though one cannot know for sure, the person being told to sit down and shut up was almost certainly one of the female flight attendants. Perhaps she was senior attendant Deborah Welsh, who spent much of her time in First Class. Or perhaps she was Wanda Green, who was also assigned to the front of the airplane. Some United attendants carried a key to the cockpit, and one key was usually kept in the forward galley. By arrangement with Captain Dahl, reportedly, his attendants could also gain access to the cockpit by means of a coded knock. Welsh, aged forty-nine, was a veteran with a reputation for being tough. She had once managed to shove a drunken male passenger back into his seat. Green, the same age as Welsh, doubled as a real estate agent and had two grown children. One of these two attendants was likely used to gain access to the cockpit.
The woman in the hijackers’ hands did not keep quiet or sit down. A minute into the series of orders to the captive, a terrorist’s voice is heard to intone in Arabic the Basmala: “In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” This is an invocation used frequently by observant Muslims, often before embarking on some action.
Next on the recording, the man exclaims: “Finish, no more. NO MORE!” and “Stop, stop, stop, STOP!” Repeatedly: “No! No, no, no, NO!” Time and time again, frantically: “Lie down! … DOWN! … Down, down, down … Come on, sit down, sit!”
For two minutes of this, the captive has not spoken. Now, however, a female American voice is heard for the first time. She begs, “Please, please, please …” Then, again ordered to get down, she pleads, “Please, please, don’t hurt me … Oh, God!”
According to Deborah Welsh’s husband, the attendant had spoken of Muslim terrorists with scorn, thought them cowards. If the captive in the cockpit was Welsh, perhaps she now tried an acid response. After another minute of being told to stay down, the female voice on the recording asks, “Are you talking to me?” Her reward, within moments, is violence.
Barely has the hijacker started in again on his mantra of “Down, down!” than the woman is heard pleading, “I don’t want to die.” She says it three times, her cries accompanied by words—or sounds—that are blanked out in the transcript as released. Then, the transcript notes, there is the “sound of a snap … a struggle that lasted for few seconds.” Moments later, a voice in Arabic says, “Everything is fine. I finished.” The woman’s voice is not heard again.
Two minutes after the silencing of the attendant, the terrorist pilot tried again to make an announcement to the passengers. He asked that passengers remain seated, adding this time: “We are going back to the airport … we have our demands. So, please remain quiet.”
About a minute later, at 9:40, a surviving flight attendant on board got through to Starfix, United’s maintenance facility in California. This was Sandra Bradshaw, probably seated toward the rear of the plane in Coach. Those who handled the call thought she sounded “shockingly calm” as she told of hijackers, armed with knives, on the flight deck and in the cabin. Bradshaw said that a fellow flight attendant had been “attacked” and—as relayed to United Airlines Operations by a Starfix operator—that “knives were being held to the crew’s throats.”
It may be that Captain Dahl and copilot Homer were not killed at once. Well into the hijack, the voice recorder transcript shows that a “native English-speaking male” in the cockpit says—or perhaps groans—“Oh, man! …” A few minutes later a hijacker is heard saying in Arabic, “… talk to the pilot. Bring the pilot back.”
A flight attendant—perhaps CeeCee Lyles, who also worked in Coach—at one point passed word that the hijackers had “taken the pilot and the copilot out” of the cockpit. They were “lying on the floor bleeding” in First Class. It was not clear whether the pilots were dead or alive.
Did the hijackers try to get the pilots, already wounded, to help with the controls? Did they then move them to the forward passenger area and leave them lying there? There is no way to know.
FAR BELOW, ALL WAS CHAOS. At the very moment that the attendant in 93’s cockpit had fallen ominously silent—all unknown to those wrestling with the crisis on the ground—Flight 77 had slammed into the Pentagon. On his first day of duty in the post, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney and his senior colleagues had no way of knowing what new calamity might be imminent.
A Delta flight on its way from Boston to Las Vegas missed a radio call, triggering suspicion. Was this another hijack? Boston had been the point of departure for two of the planes already attacked. Then word reached the FAA Command Center that Flight 93 might have a bomb on board.
At 9:25, Sliney had ordered a nationwide “ground stop,” prohibiting any further takeoffs by civilian aircraft. At 9:42, when the Command Center learned of the crash into the Pentagon, FAA officials together decided to issue a command unprecedented in U.S. aviation history. Sliney reportedly boomed, “Order everyone to land! … Regardless of destination. Let’s get them on the ground.”
There were at that moment some 4,540 commercial and civilian planes in the air or under American control. For the more than two hours that followed, controllers and pilots would work to empty the sky of aircraft. It was the one drastic action that might avert fresh disaster.
By 12:16, the FAA was able to inform government agencies that all commercial flights had landed or been diverted away from U.S. airspace.
BACK IN WASHINGTON, Clarke’s videoconference had finally gotten under way at about 9:37. Extraordinarily, though, it would be an hour before the Defense Department fielded anyone involved in handling the situation. Secretary Rumsfeld himself was out of touch, as noted, having headed outside to view the carnage at the Pentagon.
Absent anyone with a real grasp
of what was going on—let alone expertise in how to deal with it—the first matter discussed in the videoconference had been not the crisis itself but the safety of the President and Vice President. In case they were killed or incapacitated, contingency plans were in place for those next in line to the presidency to be taken to a secret underground shelter outside Washington. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Senator Robert Byrd, president pro tempore of the Senate, third and fourth in line, would soon be rushed to the shelter.
All over the capital, people were now pouring out of office buildings. Thousands rushed to get out of the downtown area. The Secret Service ordered an evacuation of nonessential personnel from the White House, and departure—already under way—became headlong flight. Agents yelled at women to take off their high heels and run, and the sidewalks were soon littered with shoes.
Rumor took hold. “CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall near the Capitol,” read a note passed to Clarke. There was no fire on the Mall. Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary representing the Department of State on the videoconference, had a blunt response when asked about the “car bomb.” “Does it fucking look,” he asked, looming large on the monitor, “as if I’ve been bombed?”
TO THE NORTH, in New York City, humor survived in the midst of suffering. A firefighter in the North Tower—on the way up—noticed a fellow coming down toting an odd piece of salvage, a golf club. “Hey!” exclaimed the fireman, “I saw your ball a few flights down.” There were bizarre sights, too. Officers moving from floor to floor found a few people still hard at work at their computers—blind to the peril.
As in Washington, rumors flew. “There’s another plane in the air,” a senior fireman hollered into his radio. “Everybody stay put … We don’t know what’s going on.” A police sergeant told a firefighter, “They hit the White House. And we have another inbound coming at us now.” “Yeah,” a radio dispatcher confirmed, “another one inbound. Watch your back.”
There was no third hijacked airplane heading to New York. Some in the North Tower, meanwhile, were still unaware that even one airplane had hit the building. “What happened?” enquired Keith Meerholz, who had escaped with minor burns. “A plane hit each tower,” a fireman confided, “but don’t tell anyone.” He did not want evacuation to become panic.
For those still alive on the higher floors of the tower, the grim ordeal continued. They were stranded, unable to go down—because of blocked stairways and jammed elevators—or up, with the faint prospect of rescue by helicopter, because of the locked doors.
Down on the 27th floor, from which most workers would escape, a man in a wheelchair named Ed Beyea waited patiently with Abe Zemanowitz, a colleague who had stayed protectively at his side. So far below the point of impact, with emergency services on the scene, real danger perhaps seemed remote. Yet neither man would survive.
Outside, paramedic Carlos Lillo was crying as he worked. His wife, Cecilia, worked on the tower’s 64th floor, and he was frantically worried about her. Cecilia would get safely down and out of the building. Carlos, who lost touch with his comrades, died.
The dying had begun in a horrific way for the firefighters. “The Chief said, ‘You’re going into the lobby command post,’ ” Paul Conlon remembered. “He pointed to the entrance of Two World Trade Center [the South Tower] … It was probably two hundred yards … There were people jumping … Dan Suhr said something like, ‘Let’s make this quick …’ We got about halfway there, and Dan gets hit by a jumper.”
Daniel Suhr, aged thirty-seven, had been with an engine company from Brooklyn. “It was as if he exploded. It wasn’t like you heard something falling and you could jump out of the way … We go to pick him up. He’s a big guy … Someone picked up his helmet … One of the guys says, ‘He still has a pulse.’ … I called the Mayday … The guys were doing CPR. The ambulance came up pretty quickly.”
Suhr, dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Hospital, was the first firefighter to die, first on a list that, it would soon become clear, was to be numbingly long.
Communications, crucial to any firefighting operation, failed dismally that day. “We didn’t have a lot of information coming in,” Chief Joe Pfeifer recalled of the Command Center in the North Tower lobby. According to the Fire Department’s own investigation, the portable radios in use on 9/11 did not “work reliably in high-rise buildings without having their signals amplified or rebroadcast by a repeater system.”
“We didn’t receive any reports of what was seen from the helicopters,” Pfeifer said. “It was impossible to know what was done on the upper floors, whether the stairwells were intact or not.” “People watching on TV,” Deputy Chief Peter Hayden said, “had more knowledge of what was happening a hundred floors above us than we did in the lobby.”
As their chiefs worked blind, men struggled up the North Tower weighed down by equipment. Company followed company on the strenuous ascent into the unknowable. Of those they had come to rescue, some 1,500 souls had already died or were going to die, those trapped above the impact zone and the injured, handicapped, severely obese, or the elderly, for whom movement was difficult. Of the roughly 7,500 civilians who had been in the North Tower before the attack, however, 6,000 would manage to leave the building by 10:00 A.M.
Of perhaps 7,000 people in the South Tower, some 6,000 are thought to have made their way to safety by 9:30. Of about a thousand who remained, 600 would die.
Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, the man Clark had pulled from the wreckage on the 81st floor of the South Tower, had continued to make their painful way down. Slithering at first over ceiling tiles and sheet rock, they sloshed through water, groped through smoke, hurried past fingers of flame. Then the way seemed clear for the long trudge down to safety. “Let’s slow down,” Clark said as they reached the mid-20s. “We’ve come this far. There’s no point in breaking an ankle.” There no longer seemed any need to rush.
High above, hope of escape had withered. Sean Rooney, an Aon insurance executive, had tried to reach the roof and been defeated by the locked doors. From the 105th floor, on the phone to his wife, Beverly, he said, “The smoke is very thick … the windows are getting hot.” Some two hundred other people were trapped in a nearby conference room.
Below, too far below, firefighters were still climbing, climbing. One group, that reached the 70th floor, found numerous victims with serious injuries. Chief Orio Palmer, who got to the 78th floor, reported that there were many “Code Ones”—firefighterspeak for dead. Palmer could see pockets of fire but, speaking as though there would be time to do the job, said he thought it should be possible to put them out.
Emergency operators had continued to log piteous calls:
09:32 105 FLR—PEOPLE TRAPPED—OPEN ROOF TO GAIN ACCESS
09:36 FC STS THEY ARE STUCK IN THE ELEVATORS … STS THEY ARE DYING
09:40 MC STS PEOPLE PASSING OUT
09:42 PEOPLE STILL JUMPING OFF THE TOWER
09:39 FC MELISSA STS FLOOR VERY HOT NO DOOR STS SHE’S GOING TO DIE … STILL ON PHONE … WANT TO CALL MOTHER
Emergency workers in the South Tower lobby were overwhelmed by the number of injured people who could go no further.
Outside, butchered corpses. “Some of them had no legs,” said Roberto Abril, a paramedic, “some of them had no arms. There was a torso with one leg, with an EMS jacket on top. I guess somebody just wanted to cover it. We kept going back, but at one point it was useless because most of the people that could get out were already walking.”
EARLY THAT MORNING, a handful of high-ranking firemen had pondered the unthinkable. How long would the fires burn on the upper floors, chief of safety Al Turi wondered, before there were partial collapses? Three hours, perhaps? He shared his concern with chief of department Peter Ganci and other colleagues. “The potential and the reality of a collapse,” deputy division chief Peter Hayden said, was discussed early on. “I think we envisioned a gradual burning of the fire for a couple of hours and
then a very limited type of collapse—the top fifteen or twenty floors all folding in.”
Rick Rescorla, security chief for Morgan Stanley, saw it coming from the start. “Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse,” he forecast right after the strike on the North Tower, “and it’s going to take the whole building with it.” He ordered his staff to evacuate at once, even though they were based in the South Tower—at the time still undamaged.
When the top of the South Tower in turn became an inferno, the same thought occurred to firefighter Richard Carletti. “Tommy,” he told a colleague as they stood staring upward, “this building is in danger of collapse.”
Only months earlier, Frank De Martini, construction manager for the New York Port Authority, had dismissed the notion of one of the towers collapsing. “I believe the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door,” he said in an interview. “And the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing the screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting … The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it.”
An early design study had indeed suggested that the Trade Center would survive were a Boeing 707, the largest airliner of the day—“low on fuel and at landing speeds”—to strike one of the towers. Now, the buildings had been hit by far larger, far more powerful, 767s heavily laden with fuel. On 9/11, De Martini became concerned early on, and asked that structural inspectors be summoned. He was himself to die that day.
By about 9:50, photographs analyzed much later would show, the South Tower’s 83rd floor gave the appearance of drooping down over the floor below. Video footage showed a stream of molten metal cascading from a window opening near one corner. A minute later, a police helicopter pilot warned that there were “large pieces of debris hanging” from the South Tower. They looked as though they were about to fall.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 6