There is no knowing exactly what happened when the hijackers erupted into the cockpit. “There was no warning to be more vigilant,” Captain Ogonowski’s wife, Peg, would later say. “These people come in behind him. He’s sitting low, forward, strapped in—the same with his copilot. No warning …”
Ogonowski and copilot Tom McGuinness had been trained not to respond to force with force. FAA policy was still geared to hijackings designed to take over airliners, not destroy them. It called for pilots to “refrain from trying to overpower or negotiate with hijackers, to land the aircraft as soon as possible, to communicate with authorities, and to try delaying tactics.” According to an FAA security report, the agency did know that “suicide was an increasingly common tactic among terrorists in the Middle East.” Its brief to its pilots, however, offered no guidance on how to deal with hijackers bent on suicide.
Attendant Ong had not sounded panicky as she reported from Flight 11. From time to time, though, she asked staff on the ground to “Please pray for us.” There were moments, she said, when the plane was being flown erratically, “sideways.” It was descending. The phone line had started to fade in and out. Her colleague Amy Sweeney said she could see they were now “over New York City.”
Then Ong exclaimed, “Oh, God! … Oh, God! …” and began to cry. Sweeney screamed and said, “Something is wrong. I don’t think the captain is in control. We are in a rapid descent … We are all over the place … I see water! I see buildings! …” Next, a deep breath and, slowly, calmly, “Oh, my God! … We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low.” Seconds later, again, “Oh, my God, we are way too low …”
American Airlines’ people on the ground could no longer hear either flight attendant. In Boston, duty manager Woodward got only “very, very loud static.” In North Carolina, Gonzalez was saying, “Betty, talk to me. Betty, are you there, Betty? …”
And finally, “I think we may have lost her.”
TWO
IT WAS JUST OVER HALF AN HOUR SINCE THE HIJACKERS HAD STRUCK.
In an office in Lower Manhattan, high in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a data processor glanced up from his computer. On the horizon to the north, a dot in the sky got his attention. Unusual to see a plane over there, he thought, and turned back to his work.
Moments later, from his perch on a structure on East 77th Street, a steelworker was startled by the sight and the roar of an airliner flying so low that—it seemed to him—it almost hit the antenna atop the Empire State Building. At Madison Avenue and 45th Street, construction workers stared in astonishment. In SoHo, twenty blocks north of the Trade Center, a composer seated in a restaurant window heard a jet thunder overhead. Pigeons, normally blase, rose in alarm. A window-gazing student at Stuyvesant High—on the banks of the Hudson River— glimpsed the plane for a second and blurted a stunned, “Did you see that?”
A “freakish noise” sent author-photographer Lew Rubenfien rushing onto the roof of his apartment building.
It was the sound jet engines make on a runway when they have been powered all the way up for takeoff— though much more violent, somehow enraged.… The plane was moving far faster than you ever saw one go so low in the sky.… I began to shout telepathically, “Get away from the building, get away from the building.” … The plane made a perfect bull’s-eye, leaving a jagged tear … and then, just as it happens in dreams, everything stretched a long way out.… There could only have been a fraction of a second.… Then, at last, the building exploded. Hot and orange, the great gassy flower blew out.
It was 8:46 A.M.
The impact had been caught on film thanks to the snap reaction of French documentary maker Jules Naudet, filming nearby with a unit of the New York Fire Department. “I look up, and it’s clearly an American Airlines jet,” the Frenchman said later. “I turned the camera toward where it was going to go … I see it go in. I’m filming it.” The image he shot, destined to become iconic, precisely matches Rubenfien’s verbal description—orange burst at the core, great bloom of gray smoke or vapor to the left.
In the North Tower, the man who had seen the plane as a distant dot had not been looking when it came right at him. To Chuck Allen of Lava Trading, busy in his 83rd floor office, the memory instead would be of a “muffled, sucking, unbearably loud noise. Like the sound of two high-speed trains crossing in high proximity to each other.”
Through the windows, still unbroken, he saw debris falling, paper floating. Liquid was running down the windowpanes. There was a grinding and squeaking in the walls and—Allen was vividly conscious of it—the entire building leaned to one side. Then, gradually, it righted itself.
On the 86th floor, the windows had shattered. James Gartenberg, a broker with Julian Studley real estate, reported by phone that the glass had blown “from the inside of the building out.” And that: “The core of the building, the interior core part of the building, collapsed.”
American Flight 11 had sliced into the tower between the 93rd and 99th floors. The liquid Allen saw on the windows was almost certainly jet fuel from the plane’s wing tanks, a dribble of the ten thousand gallons said to have been on board.
Filmmaker Naudet, far below, stayed with the crew of firefighters as it switched from exercise mode to rapid response and rushed to the tower. Minutes later, in the downstairs lobby, he saw what exploding aviation fuel can do. Fireballs had shot down some of the many elevator shafts, detonating on several floors and then in the lobby. “The windows had all been blown out,” Naudet said. “The marble had come off the walls. I saw two bodies burning on the floor. One was screaming, a woman’s scream … I just didn’t want to film that.”
Some fourteen thousand people worked each day in the Trade Center towers. Its Twin Towers—North and South, each 110 stories high—loomed more than a fifth of a mile over Manhattan. They were the tallest buildings in the city of skyscrapers, symbols of America’s financial power, the heart of a great complex that housed offices, a shopping mall, a hotel, and two subway stations. Vast numbers of workers had not yet been at work when Flight 11 hit. They had been milling around on the lower levels, buying newspapers, grabbing a coffee or a snack. It was primary election day in the city, moreover, and many had stopped to vote before going to the office. Some commuters had been delayed, too, by especially heavy traffic through the tunnels in Manhattan. Innumerable lives were saved that morning by being late.
As filmmaker Naudet had seen, some were killed or terribly injured in the North Tower lobby. It was the 91st floor far above, though, just below the impact point, that became the frontier between certain death and possible, even probable, survival. Above, on levels 92 to 105, were the hundreds of international bankers, the bond traders, investment and insurance managers and their staffs, who regularly came in early to get a jump on the markets. Higher still, near the tower’s summit, were the customers and staff of Windows on the World, the celebrated restaurant atop the Trade Center—and engineers who manned television and radio transmitters.
Of the 1,344 souls on those upper floors, none would survive. Some had died instantly, and hundreds had no way of escaping.
On the 92nd floor, which was intact for a while, debris blocked the stairways. At Carr Futures, John San Pio Resta; his wife, Silvia, seven months pregnant; and trader Damian Meehan were trapped. So, too, was Michael Richards, a sculptor who used studio space on the same floor—an anomaly in a building dedicated to commerce— provided by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Meehan had time to phone one of his brothers, to tell him the elevators were gone and that there was smoke. His last words were “We’ve got to go,” as he headed for one of the blocked stairways. We know nothing of the last moments of the San Pio Restas and Michael Richards. Richards had last been seen at midnight, saying he planned to work till morning. Long preoccupied with the theme of aviation, his final work had been a bronze of himself amidst flames and meteors, pierced by airplanes.
The area immediately above the 92nd floor was a tomb. Fred Alger Management lost thirty-five people, Marsh and McLennan, spread over several floors, 295. For Marsh analyst Patricia Massari, on the phone to her husband when the plane hit, there had been time only for “Oh, my God!” Then the phone went dead. The remains of one of her colleagues would be found five blocks away.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trading company, had occupied floors 100 to 105. Six hundred fifty-eight people had been in their offices at the moment of impact. Michael Wittenstein had hung up in the middle of a call to a customer, then—courteous to a fault—phoned back to apologize. “I believe,” he had time to say, “there was an
