Maine. There they visited a Pizza Hut, a Walmart, a gas station, and two ATM machines. Before dawn on September 11, they drove to the Portland International Jetport for a US Airways commuter flight back to Boston.
It was something of a mystery why Atta and Omari went to Portland only to fly back to Boston the morning of September 11. One possibility was that they thought they’d seem less suspicious that way than if they drove to Logan Airport and arrived there at the same time as a large group of other Middle Eastern men. It’s also possible that they expected to be subject to less stringent security screening at a smaller airport in Maine.
Once at the Portland airport, Atta checked two suitcases: his black rolling Travelpro and a green rolling bag that apparently belonged to Omari. The green suitcase contained innocuous items including Omari’s Saudi passport and his checkbook, an Arabic-to-English dictionary, three English grammar books, a handkerchief, a twenty-dollar bill, Brylcreem antidandruff hair treatment, and a bottle of perfume.
At the Portland ticket counter, Atta asked an agent for his boarding pass for their next flight, departing Boston: American Flight 11. The agent told Atta he’d have to check in a second time when he reached Logan. Atta clenched his jaw and appeared on the verge of anger. He told the agent that he’d been assured he’d have “one-step check-in.” The agent didn’t budge or rise to Atta’s hostility. He simply told Atta that he’d better hurry if he didn’t want to miss the flight. Although Atta still looked cross, he and Omari left the ticket counter for the Portland airport’s security checkpoint.
At 5:45 a.m., Atta and Omari walked without incident through the metal detector, which was calibrated to detect the amount of metal in a gun or a large knife. Their black carry-on shoulder bags traveled down the moving belt and passed cleanly through the X-ray machine. Omari also carried a smaller black case that looked like a camera bag, which also didn’t raise alarms. Atta wore a stern expression and clothes that resembled a pilot’s uniform: dark blue collared shirt and dark pants. Omari wore a cream-colored shirt and khaki pants. After clearing security, Atta and Omari sat in the last row of the small commuter jet for the short flight to Boston.
Meanwhile, Atta’s checked bags were selected for added security screening, mainly to ensure that they didn’t contain explosives. The selection was made by a program implemented in 1997 called the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, which used an algorithm of classified factors, weighted by a computerized formula. The system also selected some passengers on each flight at random, to minimize complaints about discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin and to prevent terrorists from learning ways to avoid being chosen. The very design of the system, which targeted only passengers who checked bags, reflected the Federal Aviation Administration’s woefully mistaken belief in the summer of 2001 that hijackings were a thing of the past and that sabotage, in the form of a bomb sneaked onto a plane in the luggage of a passenger who didn’t board, represented the greatest threat to air travel. It’s unclear what led the FAA to that conclusion, especially because sixty-four hijackings had occurred worldwide between 1996 and 2001 versus only three cases of sabotage.
The Portland jetport didn’t have explosive detection equipment, and the bags weren’t opened and searched. Under FAA security rules, the only requirement was that the bags be held off the plane until the person who had checked them boarded. After Atta boarded, the ground crew tossed his checked suitcases into the small plane’s luggage compartment.
Under previous, stricter airport security rules, abandoned by the FAA several years earlier, passengers whose bags were selected for explosive screening would also undergo a body pat-down and a thorough search of their carry-on bags. But those measures took time, and the FAA had come under harsh criticism for long airport lines, which led to costly and frustrating delays and declines in on-time arrivals. As a result, those pat-down and bag search rules were eliminated. No one patted down Atta or Omari or searched their carry-on bags.
It’s unclear what effect those added security measures might have had on Atta and Omari’s plans. During the two previous months, Atta had purchased two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multitool with a short knife. During his trip to Spain earlier in the summer, Atta reported to his al-Qaeda contact that he and two fellow pilot trainees, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had been able to carry box cutters onto planes during their test flights. It’s unknown whether Atta or Omari carried those or other weapons through security in Portland or Boston on September 11, but even if they had, it might not have mattered to ground screeners. Federal rules in place in the summer of 2001 allowed airline passengers to carry knives with blades shorter than four inches. Although security screeners had discretion to confiscate short-bladed knives using “common sense,” government studies showed persistent gaps in the performance of low-wage human screeners. They worked for the airlines and consequently were encouraged to keep security lines short and fast-moving. Screeners were supposed to conduct “random and continuous” checks of carry-on bags, but in practice that rarely happened.
Gaps in airport security went deeper than screening rules and personnel. For instance, once a would-be hijacker passed the security checkpoint, he had every reason to think he was in the clear, with no worries about being confronted on a domestic flight by an armed air marshal. In 2001, the FAA employed only thirty-three such marshals, a sharp drop from the 1970s, and they were assigned exclusively to international flights considered to be high risk. That was the case despite a statement published by the FAA just eight weeks before September 11 in the Federal Register: “Terrorism can occur anytime, anywhere in the United States. Members of foreign terrorist groups, representatives from state sponsors of terrorism and radical fundamentalist elements from many nations are present in the United States. Thus, an increasing threat to civil aviation from both foreign sources and potential domestic ones exists and needs to be prevented and countered.”
THE US AIRWAYS flight from Portland landed in Boston at 6:45 a.m., leaving Atta and Omari plenty of time to catch American Flight 11 to Los Angeles, departing from Terminal B. They passed through security screening at Logan Airport, again without incident. Within minutes of arriving in Boston, Atta received a call on his cellphone from a pay phone in Logan’s nearby Terminal C, which served planes from United Airlines, among others. The caller was a key collaborator in Atta’s deadly plan.
The two men waited at Gate 32 with other passengers, but before boarding Flight 11, Atta had a strange interaction. First Officer Lynn Howland had just arrived in Boston after copiloting the red-eye flight from San Francisco on the plane that would be redesignated American Flight 11. As she walked off the 767 and entered the passenger lounge, a man she didn’t know approached her and asked if she’d be flying the plane back across the country. Based on his clothing, he looked like a pilot hoping to catch a ride to Los Angeles on an available jump seat.
“No, I just brought the aircraft in,” Howland told him.
The man abruptly turned his back and walked away. Later she identified him as Mohamed Atta.
As he boarded Flight 11, Atta asked a gate agent whether the two bags he’d checked earlier in Portland had been loaded onto the plane. Atta had reason for concern about his suitcase, especially if someone familiar with Arabic decided to search it prior to Flight 11’s takeoff. Inside his black rolling Travelpro bag was the handwritten instruction letter about how to prepare spiritually and logistically to hijack a plane. Even without knowledge of Arabic, a sharp screener might have grown suspicious when he or she noticed the videotaped lessons on flying Boeing jets, the other pilot gear, the folding knife, and the canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. To track down Atta’s bags, the gate agent called Flight 11’s ground crew chief, Donald Bennett. He reported that the two bags had arrived, but too late. His crew had already loaded and locked the big jet’s luggage compartment, and the airline’s desire for on-time departures prohibited reopening it so close to takeoff. Because the bags had previously passed through security, no one had reason to inspect them just because they arrived late. Atta and Omari’s bags got new tags, for a later flight
