7:39 a.m., Atta and Omari stepped aboard and found seats 8D and 8G, the middle pair of Flight 11’s two-two-two business cabin seat configuration.
Already seated were Saudi Arabian brothers Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, in seats 2A and 2B, in the first row of first class. The plane didn’t have a Row 1, so those seats placed them directly behind the cockpit. Their checked bags were selected for explosives screening at Logan, just as Atta’s and Omari’s had been in Portland. No explosives were found, and the bags were loaded aboard Flight 11. Under the new FAA rules, just like Atta and Omari, neither Shehri brother had to undergo an added personal screening such as a pat-down or carry-on search for weapons or contraband.
The fifth member of their group, Saudi native Satam al-Suqami, didn’t undergo added screening, either. Shortly after Atta and Omari boarded, Suqami made his way to seat 10B, on an aisle in business class.
The five men had chosen their seats aboard Flight 11 in a way that gave them access to the aisles and placed all of them close to the cockpit. By chance, Suqami’s seat in business class put him directly behind tech entrepreneur and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin.
FLIGHT 11 HAD a capacity of 158 passengers, but as the crew prepared for takeoff, only 81 seats were filled: 9 passengers in first class, 19 in business class, and 53 in coach.
Shortly before takeoff, American Airlines flight service manager Michael Woodward walked aboard for a final check.
In first class he found Karen Martin, the Number One, or head flight attendant, who was known for running an especially tight ship. Tall and blond, forty years old and fiercely competitive, Karen was described by friends as “Type A-plus.” Nearby stood thirty-eight-year-old Barbara “Bobbi” Arestegui, the Number Five attendant, petite and patient, known for her ability to calm even the most difficult passenger.
Michael asked if they were ready to go.
“Yep, everything’s fine,” Karen Martin said. Michael spotted his friend Kathy Nicosia, the Number Two attendant, and waved.
Before he left, Michael scanned down the aisle, almost out of habit, to see if the attendants had closed all the overhead bins. As he looked through the business section, Michael locked eyes with the passenger in seat 8D. A chill passed through him, a queasy gut feeling he couldn’t quite place and couldn’t shake. Something about Mohamed Atta’s brooding look seemed wrong. But the flight was already behind schedule, and Michael wouldn’t challenge a passenger simply for glaring at him. He turned and stepped off Flight 11, and a gate agent closed the door behind him.
Buttoned up and ready to go, crew and passengers aboard Flight 11 began the usual drill: seats upright, belts fastened, tray tables secured into place, cellphones switched off. Flight attendants buckled into jump seats. Its wings loaded with fuel, the Boeing 767 rolled back from Gate 32. Inside their locked cockpit, Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr. taxied the silver jet away from the terminal.
Cleared for takeoff, they turned onto Logan’s Runway 4R and checked the wind speed and air traffic. They took flight at 7:59 a.m., becoming one of the roughly forty-five hundred passenger and general aviation planes that would be airborne all across the United States by late morning.
Moments after takeoff, the pilots made a U-turn over Boston Harbor and pointed the plane west, flying through clear skies several miles above the wide asphalt ribbon of the Massachusetts Turnpike, headed toward the New York border.
DURING THE FIRST fourteen minutes of Flight 11, pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness followed instructions from an FAA air traffic controller on the ground and eased the 767 up to 26,000 feet, just under its initial cruising altitude of 29,000 feet. They spoke nineteen times with air traffic control during the first minutes of the flight, all brief, routine exchanges, automatically recorded on the ground, mostly polite hellos and instructions about headings and altitude.
The smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafted through the cabin as flight attendants waited for the pilots to switch off the Fasten Seatbelt signs. First-class passengers would soon enjoy “silver service,” provided by Karen Martin and Bobbi Arestegui, with white tablecloths for continental breakfast. Business passengers would receive similar but less fancy options from attendants Sara Low and Jean Rogér, with help from Dianne Snyder. Muffins, juice, and coffee would have to sustain passengers in coach, served by Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, with Karen Nicosia working in the rear galley. The lone male attendant, Jeffrey Collman, would help in coach or first class as needed. Regardless of seating class, everyone on board would be invited to watch comedian Eddie Murphy talk to animals during the in-flight movie, Dr. Dolittle 2.
Fifteen minutes into the flight, shortly before 8:14 a.m., the pilots verbally confirmed a radioed request from an air traffic controller named Peter Zalewski to make a 20-degree right turn. The plane turned. Sixteen seconds later, Zalewski instructed Flight 11 to climb to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The plane climbed, but only to 29,000 feet. No one in the cockpit replied to Zalewski’s order. Ten seconds passed.
Zalewski tried again. Soft-spoken, forty-three years old, after nineteen years with the FAA, Zalewski had grown accustomed to the relentless pressure of air traffic control. He spent his days in a darkened, windowless room at an FAA facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, known as Boston Center, one of twenty-two regional air traffic control centers nationwide. A simplified way to describe the job done by Zalewski and the 260 other controllers at Boston Center would be to call it flight separation, or doing everything necessary to keep airplanes a safe distance from one another. Zalewski’s assignment called for him to keep watch on his radar screen, or “scope,” for planes flying above 20,000 feet in a defined area west of Boston. When they left his geographic sector, they became another FAA controller’s responsibility.
When Zalewski received no reply from the pilots of Flight 11, he wondered if John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness weren’t paying attention, or perhaps had a problem with the radio frequency. But he didn’t have much time to let the problem sort itself out. He began to grow concerned that, at its current altitude and position, Flight 11 might be on a collision course with planes flying inbound toward Logan. Zalewski checked his equipment, tried the radio frequency Flight 11 used when it first took off, then used an emergency frequency to hail the plane. Still he heard nothing in response.
“He’s NORDO,” Zalewski told a colleague, using controller lingo for “no radio.” That could mean trouble, but this sort of thing happened often enough that it didn’t immediately merit emergency action. Usually it resulted from distracted pilots or technical problems that could be handled with a variety of remedies. Still, silent planes represented potential problems for controllers trying to maintain separation. As one of Zalewski’s colleagues tracked Flight 11 on radar, moving other planes out of the way, Zalewski tried repeatedly to reach the Flight 11 pilots.
8:14:08 a.m.: “American Eleven, Boston.”
Fifteen seconds later, he called out the same message.
Ten seconds later: “American one-one … how do you hear me?”
Four more tries in the next two minutes. Nothing.
8:17:05 a.m.: “American Eleven, American one-one, Boston.”
At one second before 8:18 a.m., flight controllers at Boston Center heard a brief, unknown sound on the radio frequency used by Flight 11 and other nearby flights. They didn’t know where it came from, and they couldn’t be certain, but it sounded like a scream.
ZALEWSKI TRIED AGAIN. And again. And again. Still NORDO.
Another Boston Center controller asked a different American Airlines pilot, on a plane
