the phone rang.
Barbara told Ted that “the pilot” had announced that the plane had been hijacked, but it wasn’t clear if she knew whether the speaker on the intercom was one of the hijackers or the original cockpit crew. She might have been operating under the old “rules” and believed the terrorists were forcing the legitimate pilots to do their bidding. Barbara said the plane was flying over houses. Another passenger told her they were headed northeast.
“What can I tell the pilot?” Barbara asked Ted. “What can I do? How can I stop this?”
Ted wasn’t sure how to answer. He decided that he had to tell Barbara about the other two hijackings and crashes at the World Trade Center. Flight 77 seemed bound for the same fate; the question was where the hijackers intended to crash. Barbara absorbed the news quietly and stoically, though Ted wondered if she’d been shocked into silence.
They expressed their feelings for each other. Each reassured the other that it wasn’t over yet, the plane was still aloft, and everything would work out. Even as he said the words, Ted Olson didn’t believe them. He suspected that neither did Barbara.
The call abruptly ended.
AT THAT MOMENT, no one at the FAA had any idea what was happening aboard American Flight 77, or where it was.
Shortly after nine, controllers at Indianapolis Center began spreading word that Flight 77 had disappeared from their screens. At 9:09 a.m., controllers at Indianapolis Center reported the loss of contact with the plane to the FAA regional center. Fully fifteen minutes later, a regional FAA official relayed that information to FAA headquarters in Washington.
By 9:20 a.m., after the distress calls from Renée May and Barbara Olson and nearly twenty-five minutes after someone turned off the transponder on Flight 77, Indianapolis controllers finally learned that two other passenger jets had been hijacked. At that point, they doubted their initial assumptions about a crash. They and their FAA supervisors began to consider the evidence that a third passenger plane had been hijacked.
Overall, confusion and uncertainty were almost universal during the first hour after the hijackings, extending far beyond the FAA. At 9:10 a.m., a United dispatch manager wrote in a logbook: “At that point a second aircraft had hit the WTC, but we didn’t know it was our United flight.” As late as 9:20 a.m., dispatchers from United Airlines and American Airlines were still trying to confirm whose planes had hit the World Trade Center. During one phone call, an American Airlines official said he thought both planes belonged to his airline, while a United official said he believed that the second plane was Flight 175. He reached that conclusion in part because enlarged slow-motion images on CNN showed the plane that flew into the South Tower didn’t have American Airlines’ shiny metallic skin.
In fairness to FAA and airline officials, these were extraordinarily fast-moving events for which they had never trained. Also, the officials were hamstrung by a mix of incorrect or fragmentary information, as well as by a false sense of security that developed during the years since a U.S. air carrier had been hijacked or bombed. Just four years earlier, a presidential commission on air safety chaired by Vice President Al Gore focused on the dangers of sabotage and explosives aboard commercial airplanes. It also raised the possibility that terrorists might use surface-to-air missiles, and it cited concerns about lax screening of items airline passengers might carry onto planes. The commission’s final report never mentioned a risk of suicide hijackings.
Ultimately, though, the FAA bore responsibility as the government agency with a duty to protect airline passengers from piracy and sabotage. Despite that mission, the FAA had significant gaps in domestic intelligence and multiple blind spots. Some of this was attributable to a lack of communication, and perhaps a lack of respect, from federal intelligence-gathering agencies. On September 11, 2001, the FAA’s “no-fly list” included a grand total of twelve names. By contrast, the State Department’s so-called TIPOFF terrorist watchlist included sixty thousand names. Yet the FAA’s head of civil aviation security didn’t even know that the State Department list existed. Two names on that State Department list were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77. That wasn’t the only example of other federal agencies’ not sharing information about potential threats with the FAA.
Earlier in the summer, an FBI agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams had written a memo to his superiors in Washington expressing concern about Middle Eastern men with ties to extremists receiving flight training in the United States. Williams’s memo presciently warned about the “possibility of a coordinated effort by [O]sama bin Laden” to send would-be terrorists to U.S. flight schools to become pilots to serve al-Qaeda. Among other recommendations, he urged the FBI to monitor civil aviation schools and seek authority to obtain visa information about foreign students attending them. The FBI neither acted on the memo nor shared it with the FAA. The FBI took a similar approach in the case of a French national named Zacarias Moussaoui who’d been receiving flight training in Minneapolis. Moussaoui was arrested less than a month before September 11 for overstaying his visa, and an FBI agent concluded that he was “an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals.” The agent believed that Moussaoui’s flight training played a role in those plans. On August 24, eighteen days before the attacks, the CIA described him as a possible “suicide hijacker.” But when the FBI told the FAA and other agencies about Moussaoui on September 4, its summary didn’t mention the agent’s belief that Moussaoui planned to hijack a plane.
In the summer of 2001, the FAA seemed to ignore even its own recent security briefings. A few months before September 11, an FAA briefing to airport security officials considered the desirability of suicide hijackings from a terrorist perspective: “A domestic hijacking would likely result in a greater number of American hostages but would be operationally more difficult. We don’t rule it out… . If, however, the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable.”
Now that scenario had come to pass, and the FAA found itself unaware and unprepared.
THE FAA’S INDIANAPOLIS Center controllers continued to search their radar screens to the west and southwest along Flight 77’s projected path, having missed the plane’s sharp turn back to the east. Although the plane had disappeared from radar at 8:56 a.m., it actually reappeared at 9:05 a.m. But because some controllers had stopped looking when they thought it crashed, and some looked in the wrong direction, they never saw it return to their radar screens. Neither Indianapolis Center controllers nor their bosses at the FAA command center issued an “all-points bulletin” for other air traffic control centers to look for the missing plane.
American Airlines Flight 77 traveled undetected for thirty-six minutes.
The plane’s new flight path pointed it on a direct course for Washington, D.C. But yet again, no one told the U.S. military, this time about a threat to the nation’s capital.
BY 9:25 A.M., even as American Flight 77 remained missing and a mystery, one top FAA official grasped the severity and growing scope of the crisis.
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 77 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 question 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
