disturbed. They were too busy discussing the hijacking of American Flight 11, which they didn’t realize had scythed into the North Tower almost ten minutes earlier.
During the first frenzied minutes before and after 9 a.m. on September 11, only a few people recognized the enormity of the unfolding catastrophe. Tragically, some of those who best understood key pieces of the crisis were inside American Flight 11 before it crashed and United Flight 175 as it sped toward New York City.
AT NEARLY THE same time as Peter Hanson called his parents’ Connecticut home, a telephone rang at a United Airlines facility in San Francisco where in-flight crews called to report minor maintenance problems. Flight attendants knew they could dial “f-i-x,” using the corresponding numbers on the keypad, 3-4-9, and automatically be connected to the airline’s maintenance center.
From an Airfone near the rear of Flight 175, a male flight attendant, believed to be former cellphone salesman Robert Fangman, reported details of the hijacking to a maintenance worker. The information dovetailed with the report Peter Hanson gave his father. The flight attendant said that both pilots of United Flight 175 had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and hijackers were probably flying the plane.
The unrecorded call cut off after about two minutes. The United maintenance worker and a colleague tried to recontact the flight using the ACARS digital message system linked to the cockpit: “I heard of a reported incident aboard your [aircraft],” they wrote. “Plz verify all is normal.”
They received no reply. Minutes passed before someone from the San Francisco maintenance center reported the call to United headquarters in Chicago.
Not every attempt to sound the alarm or to reach loved ones from Flight 175 proved successful. Between 8:52 a.m. and 8:59 a.m., former pro hockey player Garnet “Ace” Bailey tried four times to call his wife, Kathy, on her business and home phones. The calls dropped or didn’t connect. He never got through.
FLIGHT 175 COMPLETED a fishhook turn over Allentown, Pennsylvania, banking to the left and descending as it crossed back over New Jersey, and headed toward New York City. The pilot almost certainly was Marwan al-Shehhi, the companion of Mohamed Atta and the only one of the five Flight 175 hijackers trained to fly a passenger jet.
Nothing was safe in their path. A New York Center controller watched as the United plane turned toward a Delta 737 flying southwest at 28,000 feet.
“Traffic two o’clock! Ten miles,” the controller warned the Delta pilots. “I think he’s been hijacked. I don’t know his intentions. Take any evasive action necessary.”
The Delta flight ducked away from United 175, but soon after, the hijacked plane put itself on a collision course with a US Airways flight. An alarm sounded in the US Airways cockpit, and the pilots dived to avoid a midair crash.
AFTER DROPPING HER husband, Brian “Moose” Sweeney, at the Hyannis airport, Julie Sweeney got ready for her fifth day of work as a high school health teacher on Cape Cod. She’d already left for work when the phone rang in the home she shared with the former Navy F-14 pilot, Top Gun instructor, “Twin Tower” college football player, and costume-party Viking.
Brian’s call, at shortly before 8:59 a.m., went to their answering machine.
He spoke in a calm, serious tone, and his message echoed what he’d told Julie weeks earlier about how he wanted her to “celebrate life” if anything happened to him:
“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”
Brian hung up. Then he punched in the numbers for another telephone call.
AS LOUISE SWEENEY prepared to leave home to run errands, the phone rang. She picked up to hear her son’s voice: “Mom, It’s Brian. I’m on a hijacked plane and it doesn’t look good. I called to say I love you and I love my family.”
Brian told his mother that he didn’t know who the hijackers were. Calling from the rear of the plane, he said he thought they might come back, so he might have to hang up quickly. He told her he believed that they might be flying somewhere over Ohio. Brian said he and other passengers might storm the cockpit.
Louise knew her son, and she recognized how he sounded when he became “pissed off.” He had that tone.
Before ending the call, Brian told her, “Remember Crossing Over. Don’t forget Crossing Over.”
Louise remembered, and she wouldn’t forget. As Flight 175 streamed toward New York City, descending by the second, flying erratically, the original pilots apparently dead and a flight attendant wounded, Brian tried to comfort his mother. Crossing Over was a book and television program featuring a self-professed psychic named John Edward, who claimed to communicate with the dead. Brian wanted his mother to know that somehow, someday, he would see her again.
Now Brian had to go.
“They are coming back,” he said. Brian told his mother goodbye as he hung up.
Louise Sweeney turned on the television.
AT NINE O’CLOCK, Peter Hanson called his parents’ home a second time from Flight 175.
“It’s getting bad, Dad,” Peter told his father, Lee. “A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace.”
“They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up and getting sick.”
“The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down.”
“I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.”
Peter’s description of the hijackers’ weapons, claims, and tactics echoed the calls only minutes earlier from Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney on Flight 11.
Then, just as Brian Sweeney had tried to reassure his wife and mother, Peter Hanson sought to comfort his father: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”
AT 9:01 A.M., as United Flight 175 rapidly descended, Peter Mulligan, a flight control manager at New York Center, told the FAA Command Center in Virginia: “We have several situations going on here. It’s escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us.”
As it barreled toward the World Trade Center, already the scene of disaster from Flight 11’s crash, United Flight 175 looked as though it might hit the Statue of Liberty.
Air traffic controllers stared rapt at their screens, even as they continued to warn other nearby planes. Everything in their long years of training and experience channeled their minds toward the hope and expectation that hijacked planes would land and passengers would be held hostage until demands were met, or until the military either forced the hijackers to surrender or killed them. To the very last moments, some controllers held tight to the notion that the pilots were racing toward the nearest airport, beset by a routine mechanical or electrical emergency.
Reality overtook that fantasy.
United Airlines
