to begin a two-month adventure in Australia. An associate dean and associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, Leslie had accepted a visiting fellowship at Australian National University in Canberra. Along with teaching, the trip would allow her to test theories for a book she was writing about women, work, and families. A computer engineer and scientist, Charles took a leave from his work developing software that organized and managed scientific data. Earlier in his career, he developed a software system for researchers in Alaska trying to measure impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. At eight, Zoe was a Girl Scout, a swim team member, a ballet student, an actress in school musicals, and a devoted reader of the Harry Potter books. At three, curly-haired, irrepressible Dana found comfort in her stuffed lamb and joy in stories about princesses. (She regularly dressed as one.)
A married couple occupied the other two seats in Row 23: quiet, retired chemist Yugang Zheng and his outgoing, retired pediatrician wife, Shuying Yang. They were on their way home to China after a nearly yearlong visit with their daughter, a medical student and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They’d just returned from a week of sightseeing, hiking, and swimming in Maine and had delayed their flight to spend one more day with their daughter and her husband. As a wedding gift, they’d given the young couple a statue of the goddess of compassion, Bodhisattva Guanyin, who hears the cries of the world and brings care to those in need.
In the row in front of them, Retired Rear Admiral Wilson “Bud” Flagg and Darlene “Dee” Flagg had plans for a family gathering in California. Both sixty-two, the high school sweethearts had recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and Bud’s fortieth reunion at the U.S. Naval Academy. One story that made the rounds at the reunion explained how Bud had stopped his classmates from raiding his stash of Dee’s cookies: he substituted a batch he’d baked with laxatives. (It was a lesson he didn’t have to teach twice.) Bud served three tours as a fighter pilot in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Later, he had a dual career as a pilot for American Airlines and an officer in the Naval Reserve. The Flaggs had two sons and four grandchildren, and together they ran a Virginia cattle farm.
In a window seat seven rows away sat Dr. Yeneneh Betru. He’d moved to the United States from Ethiopia as a teenager in order to fulfill a promise to his grandmother that he would become a doctor and cure whatever ailed her. Soft-spoken but determined, thirty-five years old, Yeneneh traveled throughout the United States training other doctors in the care of hospitalized patients, while spending his personal time and money assembling equipment to create the first public kidney dialysis center in Addis Ababa.
In 5B of business class sat a man known for his dapper clothes and mastery of dominoes and whist: Eddie Dillard. At fifty-four, Eddie had retired four years earlier from a career as a district manager for the tobacco company Philip Morris. Since then, he’d transformed into a savvy real estate investor. He was flying to California to work on a rental property he owned with his wife, Rosemary, an American Airlines base manager at Reagan National Airport in Washington.
In first class, newlyweds Zandra and Robert Riis Ploger III buckled into second-row seats on the first leg of a two-week honeymoon to Hawaii. Despite previous marriages and four grown children between them, Zandra and Robert acted like teenagers, holding hands and exchanging pet names: Pretty for her, Love for him. He was a systems architect at Lockheed Martin, she was a manager at IBM. Both were dedicated fans of Star Trek.
Predictably for a flight from Washington, spread throughout the cabin were passengers with connections to the government and the military. Bryan Jack was a PhD numbers cruncher for the Defense Department who’d won the department’s Exceptional Service Medal twice in the past three years. William Caswell was a physicist with a PhD from Princeton who served in the Army during Vietnam and now worked for the Navy as a civilian. Both men were on official business trips that took them away from their offices in the Pentagon.
Dr. Paul Ambrose was a fellow at the Department of Health and Human Services, on his way to California for a conference on how to prevent youth obesity; Charles Droz was a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy who’d built a career in computer technology; Dong Chul Lee spent eighteen years working for the U.S. Air Force and the National Security Agency before taking an engineering job with Boeing; consultant Richard Gabriel had lost a leg in battle during the Vietnam War; and John Yamnicky Sr. was a barrel-chested retired Navy captain who flew fighter jets in Korea and on three tours in Vietnam.
In the cockpit, Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame formerly flew F-4 Phantom fighters as a medal-winning pilot and honors graduate of the Navy’s “Top Gun” school. Married to an American Airlines flight attendant, Chic Burlingame was an Eagle Scout, an Annapolis graduate, a father, a grandfather, and a stepfather of two. He was one day shy of fifty-two. Tucked in his wallet was a laminated prayer card from his mother’s funeral, ten months earlier, with part of a poem: “I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there, I did not die.” Joining him at the controls was First Officer David Charlebois, a young pilot dedicated to his partner. Together they enjoyed their row house in Washington, D.C., and the border collie he’d rescued when it was a puppy.
Strapped into a jump seat in the back of the plane was senior flight attendant Michele Heidenberger, wife of a US Airways pilot and mother of two, who’d been flying for thirty-one years. Before takeoff she called her husband, Thomas, to make sure their fourteen-year-old son was awake and had packed a lunch for school.
Serving first class, flight attendant Renée May was an artist who knitted blankets for her friends and had recently accepted her boyfriend’s proposal. At thirty-nine, Renée had learned only a day earlier that she was seven weeks pregnant. After landing in Los Angeles, she planned to hop a quick flight to visit her parents in Las Vegas. She’d spoken with them twice in the past two days but had told them only that she had big news to share.
Also working the flight was a couple whose friends called them Kennifer. Married for eight years, flight attendants Ken and Jennifer Lewis normally flew separately, but they used their seniority to mesh their schedules so they could vacation when they reached Los Angeles, their favorite city. A magnet on their refrigerator read HAPPINESS IS BEING MARRIED TO YOUR BEST FRIEND. When they were home, in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Ken and Jennifer liked to drag lawn chairs to the end of their driveway, trailed by their five cats. As night fell, they would gaze at the stars.
ALSO ON BOARD were five young Saudi Arabian zealots who’d pledged their lives to al-Qaeda. Like their collaborators on American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, the men chose seats strategically, clustered toward the front of the plane.
Unlike their associates aboard the other two flights, three of the al-Qaeda members on American Flight 77 nearly had their plans foiled by airport security.
At 7:18 a.m., Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdhar set off alarms when they walked through a Dulles Airport metal detector. Security workers sent them to a second metal detector. Mihdhar passed, but Moqed failed again. A private security officer hired by a contractor for United Airlines scanned Moqed with a metal detection wand and sent him on his way. Neither was patted down.
Almost twenty minutes later, Nawaf al-Hazmi set off alarms at both metal detectors at the same security checkpoint. Two weeks earlier, he’d purchased Leatherman multitool knives, and a security video showed that he had an unidentified item clipped onto his rear pants pocket. A security officer hand-wanded Hazmi and swiped his shoulder bag with an explosive trace detector. No one patted him down, and he walked on toward Flight 77 with his brother, Salem al-Hazmi.
All five were chosen for another security screening, three by the CAPPS computer algorithm and two, the Hazmi brothers, because an airline customer service representative judged them to be suspicious. One, apparently Salem al-Hazmi, offered an identification card without a photograph and didn’t seem to understand English. The airline worker who checked them in thought he seemed anxious or excited.
