layer of security screening proved meaningless. Just as with their collaborators, it only meant that their checked bags were held off the plane until after they boarded.
Hani Hanjour, who’d trained as a pilot, took seat 1B in first class. Four rows back in the same cabin, in seats 5E and 5F, sat the Hazmi brothers. They were the only two passengers on Flight 77 to request special meals: the Hindu option, with no pork.
On the opposite side of the plane, in coach seat 12A sat Majed Moqed. Next to him, in 12B, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, slim and dark-haired, a man who U.S. intelligence officials had known for several years was a member of al-Qaeda, yet who traveled under his real name.
AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77 pushed back from Dulles Gate D-26 at 8:09 a.m. It was airborne eleven minutes later.
At that moment, United Flight 175 had been in flight for six minutes, with no signs of trouble. American Flight 11 had already stopped communicating with air traffic controllers, and soon after, flight attendant Betty Ong began her distress call to American Airlines.
THREE MINUTES INTO their flight from Cape Cod to New York in pursuit of American Flight 11, Otis F-15 pilots Tim Duffy and Dan Nash learned that the World Trade Center had been struck by a plane, presumably the one they were supposed to find. They saw rising smoke from more than a hundred miles away. The clouds of smoke intensified minutes later with the strike on the South Tower.
As the fighter pilots approached a crime scene of almost unimaginable proportions, NEADS Major Kevin Nasypany ordered them to fly in a holding pattern in military-controlled airspace off Long Island. That way, they’d stay clear of scores of passenger planes that still flew nearby.
At 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the crash of United Flight 175, FAA controllers issued an order that barred all nonmilitary aircraft from taking off, landing, or flying through New York Center’s airspace until further notice. Meanwhile, Boston Center had stopped all departures from its airports. Soon after, all departures were stopped nationwide for planes heading toward or through New York or Boston airspace.
Around the same time, fearing more hijackings, the operations manager at Boston Center told the controllers he supervised to warn airborne pilots by radio to heighten security, with the aim of preventing potential intruders from gaining access to cockpits. He urged the national FAA operations center in Virginia to issue a similar cockpit safety notice nationwide, but there’s no evidence that that happened.
As the NEADS team absorbed news of the second crash into the World Trade Center, a technician uttered an offhand comment charged with insight: “This is a new type of war, that’s what it is.”
At first, almost no one could fathom the idea of terrorist hijackers who’d been trained as pilots at U.S. flight schools. Several technicians at NEADS held on to the idea that the original pilots had somehow remained at the controls, flying under duress from the terrorists and unable to use their transponders to issue an alert, or “squawk,” using the universal hijacking code 7500.
“We have smart terrorists today,” a NEADS surveillance officer said. “They’re not giving them [the pilots] a chance to squawk.”
Shortly before 9:08 a.m., five minutes after the South Tower explosion, Nasypany decided that he wanted the Otis fighter jets to be ready for whatever might come next from the terrorists. No simulations, exercises, or history had prepared any of them for this, and other than Boston Center’s unapproved calls to NEADS, the FAA still had yet to make contact with the military. Nasypany improvised.
“We need to talk to FAA,” Nasypany told his team. “We need to tell ’em if this stuff is gonna keep on going, we need to take those fighters, put ’em over Manhattan. That’s the best thing, that’s the best play right now. So, coordinate with the FAA. Tell ’em if there’s more out there, which we don’t know, let’s get ’em over Manhattan. At least we got some kind of play.”
Nasypany wanted to launch two more fighter jets, the pair of on-alert F-16s ready and waiting at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The fighters were part of the North Dakota Air National Guard’s 119th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Happy Hooligans.
But Colonel Marr rejected that plan. He wanted the Langley fighters to remain on the ground, on runway alert. With only four ready-to-launch fighter jets in his arsenal, the colonel didn’t want all of them to run out of fuel at the same time. Unaware that airborne fuel tankers would have been available, Marr thought that putting the Langley fighters in the air might leave the skies relatively unprotected if something else happened in the huge area of sky that NEADS was sworn to protect.
Nasypany’s mind kept churning. Two suicide hijackers in fuel-laden jets had slammed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, both of which burned on television screens all around him. They’d killed everyone on board and an unknown number of people in the buildings. Nasypany had positioned two F-15s in the sky over New York, and it remained anyone’s guess if they’d soon be chasing other hijacked planes with similar deadly intentions.
“We need to do more than fuck with this,” Nasypany declared.
Nasypany wondered aloud how he and his team would respond if the nation’s military commanders, starting with the president of the United States, gave a shoot-down order for a plane filled with civilians. He asked members of his staff how they would react to such an order. As they scrambled to absorb the moral and practical implications, Nasypany focused on the weaponry they would use, if necessary.
“My recommendation,” Nasypany told his team, “if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft, we use AIM-9s in the face.”
The AIM-9 is a short-range, air-to-air missile known as the Sidewinder, with a twenty-pound warhead and an infrared guidance system that locks onto its target. Each fully armed F-16 fighter carried six of them, while each F-15 carried two Sidewinders and two larger missiles called Sparrows.
Nasypany made the comment with the professional air of a military airman who might receive a wrenching command. Then he paused a moment, as though unsettled, and added more obliquely, “If need be …”
The potential need to shoot down a commercial airliner filled with innocent men, women, and children remained unresolved. A short time later, a female NEADS staffer said to no one in particular: “Oh God, they better call the president.”
Another staffer said: “Believe me, he knows.”
In fact, President George W. Bush had learned about the World Trade Center crashes only minutes earlier, and no discussions had yet taken place about what action the military should take if more terrorists turned passenger jets into weapons of mass destruction.
Still, at NEADS they wanted to be ready. On Nasypany’s orders, Otis F-15 fighter pilots Duffy and Nash left their holding pattern and established a CAP, or Combat Air Patrol, over Manhattan. A staffer from NEADS radioed Duffy to ask if he’d have a problem with an order to shoot down a hijacked passenger jet. Having seen the destruction already caused by suicide hijackers, Duffy answered flatly: “No.”
Nash looked down from his cramped cockpit at the burning towers. Thick black smoke spiraled upward to space. Nash thought: “That was the start of World War III.”
If Nash was correct, the next battle had already begun, and the battlefield would be Washington, D.C.
THE SKIES WERE blue, the air was smooth, and all was normal during the first half hour of American Flight 77’s voyage west.
Shortly after the flight took off from Dulles, before the hijackings of
