at the Washington Center, Danielle O’Brien, made a routine handoff of Flight 77 to a colleague at the FAA’s Indianapolis Center. For reasons she couldn’t explain and would never fully understand, O’Brien didn’t use one of her normal sendoffs to the pilots: “Good day,” or “Have a nice flight.” Instead she told them, “Good luck.”
Indianapolis Center air traffic controllers managed separation in the airspace over 73,000 square miles of the Midwest, including parts of Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. When initially under the control of Indianapolis Center, Flight 77’s pilots climbed, as instructed, to 35,000 feet and turned right 10 degrees. At just before 8:51 a.m., five minutes after the crash of Flight 11, the pilots acknowledged routine navigational instructions from Indianapolis controller Chuck Thomas, an eleven-year FAA veteran who tracked the flight along with fourteen other planes in his sector.
Focused on their work, neither Thomas nor the other controllers in Indianapolis Center had seen television reports about the crash of American Flight 11. They also had no knowledge of the then ongoing crisis aboard United Flight 175.
From the perspective of Chuck Thomas and other controllers in Indianapolis Center, all of them unaware of the emerging pattern of suicide hijackings, American Flight 77 began behaving in strange and unexpected ways starting at 8:54 a.m. First, the plane made an unauthorized turn to the southwest. Three minutes later, someone turned off its transponder and the plane disappeared from Thomas’s radar screen.
Concerned, but with no reason to fear the worst, Thomas searched for Flight 77 on his screen along its projected flight path to the west and to the southwest, the direction in which he had seen it turn. Nothing.
“American Seventy-Seven, Indy,” Thomas called over the radio. He tried five more times over the next two minutes, starting at 8:56 a.m. No reply.
Thomas called American Airlines for help in contacting Flight 77 pilots Chic Burlingame and David Charlebois in the cockpit, but the airline’s dispatchers also couldn’t reach them by radio. Airline officials sent a text message to the cockpit instructing the pilots to contact Indianapolis Center air traffic controllers. That went unanswered, too.
Thomas and other controllers spread word throughout Indianapolis Center that they had lost contact with Flight 77. As a precaution, they agreed to “sterilize the airspace,” moving other planes out of the way of Flight 77’s projected westerly path. But its failure to respond and the loss of its transponder signal made the controllers doubt the plane was still airborne. Still in the dark about what had happened in New York, they suspected that Flight 77 had experienced a catastrophic electrical or mechanical failure and that the plane had crashed. Controllers tried to call the flight for several more minutes but heard only silence. They made a final radio call to Flight 77 at shortly after 9:03 a.m.—coincidentally, at almost the exact moment United Flight 175 hit the South Tower.
Meanwhile, a conference call about the hijackings of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 among air traffic controllers in the Boston, New York, and Cleveland centers didn’t include Indianapolis Center. The reason was at once straightforward and tragically wrongheaded: no one thought a hijacked plane was headed that way, so the FAA didn’t want to distract them from their work.
At 9:08 a.m., more than twenty minutes after American Flight 11 had hit the North Tower, Indianapolis controllers remained unable to find Flight 77 on radar or raise the cockpit by radio. They called the West Virginia State Police, Air Force Search and Rescue in Langley, Virginia, and the FAA’s Great Lakes Regional Office to alert them to the possible crash of Flight 77. They considered a downed plane the most likely outcome; in an information vacuum about the other incidents, nothing of what the Indianapolis controllers saw fitted their expectations or training about a “traditional” hijacking.
But in fact, American Flight 77 was still airborne.
Someone in the cockpit had made a hairpin turn over Ohio. As a result, Indianapolis air traffic controllers were looking for the plane in exactly the wrong direction. While they searched to the west and southwest, because that’s where the plane had been heading, Flight 77 now pointed east.
Its autopilot was set for a new course: to Reagan National Airport, in the heart of Washington, D.C.
“BEWARE ANY COCKPIT INTRUSION”
United Airlines Flight 93
UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT ATTENDANT CEECEE LYLES’S CELLPHONE rang before 5 a.m. as she slept on the futon in her crash pad apartment in Newark, New Jersey. Only a few hours had passed since she fell asleep midconversation with her husband, Lorne. Now he called to wake her up, so she wouldn’t miss her flight. As soon as she opened her eyes, they resumed their seemingly endless, “everything and nothing” phone conversation.
As CeeCee got ready for work, she quizzed Lorne about his overnight shift as a Fort Myers, Florida, police officer. She dawdled in the bathroom, fixing her hair and perfecting her makeup before donning her navy-blue uniform. Three minutes before an airport bus made its 6:15 a.m. stop at the apartment building, a flight attendant she roomed with called out: “Girl, you’re going to miss that shuttle!”
CeeCee grabbed her bags and bolted out the door. She and Lorne kept talking on her ride to Newark International Airport, reviewing what bills and chores he should handle while she traveled. They talked until her seven o’clock briefing with fellow flight attendants at the United Airlines operations center, located beneath baggage claim in Terminal A. They resumed talking at 7:20 a.m. and continued their conversation until CeeCee reached the security checkpoint. They talked again as she walked through the terminal to United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 parked at Gate 17A.
CeeCee told Lorne she expected an easy day. The nonstop flight to San Francisco had been assigned five flight attendants, she told him, despite a sparsely filled cabin. First class would have ten passengers and coach would have only twenty-seven, which meant that four out of every five seats on Flight 93 would be empty.
Work had begun and CeeCee said goodbye. Lorne told her he loved her and to call when she landed.
THROUGHOUT THE MORNING, as minutes ticked past and the terror swelled, only the hijackers and their al-Qaeda bosses knew how many planes they intended to seize. It could be two, ten, or more. But from the terrorists’ perspective, the first hour of their attack went like clockwork: so far, they’d hijacked three planes, two of which had struck their targets in New York and the third was under their control, coursing toward Washington, D.C.
Those results were the fruits of a poisoned tree. After months of research and reconnaissance led by Mohamed Atta, the hijackers had guessed correctly about how their victims in the air and their enemies on the ground would and wouldn’t react to a hostile airborne takeover. During the first three hijackings, fifteen terrorists had used planning, training, subterfuge, and deadly violence to exploit preconceived notions and gaping weaknesses they’d identified in U.S. airline security, all in service to Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against the United States and its people.
The hijackers on American Flight 11, United Flight 175, and American Flight 77 had boarded without incident, despite their apparent possession of short-bladed knives, not to mention previous travels and associations that should have been flaming red flags. They’d swiftly gained access to cockpits and replaced pilots with men who’d trained to fly jets expressly for the purpose of becoming martyrs. “Muscle” hijackers spread
