Nine Hours in September: The Morning the Sky Turned Wrong
It began as an ordinary Tuesday under a flawless blue sky. By 10:03 a.m., four hijacked airliners had rewritten the day into history.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, opened clear and mild across the northeastern United States. Four passenger jets, all bound from the Northeast toward California, sat on runways carrying ordinary travelers and full tanks of fuel meant for cross-country flights. Nineteen men, members of al-Qaeda, had boarded those planes in three groups of five and one group of four. Nothing in the pre-dawn hours suggested what the morning would become.
At 8:46 a.m., Mohamed Atta, the operation's ringleader, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The 110-story building absorbed the impact, fire and smoke pouring from the gash near its upper floors. All 92 people aboard the aircraft were killed instantly, along with more than a thousand people in the tower and surrounding area.
Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., a second hijacked plane appeared in the New York sky. Marwan al-Shehhi flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower. Television cameras that had gathered to film the aftermath of the first crash captured the second collision live, and the nation watched in real time as it became clear this was no accident. All 65 people on Flight 175 died, along with more than a thousand others.
While New York burned, a third hijacked aircraft was crossing Ohio airspace. American Airlines Flight 77, which had departed Dulles International Airport, turned toward Washington, D.C. At 9:37 a.m., Hani Hanjour flew the plane into the western façade of the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. The impact partially collapsed that section of the building. All 64 people aboard the plane and 125 people inside the Pentagon were killed.
By this point, the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered an unprecedented ground stop across all of American airspace — every aircraft in the sky was to land immediately or divert, many toward Canada. But one hijacked plane was still aloft: United Airlines Flight 93, hijacked by Ziad Jarrah, was headed toward Washington, believed to be aimed at the Capitol or the White House.
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