Anguished calls from the sky

Voices from doomed buildings, voices from hijacked aircraft and cries for help from the rubble. MICHAEL McCARTHY reports how cellphones lent a new dimension to disaster.

They were the most terrible goodbyes it is possible to imagine. As the four hijacked planes at the centre of America's terrorist nightmare sped towards their doom several passengers managed to make anguished, frantic or unbearably poignant calls to their loved ones on their mobile phones.

Most realised they would shortly be dead, but even in their final terrified minutes aboard aircraft with their pilots disabled, managed to shout from the sky the short but essential message, the core of all human relationships: I love you.

Try as one can, it remains hard to imagine the effect of receiving such a call from spouse or from child. The familiar ringing tone. The familiar voice at the end of the line. Then the horrific realisation of what the message is, and the terrible impotence to do anything about it.

This was the immediacy of the cellphone made absolute. The mocked yuppie accessory, curse of the suburban malls transformed into a conduit of despair. And into a symbol of life. For in the wreckage of the devastated World Trade Center a few survivors reached out to the rescuers by way of their cellphones.

In San Francisco for Alice Hoglan it was a voice moments from tragedy. She picked up her phone at home about 9.45 am to hear the voice of her son, Mark Bingham, 31, calling from the air on the other side of America.

Bingham was one of 38 passengers and seven crew on United Airlines Flight 93, the Boeing 757 from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, which was now hijacked and en route, it is believed, to crash on to the presidential retreat at Camp David.

"He said, 'I want you to know I love you very much, in case I don't see you again,' Mrs Hoglan said, holding her head in her hands. "He said, 'I'm in the air. We've been taken over. There are three men that say they've got a bomb.'

"He repeated that he loved me. I told him we all love him. Then he became distracted, as if someone was speaking to him. He said something to the effect that it was true. Then the phone went dead."

Her only consolation was that her son, a well-built public relations executive, might have played a role in preventing the plane from hitting its target.

"This was the only flight of the four that did not reach its target, which they believed to be Camp David, and that gives us reason to believe that perhaps Mark was able to help save the lives of people on the ground," she said. "We hope that Mark was able to take an active stand against these folks."

Her belief is reinforced by another mobile call made from flight 93, from a businessman, Thomas E. Burnett jun, the 38-year-old senior vice-president and chief operating officer of Thoratec Corp - one that was just as poignant, but also determined.

Burnett managed to reach his wife, Deena, in her San Francisco home and according to the Rev Frank Colacicco, his family priest, told her: "I love you, honey. I know we're all going to die - but there's three of us who are going to do something about it."

But a third call from the same doomed plane was only terror and heartbreak. One of the five flight attendants, CeeCee Lyles, in tears, managed to reach her husband at home in Fort Myers, Florida. Her aunt, Mareya Schneider, said: "She called him and let him know how much she loved him and the boys. People were screaming in the background and she said, 'We've been hijacked,' and then the phone went dead."

More such anguished messages were tumbling out of the sky from the other hijacked aircraft. On American Airlines Flight 77, the Boeing 757 en route from Dulles Airport near Washington to Los Angeles with 58 passengers and six crew, Barbara Olson, a 45-year-old right-wing lawyer turned TV commentator, sized up the hijack situation, locked herself in the plane's lavatory, and twice called her husband - one of the American Government's senior legal officials, the US Solicitor-General Theodore Olson.

She managed to reach him in his office at the Justice Department and told him that the plane had been taken over by men wielding "boxcutters and knives".

She was cut off. She called back. She asked her husband, bravely: "What do I tell the pilot to do?" Those were her last words. Seconds later, having made the short trip from Dulles to Washington, the plane plunged into side of the Pentagon and killed everyone on board.

Olson said later: "She called from the plane while it was being hijacked. I wish it wasn't so. But it is."

At least one passenger on one of the planes which hit the towers of the World Trade Center managed to make a call on his mobile. Massachusetts-based Peter Hanson was travelling with his wife, Susan, and 2-year-old daughter, Christine, on United Airlines flight 175, the Boeing 767 bound from Boston to Los Angeles with 56 passengers and nine crew on board which hurtled into the second of the giant towers.

Hanson called his parents in Easton, Connecticut, and managed to tell them that a stewardess had been stabbed before being cut off. They were reluctant to speak further.

"All I want to say is they went down together," said Hanson's mother, Eunice. "They went down together. They stayed together in death. That's the only consolation I have.

Such was the violence of the explosions when the four aircraft went down that it is seems likely there is nothing left of the men, women and children who boarded their last flights in Boston, Washington and Newark, all thinking they were bound for California on a beautiful autumn morning. They have been vaporised.

Yet amid the horror of it, the memory will endure of Mark Bingham, and Thomas E Burnett jun, and CeeCee Lyles, and the others who managed to call those close to them in their final terrifying minutes and give them that life-affirming message in the face of death.

As they fell out of the sky over America they proved incontestably true Philip Larkin's simple but unforgettable line: "What will survive of us is Love."

For some survival came in the form of rescue as emergency crews worked through the World Trade Center rubble guided by cellphone calls. Two police officers were pulled alive from the debris. Others trapped inside made desperate pleas for help by dialling the 911 emergency number and trying to describe to police where they were trapped. But the rescuers were not always able to get there.

Before the towers collapsed, escaping workers stopped to take count of colleagues before heading for the street far below. On the way down the stairs, those fleeing comforted each other and many used cellphones to call home.

Meghan Mitchell, a 22-year-old New York resident, said cellphones helped her communicate with her boyfriend, who witnessed the World Trade Center explosions after an early morning business appointment there.

"He called me right before the building collapsed," Mitchell said. "I was so relieved to hear his voice ... a lot of pay phones weren't working or there were huge lines for them," she said.

Some wireless industry observers said the high penetration rate of the cellphones - more than 40 per cent of the US population own them - may have helped lessen the degree of panic.

Until recently, the only telephone communication available would have been through regular land-based phones.

"The fact that people could get hold of each other rapidly, parent to kid, husband to wife, probably alleviated some of the panic that otherwise would have happened," said Herschel Shosteck, chairman of wireless consulting firm Shosteck Group.

Shosteck said the networks held up remarkably well given the enormity of the situation.

Wireless telephone operators had said they experienced a significantly higher call volume than usual, and some firms such as Sprint Corp lost some cell sites used to connect calls in lower Manhattan.

Many companies, including the nation's two largest wireless firms, Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless, were able to beef up their networks in New York and Washington quickly with temporary cell sites or mobile transmitter sites called cells-on-wheels.

The passengers on the hijacked airliners were able to dial emergency hot lines or call relatives because their planes were within range of ground-based cellular network antennas.

Though mobile phones are not designed for air-to-ground communication, they work if they have a direct line of sight to a cell tower.

That is 13-16km for an analog wireless phone and about 8km for a digital phone - easily within the cruising altitude of commercial jets, said Marvin Sirbu, an engineering professor at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Cellular connections can be blocked by buildings or foliage. But from the air, phones can have a direct path to antenna configured to receive signals from above.

A call from a plane travelling at 885 km/h would need to be transferred to a different cell tower every minute or so, which could explain why some callers were cut off then almost immediately re-establish connections.

- INDEPENDENT, AGENCIES

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