Four flights hijacked to hell

They seemed like routine domestic flights when they began but they ended with destruction on an unimaginable scale. JEREMY REES reports.

American Airlines pilot John Ogonowski pulled out of his home just before dawn.

He left behind the 60ha farm, planted in corn, in rural north Massachusetts, its large white farmhouse with the American flag flying outside. It was the place where he, his wife and his three teenage daughters planned to have a barbecue this weekend for neighbours.

Ogonowski, a few days past his 52nd birthday and a former US Air Force pilot, had flown for American Airlines for 22 years, the last few years on the Boston-LA route.

He tooted - as he always did - to his family and headed for Logan Airport, Boston, for the routine six-hour flight.

Among the 81 passengers and 11 crew on board American Airlines Flight 11 were David Angell, the executive producer of the NBC television show Frasier, and his wife, Lynn. They were on their way home to Pasadena from their New England summer home, where they been for a family wedding.

Ogonowski's 767-200 lifted off into the clear azure sky of a perfect early Fall day in New England, one among the 3000 planes in the world's busiest air lane over the American northeast.

No one knows yet what happened next.

What we do know is that Flight 11 almost immediately changed course, heading south towards New York and infamy.

Air traffic controllers watched its blip head off course but no alarms were sounded. By then pilot Ogonowski may have been dead.

Most pilots yesterday believed it was inconceivable that one of their number, even one with a gun to the head, could knowingly fly a plane into a crowded building. Probably the terrorists were in control.

Even a few hours on a flight simulator would be enough to teach the basics of how to crash the plane once airborne.

Clyde Ebanks, vice-president of an insurance company, was at a meeting on the 103rd floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center when his boss said, "Look at that!"

He turned and watched Flight 11, 200 tonnes with a cruising speed of 500 mph, fly past the window and into the other tower. Flight 11 disappeared from the radar screens. It was 8.45 am and America's nightmare had begun.

Somewhere over upstate New York, United Airlines Flight 175 was already changing direction from its Boston to Los Angeles flight path and heading south for Lower Manhattan. Even though the fate of Flight 11 was now known, no controller challenged Flight 175's new flight path.

On board a businessman managed to call his father twice to say it had been hijacked, a stewardess had been stabbed and the plane was "going down".

At 9.03 am Flight 175, with 64 people on board, flew directly into the northern tower of the World Trade Center.

Forty-two minutes later, air traffic controllers at Washington's Dulles International Airport spotted an unidentified aircraft flying low at full throttle.

In the jargon of air traffic controllers, it was a "primary target", a plane heading for heavily restricted airspace around the White House without permission. But it veered away from the White House, dropping below radar level as it headed for the Pentagon.

At 9.30 am it exploded into the western side of the defence building, igniting a fireball so intense that firefighters could not get near for three hours.

This plane had been American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, bound from Washington to Los Angeles.

Herded to the back of the plane by hijackers armed with knives and box-cutters, the 64 passengers and crew members were ordered to call relatives if they had cellphones to say they were about to die.

Barbara Olson, a former federal prosecutor turned CNN commentator, twice called her husband, the US Solicitor-General Ted Olson, in the final moments. She described how hijackers forced passengers and the pilot to the rear of the aircraft. Then the phone went dead.

She called back. "What should I tell the pilot?" were her final words.

She had only caught the flight after delaying her trip one day to be with her husband for his birthday.

At 9.58 am, just minutes after the Pentagon attack, a 911 emergency operator in Pennsylvania took a call from a man who said said he had managed to hole up in the toilet of a United Airlines flight from Newark to San Francisco.

"We are going down," he said. "We are being hijacked!"

Another man called his wife to say he and other passengers were "going to do something".

United Airlines Flight 93, a 757 with 45 people on board, crashed about 130km southeast of Pittsburgh. Where it was headed is still unclear, though speculation settled on the presidential retreat Camp David, 135km away in the Maryland mountains.

In 90 minutes, 266 on board four planes had died.

THE CRASH

New Zealander Rory Robertson was listening to a breakfast speaker at an economics conference on the ground floor of the World Trade Center when Flight 11 hit.

He had been among the thousands of workers, some clutching bagels and dressed for business, who had streamed into the Center's twin towers, symbols of the pre-eminence of the American economy, as usual on a Tuesday morning.

"There was a bit of a bang and the building shook," said Robertson. "Hotel officials told people not to go outside, as things might still be crashing down. Maybe five minutes later, people moved outside and we could see the hole near the top of the building. And the fire.

"It was a mind-numbing sight.

"I was maybe 250 yards from the WTC when I looked up and saw the second plane fly directly - maybe 150 yards - above me. Instantly, I knew it was going to hit the tower. I just ran.

"A young Japanese woman stumbled into the alley, crying and distressed. I put my arm around her shoulder and told her that we were safe, at the same time hoping that we were. The world has changed."

Moments after Flight 11 crashed, fire poured through the northern tower. Like the other four flights, its tanks had been full with aviation fuel at the moment of impact.

Donald Burns, 34, was being evacuated from a meeting on the 82nd floor, when he saw four severely burned people on the stairwell. "The fire had melted their skin."

Those on the upper floors, caught by the devastation wrought by the planes underneath, had to make their way down through a building on fire, ready to collapse and with every chance it might happen again. Some chose to jump.

People, who moments before may have been chatting over coffee or doing photo copying tumbled to their deaths from the upper floors.

A barefoot woman, smartly dressed in a blue blouse and long, white skirt, fell 110 storeys, backwards, hands and feet pointing to the sky.

The planes did not just hit New York's financial heart, they hit the place designed to be the city's nerve centre in a crisis. On the 23rd floor were the screens and rows of computer consoles of the New York City Emergency Command Bunker - "the Brain Room" for a crisis - almost all useless as the walls designed to withstand hurricanes and rocket attacks collapsed under the impact of something infinitely worse.

After the fire, came the collapse.

The towers - built to eclipse the Empire State Building - began to crumble, shortly after 10 am, with a strange sucking sound.

A vast cloud of dirt, smoke, dust, paper and debris shattered windows and filled the air with choking fumes that made even breathing an act of survival.

The sang froid of a city that regarded itself as beyond shock cracked, then splintered.

"It is unimaginable, devastating, unspeakable carnage," said firefighter Scott O'Grady.

Up to 10 blocks away workers were covered in the ash from the gray shroud that had been the World Trade Center tower.

Blood donors lined up outside the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

"It's a crisis. You must help. There's nothing else to do," said 19-year-old donor Jessica McBlath.

The New York Blood Center dispatched all available blood to the city's hospitals, sometimes carrying it by courier through chaotic streets.

The city stopped, stunned by tragedy, choked by dust, overwhelmed by the scale of the death - 300 firefighters and 85 police officers missing, 2250 people injured, thousands missing, presumed buried under the 200,000 tonnes of concrete and steel.

People lined up at payphones as the cellphones, unable to cope with the traffic, were not working.

At a 1 pm press conference, the hard-bitten mayor of a hard city, Rudolph Giuliani, talked tough.

"America is a democracy, it is a lot stronger than vicious cowardly terrorists and we are gonna overcome this."

The city was gridlocked as ferries, trains, buses and subways were suspended or were overwhelmed by the numbers fleeing Lower Manhattan, while jet fighters screamed overhead.

In Washington, the heart of Government in the world's most powerful nation, the powerful were forced to take refuge with the rest.

Rear Admiral Craig Quigley spoke to reporters gathered at a gas station at 2.10 pm, within view of the burning defence headquarters building, with more than 24,000 people working within its walls.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in his office when the plane hit, had run to the scene and loaded the injured onto stretchers.

On the street corners of the capital, people stood stunned.

At the White House, phone bank volunteers took calls from ordinary Americans, before they, too, were evacuated.

Said one of the volunteer: "People calling on the phones were hysterical.

They said, 'Do something now. Do it swiftly. Don't be a wuss. Get Bin Laden'."

THE REACTION

President Bush was addressing the students of Emma Booker Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida, at 9.03 am when his Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, whispered the unthinkable.

Minutes later, he was summoned again as he sat with a group of seven year olds. There had been a second attack. At 9.32 am he spoke to the cameras: "Today we have had a national tragedy."

It was an attack by a faceless coward. America was put on a war footing. In an effort to safeguard the President, Air Force One took to the air, at times accompanied by jet fighters, zigzagging across the country from Florida to Louisiana and on to Nebraska, before returning to Washington and the White House.

Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and General Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, having cut short his tour to South America, were collected by Secret Service agents and taken to guarded quarters in Washington.

The nine top leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives were taken to secure locations, with the members of the Bush cabinet, in case the attacks indicated a wider military campaign - an unprecedented security arrangement in peacetime.

At 10 am, the US Federal Aviation Administration ordered all planes to be grounded, again unprecedented.

At that moment there were 3181 aircraft over the North East America. By 11 am, there were none. By 10.30 am, borders with Canada and Mexico were sealed.

A US official said American forces around the globe had been put on the highest possible alert, officially known as Threatcon Delta.

The Navy dispatched 10 warships, including two aircraft carriers, the USS John F. Kennedy and the USS George Washington, to New York and Washington.

Across the country newspapers rushed out special editions. Some of the most potent symbols of America were closed to public view - the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC.

Skyscrapers, from the Sears Towers in Chicago to the Space Needle in Seattle, were evacuated. In New Orleans, where the bars in Bourbon St stay open 24 hours a day, partying was unofficially cancelled. "We're open but there's no business," said Paul Greco, manager of 161-year-old Antoine's restaurant.

Last night, rescuers were still working through the rubble of the World Trade Center, looking for survivors.

At a Brooks Brothers clothing store across the street, the men's shirt department had been converted into a makeshift morgue. Outside, etched in the ash, were the words "God bless America, land that we love".

In the city that never sleeps, there was a deathly silence.

Full coverage: Terror in America

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The fatal flights

Emergency telephone numbers for friends and family of victims

These numbers are valid for calls from within New Zealand, but may be overloaded at the moment.

United Airlines: 0168 1800 932 8555

American Airlines: 0168 1800 245 0999

NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade: 0800 872 111

US Embassy in Wellington (recorded info): 04 472 2068

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