The plane was flying erratically again. Operator Jefferson heard the sounds of an “awful commotion”: raised voices, more screams. Then: “Are you guys ready?” and Todd Beamer’s voice saying, “Let’s roll!”—a phrase that, in family life, he liked to use to get his children moving.
“OK,” Jeremy Glick told Lyz, “I’m going to do it.” His wife told him he was strong and brave, that she loved him. “OK,” he said again. “I’m going to put the phone down. I’m going to leave it here and I’m going to come right back to it.” Lyz handed the phone to her father, ran to the bathroom, and gagged.
For some minutes, passenger Elizabeth Wainio, a Discovery Channel store manager, had been on the line to her mother. She had been quiet, her breathing shallow—as if she were already letting go, her mother thought. Her deceased grandmothers were waiting for her, Wainio said. Then: “They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Goodbye.”
Sandra Bradshaw, the flight attendant who had earlier phoned to alert the airline, now got through to her husband. She was in the galley, she said, boiling water for the passengers to throw on the hijackers. Then, “Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye …”
CeeCee Lyles, Bradshaw’s fellow crew member, also got through to her husband, told him rapidly about the hijacking, that she loved him. Then, “I think they’re going to do it. Babe, they’re forcing their way into the cockpit …”
The Cockpit Voice Recorder registered the moment the hijackers realized what was happening. At just before 9:58, a hijacker asks, “Is there something? … A fight?” There is a knock on the door, followed by sounds of fighting. Then, in Arabic, “Let’s go, guys! Allah is Greatest. Allah is Greatest. Oh guys! Allah is Greatest … Oh Allah! Oh Allah! Oh the most Gracious!” Then, loudly, “Stay back!”
A male voice, a native-English-speaking voice that Tom Burnett’s wife has recognized as that of her husband, is heard saying, “In the cockpit. In the cockpit.”
Followed by a voice exclaiming, in Arabic, “They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside … Hold.”
Then, from several English speakers in unison, “Hold the door …” And from a single English speaker, “Stop him,” followed repeatedly by “Sit down! Sit down!” Then, again from an English speaker, “Let’s get them …”
Flight 93, now down to five thousand feet, had begun rolling left and right. The pilot of a light aircraft, on a mapping assignment for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, saw the airliner at about this moment. “The wings started to rock,” he recalled. “The rocking stopped and started again. A violent rocking back and forth.”
Jeremy Glick’s father-in-law, listening intently on the phone his daughter had handed him, now heard screams in the background. On the Cockpit Voice Recorder, there is the sound of combat continuing. Then, in Arabic:
“There is nothing … Shall we finish it off?”
“No. Not yet.”
“When they all come, we finish it off.”
Then, from Tom Burnett: “I am injured.”
The Flight Data Recorder indicates that the plane pitched up and down, climbed to ten thousand feet, turned. Glick’s father-in-law, phone clapped to his ear, heard more shrieks, muffled now, like those of people “riding on a roller coaster.”
In Arabic, on the voice recorder, “Oh Allah! Oh Allah! Oh Gracious!”
In English, “In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die!”
In Arabic, “Up down. Up down … Up down!”
From a distance, perhaps from Todd Beamer, “Roll it!”
Crashing sounds, then, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! … Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?”
“Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.”
“Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! … Up down. Up, down … Up down.”
More violent noises, for as long as a minute, then—apparently by a native English speaker: “Shut them off! … Go! … Go! … Move! … Move! … Turn it up.”
In Arabic, “Down, down … Pull it down! Pull it down! DOWN!”
Apparently from an English speaker, “Down. Push, push, push, push, push … push.”
In Arabic, “Hey! Hey! Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me.”
Intermittent loud “air noise” on the cockpit recorder.
Moments later, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”
Sounds of further struggle, and a loud shout by a native English speaker, “No!!!”
Two seconds later, in Arabic, in a whisper now, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”
Jeremy Glick’s father-in-law, still listening on the ground, heard high-pitched screams coming over the line Glick had left open when he left to join the rush to the cockpit. Then “wind sounds” followed by banging noises, as though the phone aboard the plane was repeatedly banging on a hard surface.
After that, silence on the phone. Silence on the Cockpit Voice Recorder. Then, in less than a second, the recording ended.
NEAR THE LITTLE TOWN of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a man working in a scrapyard had seen an airliner, flying low but seemingly trying to climb, just clear a nearby ridge. The assistant chief of Shanksville’s volunteer fire department had been talking on the phone with his sister, who said she could see a large airplane “nosediving, falling like a stone.” A witness who saw it from his porch said it made a “sort of whistling” noise.
Half a mile away, another man saw the final plunge. It was “barely fifty feet above me,” he said, “rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed … There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.”
United Airlines Flight #93 Cockpit Voice Recorder Transcript
Key:
Bolded text = English translation from Arabic
10:00:06 There is nothing.
10:00:07 Is that it? Shall we finish it off?
10:00:08 No. Not yet.
10:00:09 When they all come, we finish it off.
10:00:11 There is nothing.
10:00:13 Unintelligible.
10:00:14 Ahh.
10:00:15 I’m injured.
10:00:16 Unintelligible.
10:00:21 Ahh.
10:00:22 Oh Allah. Oh Allah. Oh Gracious.
10:00:25 In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die.
10:00:29 Up, down. Up, down, in the cockpit
10:00:33 The cockpit.
10:00:37 Up, down. Saeed, up, down.
10:00:42 Roll it
10:00:55 Unintelligible.
10:00:59 Allah is the Greatest. Allah is the Greatest.
10:01:01 Unintelligible.
10:01:08 Is that it? 1 mean, shall we pull it down?
10:01:09 Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.
10:01:10 Unintelligible.
10:01:11 Saeed.
10:01:12 … engine …
10:01:13 Unintelligible.
10:01:16 Cut off the oxygen.
It was 10:03. Thirty-five minutes had passed since the hijackers struck, four minutes since the passengers counterattacked.
The grave of Flight 93 and the men and women it had carried was an open field bounded by woods on the site of a former strip mine.
“Where’s the plane crash?” thought a state police lieutenant, one of the first to reach the scene. “All there was was a hole in the ground and a smoking debris pile.” The crater was on fire, and the plane itself had seemingly vanished. On first inspection, there seemed to be few items on the surface more than a couple of feet long. The voice recorder, recovered days later, would be found buried twelve feet under the ground. There were no bodies, it appeared, only shreds of clothing hanging from the trees. For a while, a white cloud of “sparkly, shiny
stuff like confetti” floated in the sky.
Three hundred miles away in the little town of Cranbury, New Jersey, Todd Beamer’s wife, Lisa, saw the first pictures of the crash site on television and knew her husband was dead.
In Windham, New York, someone told Jeremy Glick’s wife, Lyz, that there might be survivors. Then her father returned from the garden, where—at the request of the FBI—he had kept open the line on which Jeremy had called. He had waited, waited, for an hour and a half. Now, as he came back in, Lyz saw that her father was weeping.
Hundreds of miles apart, the two wives, now widows, sank to their knees in grief. Sudden, unforeseeable grief was invading homes across the country, across the world.
EIGHT
AT THE TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK, UNSEEN BY THE CAMERAS, A lone fire chief was grappling with the possibility for which no one had planned. John Peruggia, of Medical Services, was at the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management—in normal times, the city’s crisis headquarters.
By an irony of history, though, the office was located in the Trade Center’s Building 7. That was too close to the North Tower, and Building 7 had been evacuated within an hour of the initial strike. Peruggia was one of a handful of officials who remained. He was still there, standing in front of the building and giving instructions to a group of firefighters, when an engineer—he thought from the Building Department—made a stunning prediction.
Structural damage to the towers, the official told him, was “quite significant … the building’s stability was compromised … the North Tower was in danger of a near imminent collapse.”
This was a warning Peruggia knew he had to pass urgently to the very top, to chief of department Ganci, now at his command post opposite the North Tower. With the usual command and control system out of action, the only way to get word to him was the old-fashioned way—by runner. Peruggia’s aide that day, EMT Richard Zarrillo, set off on a hazardous five-hundred-yard journey.
AROUND THAT TIME, Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, on the final lap of their escape from the South Tower, reached the concourse at plaza level. “We stared, awestruck,” Clark remembered. “What we looked at was, normally, a flowing fountain, vendors with their wagons … tourists … a beautiful ‘people place.’ Yet this area, several acres, was dead … a moonscape … it looked like it had been deserted for a hundred years.”
No one was running or obviously panicking. Clark and his companion were told to proceed “down to the Victoria’s Secret shop, turn right, and exit by the Sam Goody store.” Then a policeman urged them to get moving and not look up. They ran a block or so, and turned to look back. “You know,” Praimnath said, “I think those buildings could go down.”
“No way,” Clark replied. “Those are steel structures.”
HIGH IN THE TOWER the two men had just escaped, an Aon Insurance vice president named Kevin Cosgrove was on the phone to a 911 operator.
COSGROVE: Lady, there’s two of us in this office … 105. Two Tower. We’re not ready to die, but it’s getting bad … Smoke really bad …
FIRE DEPARTMENT OPERATOR (joining the call): We’re getting there. We’re getting there.
COSGROVE: Doesn’t feel like it, man. I got young kids … I can barely breathe now. I can’t see … We’re young men. We’re not ready to die.
911 OPERATOR: Okay, just try to hang in there.
On the same floor, Cosgrove’s colleague Sean Rooney was still on the line to his wife, Beverly. Neither of them now hoped for rescue. “I think,” Beverly said, “that we need to say goodbye.”
• • •
FAR BELOW, on the ground near the towers, EMT Zarrillo completed his dangerous run to get to Chief Ganci and began blurting out the warning from Chief Peruggia. “Listen … the message I was given was that the buildings are going to collapse. We need to get our people out.”
“Who the fuck,” Ganci had time to say, “told you that?”
At that moment, Zarrillo would recall, there was “this thunderous, rolling roar.”
FIREFIGHTER RICHARD CARLETTI, peering up at the South Tower, had noted a sudden change. It “started to lean. The top thirty floors leaned over … I saw the western wall start to belly out.” The columnist Pete Hamill saw the walls “bulge out,” and heard “snapping sounds, pops, little explosions.” The explosive noises—to some they seemed “real loud”—were followed by a sort of “groaning and grinding.”
High in the tower itself, Aon’s Kevin Cosgrove finally lost patience with the 911 operator. “Name’s Cosgrove,” he said. “I must have told you a dozen times already. C.O.S.G.R.O.V.E. My wife thinks I’m all right. I called and said I was leaving the building and that I was fine … There are three of us in here … Three of us … Two broken windows. Oh, God … OH …!” Against a background of huge noise, Cosgrove screamed. Then the line went dead.
Beverly Rooney, still on the phone to her husband, heard sounds she, too, recalled as sounding like an explosion, followed by a crack, followed by a roaring sound. “The floor fell out from under him,” she thought. “It sounded like Niagara Falls. I knew without seeing that he was gone.”
Rooney and Cosgrove and so many others were gone. Then, and in little more than the time it takes to read these words, the South Tower itself was gone.
“The entire structure just sank down on to itself with a colossal whoosh,” reported the British journalist David Usborne, who had watched from the park in front of City Hall. “For a second, the smoke and dust cleared enough to reveal a stump of the core of the building … But the clouds closed in again and nothing more could be seen. All of us simply stood and gaped, hands to our faces.”
• • •
IN THE STUDIO AT ABC, Peter Jennings had been juggling the cascade of brutal news, his eye on one live monitor, then another. “It may be,” he said, puzzled by the vast new plume of smoke that had appeared where the South Tower had been, “that something fell off the building.” Jennings asked a colleague closer to the scene what had happened.
“The second building that was hit by the plane,” Don Dahler told him, “has just completely collapsed. The entire building has just collapsed … It folded down on itself, and it’s not there anymore.” The famously unflappable Jennings allowed himself an on-air “My God! My God!” Then, as if in the hope that he had misheard, “The whole side has collapsed?”
Dahler said it again. “The whole building has collapsed … There is panic on the streets. Thousands of people running … trying to get away.”
It was 9:59 A.M. One of the tallest buildings in the world had collapsed in no more than twenty seconds. “From a structure,” in the words of a witness, “to a wafer.”
IN THE WAKE of the roar there was darkness—an all-enveloping, suffocating, blinding dust cloud—and cloaked in the cloud a mass of humanity, rushing pell-mell for refuge.
Fire chief Ganci and his senior aides, and Zarrillo, the EMT who had brought word of a possible collapse, rushed into the garages of adjacent buildings. “I took ten or fifteen rolling steps into the garage,” Zarrillo recalled, “and hugged into a corner, an indentation, and I felt two or three guys get in behind me … The dust, the cloud, came rolling in.”
Chief Peruggia, still outside Building 7, became aware of the cloud as he answered a woman reporter’s question. “I grabbed the female, threw her through the revolving doors of Number 7 … Everything came crashing through the front … Next thing I remember I was covered in glass and some debris … I had shards of glass impaled in my head … I was able to get all this debris and rubble off me and cover my face with my coat so that I could breathe. It was very thick dust. You couldn’t see.”
When the building began to fall, EMT Jody Bell had been strapping a hysterical patient into a stair chair. “Everybody’s like, ‘Run for your lives!’ ” he remembered. “She’s hyperventilating … It’s like, a tidal wave of soot and ash coming in my direction. My life flashed before my eyes … I started to run—took about ten steps, and the lady started
screaming, ‘Don’t leave me!’ … I got ahold of myself. ‘Wait, what the hell am I doing?’ I turned back, got her out of the chair. I said, ‘Ma’am, can you run?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ She took off. I’ve never moved so fast … The dust was like snowfall. The cars are covered … I’m breathing in mouthfuls … The scene was totally blacked out.”
Firefighter Timothy Brown had just left the South Tower, where he had seen people—only their legs and feet visible through the door of a stranded elevator—being “smoked and cooked.” On his way to fetch medics when the tower fell, he had ducked into the lobby of the Marriott, the eight-hundred-room hotel adjoining the Trade Center.
“Everything started blowing towards us that wasn’t nailed down … I’m guessing that the wind at its height was around 70, 75 miles an hour … You couldn’t see anybody … You couldn’t hear anything. It was becoming our grave … I thought it lasted four minutes … You could hear an eerie silence at first, and then you could start to hear people starting to move around a little bit, people that were still alive.”
Sixteen of some twenty firefighters who had been on a stairwell in the hotel were not alive. The collapsing tower had sliced the Marriott in two.
Spared thanks to their final dash, Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath had sheltered outside a church. They “stared in awe, not realizing what was happening completely … You at least thought people had a chance—until that moment. Then this great tsunami of dust came over … I suppose it was a quarter of an inch of dust and ash, everywhere.”
To Usborne, the British reporter, the dust was a “huge tidal wave, barrelling down the canyons of the financial district … The police went berserk, we went berserk, just running, running for our lives … we were in a scene from a Schwarzenegger film … thousands of Hollywood extras, mostly in suits for the office, with handbags and briefcases, just tearing through the streets of the city. Every few seconds we would snatch a look behind us.”