The Passenger's Last Calls to Their Loved Ones
American Airlines Flight 77
BARBARA Olson should not even have been on the aircraft. Blind fate, dictated by love, placed her aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and cost the toughest woman on US television her life, the last terrible minutes of which she spent with her husband.
(Bob's Note: She wrote the widely acclaimed book, "Hell To Pay". This was a brilliant and frightening expose of Hillary Clinton's nightmarish personality and history). The CNN political commentator, who was known to make former President Bill Clinton quiver in trepidation, cowered in a toilet of the Boeing 757, pouring out her fears to Ted Olson, the US Solicitor General. It was 9.38am Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday.
At 9.43am, the jet crashed into the Pentagon, killing all passengers and crew and 800 government employees.
Mrs Olson should have been on the corresponding flight 24 hours earlier and lived to continue to terrify a generation of US politicians. However, she wanted to start the day by sharing breakfast with her husband on his birthday.
Yesterday, Mr Olson said tearfully: "She called from the plane while it was being hijacked. I wish it wasn’t so but it is."
Mrs Olson, tough, intractable and uncompromising in public life, was reduced to a fearful wreck as she managed two short calls of one minute’s duration each to Mr Olson.
During one, she spoke of the hijackers being armed with "box-cutters and knives" and the passengers being herded to the back of the aircraft.
When the call was cut off, Mr Olson rang the Justice Department command centre to alert them. They had been unaware of the hijacking.
The phone rang again. Mrs Olson, terrified, but courageously trying to remain calm and in control, asked him: "What should I tell the pilot?"
They were her last words.
"She sounded composed, or as composed as anyone could be in those circumstances," said Mr Olson.
It had been two hours since Flight 77 had left Washington-Dulles airport en route to Los Angeles. Mrs Olson had boarded the aircraft just before 8am along with 63 other passengers .
Less than two hours later - at 9.43am - the 757 ploughed into the Pentagon, collapsing its walls, setting the building alight and killing a possible 800 personnel.
At some point between 8.10am and 9.43am, the hijackers had made their move, swiftly taking control of the aircraft and preventing the crew from punching in a pre-arranged four-digit code, which would have alerted ground control that a hijacking was in progress.
Michelle Heidenberger, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was one of the flight crew. Her husband, Tom, is a US Airways pilot and they had two children, an 11-year-old son and a daughter at college. Mrs Heidenberger, who was hijack-trained, was apparently forced to access the cockpit area. Brandishing the bladed weapons, the hijackers herded together the passengers and crew, including the pilots.
They had their own man ready to fly the aircraft.
In a vicious act of cruelty, the terrorists allowed the passengers and crew to phone their families, telling them to let them know they "were going to die". The hijackers revealed that within minutes they would "hit the White House".
The passengers included an administrative employee of the US Senate, and three Washington schoolchildren accompanied by three teachers on an educational field trip.
Charles Falkenberg, 45, his partner, Leslie Whittington, and their two daughters were on the first leg of a two-month trip to Australia, where the professor of public policy was to work for the Australian National University.
The passengers who phoned loved ones told the same story. The plane had been commandeered by hijackers claiming to have bombs.
When Barbara Olson called her husband she said she was unhappy that nobody was "taking charge of the situation". In a second call, she asked him what to tell the pilot to do.
The lives of the other passencould not be counted in minutes.
Allen Cleveland, a passenger on a Washington train, saw the jet passing overhead. "I thought that was strange. There’s no landing strip on that side of the tracks," he said. Then Flight 77 disappeared from air traffic control screens, which had been tracking its course.
Radio contact was also lost because the terrorists had immobilised the aircraft’s transponder system.
Now, no-one had any idea of the aircraft’s destination. The screens had shown an aircraft heading for the White House.
Controllers at Reagan National Airport called the White House to warn the people to get out, but as the plane cruised on, the pilot made a 270-degree turn, bringing him into line with the Pentagon.
At 9.43am, the plane dipped below radar level and seconds later crashed. On the train, Mr Cleveland saw "a huge mushroom cloud".
"The lady next to me was in absolute hysterics," he added.
Yesterday, Mr Olson was overcome with grief. It was left to family friend Tim O’Brien to explain: "She wasn’t even supposed to be on this flight. She was booked on a flight yesterday, but today is Ted's birthday, so she wanted to be here this morning to have breakfast with him before she left."
Gethin Chamberlain and Jim McBeth
Thursday, 13th September 2001
The ScotsmanUnited airlines Flight 175
UNITED Airlines flight 175 left the tarmac at Logan Airport only seconds before American Airlines flight 11, already in the air, was hijacked.
The passengers aboard flight 175 had time to glimpse their fate, and precious seconds to tell of it. Among the 56 passengers was David Angell, creator of the comedy Frasier. Sitting in first class, the 54-year-old was travelling with his wife, Lynn, to attend the Emmy Awards this weekend.
Also in first class was Fred Rimmele, a physician described as an "old-style family doctor", sitting next to his wife, Kim. They were on their way to a medical conference in Santa Monica. A former Israeli army captain, Daniel Lewin, 31, was on the plane, too - heading via a technology conference in Boston to visit relatives in Los Angeles.
In economy, Leslie Whittington, a Georgetown professor, was taking her husband, Charles Falkenberg, and daughters Zoe, eight, and Dana, three, along on a university fellowship she had been granted in Australia. Jesus Sanchez, 45, from Hudson, Massachusetts, an off-duty flight attendant, sat alone in economy, making small talk with the hostesses, many of whom he knew. Alongside Mr Sanchez sat an executive from San Diego’s famous Rubio’s Restaurant, Timothy Ward.
At 8:30am, within 20 minutes of take-off, the terrorists made their move. They overpowered the air hostesses to force the pilots to hand over the controls. As the first hostess was dragged to the back of the plane by one of the hijackers, a passenger, thought to be Mr Sanchez, intervened, but he was stabbed. As the terrorist struggled to fight off Mr Sanchez, Mr Ward called his brother, Anthony, a San Diego police officer, and desperately whispered: "We’re being taken hostage, we need help. Get help, a man has been stabbed, they are trying to take over the plane."
In first class, the other two terrorists launched a similar assault on two air stewards, dragging them to the cockpit door screaming: "We are taking over the plane."
Garnet "Ace" Bailey, an ice hockey legend, made an urgent call to his agent, screaming: "We’re being hijacked, they are stabbing passengers and crew, they’ve taken over the controls." Then the call was cut off.
The terrorists finally broke into the cockpit and issued a message over the public address system telling the passengers they would be fine - but chaos reigned in the aisles as several passengers are thought to have tried to attack their captors.
Charles Falkenberg telephoned a neighbour and told him: "We’ve been taken hostage but they have promised not to harm us, we’ve tried to fight them off but they have weapons." He was then cut off.
As air traffic control listened helplessly, the hijackers announced they were heading for New York. At about 8:50am, a flight attendant managed to call an emergency number from the back of the plane. She said her fellow attendants had been stabbed, the plane had been taken over and they were going down in New York.
The plane made its fatal descent towards Manhattan - and at 9:03am, the terrorist pilots slammed the plane into the south tower, killing all 56 passengers and nine crew on impact.
In a tragic twist, an Irish businessman, Ronnie Clifford, from Cork, ran from the north tower after the first plane hit, not knowing that his sister, Ruth Clifford McCourt, 45, and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana, were passengers on the second plane. Mr Clifford’s brother, John, last night described Ronnie’s escape and spoke of his grief at the death of his sister and niece.
He said he began fearing for them after discovering that his brother was safe. "Tragically my sister hit the tower as my brother was on the ground floor. He’s safe now. He’s very traumatised. He said he saw sights he would never like to see again. Very sad. Very evil."
He continued: "I was concerned when the buildings collapsed, because I knew Ronnie worked in one. He phoned to say he made it, he was OK, traumatised, that he was within an inch of his life.
"He went through the front door on the ground floor and a lady was about three seconds in front of him. She was hit by a terrific fireball and she was horrifically injured. He went to her assistance and I think found some sort of tablecloth to put over her. While he was doing that another explosion happened and a load of people got him and the lady out. I think she subsequently died."
Mr Clifford said as he heard details of the appalling events, his brother suspected their sister could have been on the plane. "He said that, while he was OK, he had a feeling that his sister - my sister - had left Logan Airport to go to Los Angeles with her daughter at around 7:30 in the morning.
"So we were then concerned that she may have been on either of the two flights that crashed into the towers." The news was confirmed only after a period of frantic telephone calls made to the authorities, who were deluged by inquiries from concerned relatives.
Mr Clifford said yesterday: "I rang the [Irish ministry of] foreign affairs yesterday evening and they were in total turmoil. They said it was impossible to get information.
"I had someone go to Logan Airport in the evening to investigate it and the FBI confirmed she was on the flight."
Mrs McCourt, 45, lived in Connecticut and had gone to Boston to fly to Los Angeles for a for a shopping trip with her best friend, Paige. When they got to Logan, Paige managed to get a seat on the first doomed flight. Mrs McCourt was on standby and secured seats for herself and her daughter on the second flight.
Mr McCourt said: "She was going on a break, a holiday with her daughter and her friend."
Mr Clifford, 47, said his sister’s husband, David, was absolutely devastated. He added: "He’s in total shock. Juliana was their only child. They had both retired. They had both sold up their business. They had a pleasant life enjoying the fruits of their labour.
"She had a great, outgoing, bubbly personality. She was fantastic, she really was a lovely girl. It’s a total waste of life."
Mrs McCourt first went to the US more than 30 years ago with her mother, when she was 15.
Dan McDougall and John Woodcock
Thursday, 13th September 2001
The ScotsmanUnited Airlines Flight 93
FLIGHT 93 lifted into the air at 8.01am, heading west to San Francisco. The terrorists on board had another plan, a blueprint for the bloody murder of the passengers and crew and the destruction of a key US government installation. Camp David? An FBI facility?
We will probably never know why the hijackers aboard the United Airlines jetliner failed - unlike their colleagues - to reach a landmark target, crashing instead into a rural area 80 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
It could be that 38-year-old Thomas Burnett, an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, may hold the key. But he was a passenger and died on impact.
Shortly before the aircraft hit the ground, Mr Burnett phoned his wife, Deena.
"I know we’re all going to die, " he told her, "but there are three of us who are going to do something about it!"
Maybe they succeeded and confined the loss of life to the aircraft’s passengers, crew and, of course, the terrorists.
There were 45 people on board from Newark airport, New Jersey. At 10:10am it crashed into the ground in Somerset County, south-east of Pittsburgh. By the time it hit the ground, all flights in the US had been grounded and, initially, it was suspected that the plane had been shot down by USAF fighters.
However, it appears some passengers realised their captors had no intention of allowing the hijacking to end peacefully and they resolved to act.
What happened after they made their decision will never be known, but instead of crashing into the president’s retreat at Camp David or a nearby FBI building, the plane came down in a grassy field away from any town.
Mr Burnett and his fellow passengers would certainly have sealed their fate by challenging the hijackers, but potentially, they saved the lives of thousands.
His last words to his wife were: "I love you, honey".
Whatever happened in those final, fateful seconds, the father-of-three is being hailed as a hero.
Mr Burnett, the chief operating officer for a medical devices company, had already phoned his wife to tell her that the hijackers had stabbed a passenger to death.
The Rev Frank Colacicco, the family’s minister, said the couple talked for a few moments. Mr Colacicco believes Mr Burnett died trying to save lives. "I believe he gave his life for others," he said and added: "He thought he would be able to do that."
Mrs Burnett, 37, said: "He always believed God gave us the choice for evil or good and my husband figured that these people were doing evil - that was his philosophy."
It is clear that Mr Burnett was not alone in realising the seriousness of their predicament. By that time the World Trade Centre had been struck twice and the Pentagon was ablaze.
There were 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants on board the San Francisco-bound Boeing 757. It should have been a six-hour flight and the aircraft was carrying 200,000lb of fuel.
The plane was radar-tracked and it passed north of Pittsburgh and was almost at Cleveland, Ohio, before making a sharp left turn toward south-west Pennsylvania. The aircraft’s transponder had been switched off, which meant it was not identifying itself to controllers.
On board, a stewardess, CeeCee Lyles, used her mobile to call her husband and four sons in Florida.
He could hear screaming in the background. "She called him and let him know how much she loved him and the boys," said her aunt, Mareya Schneider.
Another man hid in a toilet and called the emergency operator: "We are being hijacked, " he said. He told the operator there had been an explosion on board.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Alice Hoglan answered the phone to her son, Mark Bingham, 31. Mrs Hoglan, 51, herself a United Airlines flight attendant, said her son told her that three men who claimed to have a bomb had hijacked the plane.
Mr Bingham said: "This is Mark, I want you to know I love you. I’m on United Flight 93 and we have been taken over by three guys who say they have a bomb."
Mrs Hoglan realised there was confusion. "Who are these guys?" she asked him. "Yes, it’s true," her son replied. She said: "I believe you, I believe you." The phone went dead.
The end came at 10.10am. Air traffic control co-ordinators had just reported a large aircraft heading toward the John Murtha Johnstown Cambria County Municipal Airport. The aircraft would not identify itself. Airport director Joe McKelvey said it was descending from 6,000ft: "It was extremely alarming, especially at that low altitude."
Moments later, the plane hit the ground. "It was like an atomic bomb hit," said John Walsh, 72, who heard the crash and drove to the site while still in his bathrobe. "When I got there, the plane was obliterated. You couldn’t see the cockpit or the wings or nothing."
Tom Fritz, 63, was sitting on his porch when he heard a sound that "wasn’t quite right". He said: "It was sort of whistling. It was going so fast that you couldn’t even make out what colour it was. When it decided to drop, it dropped all of a sudden, like a stone."
Gethin Chamberlain and Jim McBeth
Thursday, 13th September 2001
The Scotsman
