WASHINGTON NATIONAL
09:37:
At nearby Washington National Airport, the tower supervisor picks up a secure hotline and informs a Secret Service contact in charge of protection at the White House that an unidentified plane is hurtling towards them. Usually, the calls come the other way, from angry agents complaining that a commercial flight took off too close to the White House.

DULLES
Danielle O'Brien stops breathing as the count goes to “six, five, four” miles out. She's about to call, “three!” when the scary blip suddenly turns away. Everyone in the darkened room at Dulles Air Traffic Control exhales in a simultaneous sigh. “This must be a fighter,” someone speculates. “This must be one of our guys sent in-scrambled to patrol our Capitol and to protect our President.”

HUNTRESS
Not quite. Initially sent toward the ocean, before being vectored toward a phantom Flight 11, the three Langley fighters are still about 150 miles out-further away from the Pentagon than the base from which they originally took off.

Meanwhile, almost in sight of the Pentagon while still sitting on the air base apron, both armed interceptors on strip alert at Andrews must have been converted into garden planters.

DULLES
Everyone in Dulles ATC sits back and just breathes. For a second. The sky is still filled with airplanes that must be danced around each other to safe landings. The controllers have just started working their flights again when O'Brien watches in disbelief as the airplane she's been tracking continues its sharp right-hand turn for a full 360-degrees.

“He's turning back in, he's turning back eastbound,” several controllers start shouting to Carr. Howell calls out, “Oh, my God, John, he's coming back.”

Whatever they're seeing on their scopes is not acting like an airliner. “You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe,” O'Brien will later say. “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.”

The plane is now so low, they lose radar contact. Hearts pounding, everyone in the radar room waits.

And waits.

ACES AND AMATEURS
Veteran pilots on the ground in the vicinity of the Pentagon watch slack-jawed as a Boeing jetliner peels off like a fighter into a high-speed descending turn. No one watching doubts that an ace military pilot is at the controls.

After flying more than 100 combat missions over Vietnam, Russ Wittenberg went on to fly “57s” and “67s” for Pan Am and United. When he made the jump from Boeing's 727's to the highly sophisticated 737 through 767 series, it took this veteran jet pilot considerable time to feel comfortable flying such heavy complex jets. “I had to be trained to use the new, computerized systems. I just couldn't jump in and fly one,” he says.

There is no way, he heatedly insists, that someone as levitationally-challenged as Hani Hanjour could have flown one of the big birds Wittenberg had only mastered after thousands of flying hours. And there is zero possibility that a student pilot grappling with a heavy complex aircraft could have “descended 7,000 feet in two minutes, all the while performing a steep 270-degree banked turn before crashing into the Pentagon's first floor wall without touching the lawn.”

Even after 35 years of commercial jetliner experience, this pilot says he would never attempt it. “For a guy to just jump into the cockpit and fly like an ace is impossible,” Wittenberg concludes.

Now, as the ground rushes up to fill the windscreen, a recorded female voice in the cockpit of Flight 77 commands, “Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!”

But even if “Hani Hanjour” attempts to comply, the sheer momentum of an airliner descending in a steep, stall-inviting bank at a death-defying sink rate of 3,500 feet-per-minute will ensure that even after its terrified pilot-whoever it really is-pulls the nose up, the big jet will continue sagging in a downward trajectory straight into the ground.

GOLF ZERO SIX
As NEADS attempts to direct the lost Langley fighters back toward the White House, and hate-filled hijackers commit murder onboard Flight 93, an air force C-130 Hercules transport climbs out of Andrews on a purportedly routine delivery flight, despite the emergency grounding order. Golf Zero Six calls in to report a commercial airliner flying very low and fast directly toward the Pentagon.

Civilian controllers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport ask the pilot to attempt to identify it. That's easy, Steve O'Brien radios back. “He is pretty much filling our windscreen.”

Intending to fly on to Minnesota after dropping off cargo in the Caribbean, O'Brien is less sure of his immediate future when the big jet he's following makes “a pretty aggressive turn” maybe a mile-and-a-half right off his nose.

When the controller asks again what type aircraft he is observing, O'Brien is startled a second time in as many seconds. As he later says, “Normally they have all that information. The controller didn't seem to know anything.”

Steve O'Brien calls it either a 757 or 767. Glinting in the morning sunlight, its silver fuselage means it is probably an American Airlines plane, he adds. Instructed to turn and follow that aircraft, the Lieutenant Colonel is once again nonplussed. In 20-plus years of flying, he has never been asked to engage another aircraft with a transport plane.

EYEWITNESSES
Instead of finding solace in his commanding view of Arlington National Cemetery and the Potomac River from his office on the 19th floor of USA Today, Steve Anderson is sickeningly fascinated by what seems like the thousandth replay of an airliner flying into the World Trade Center. Only gradually does he become aware that the sound of approaching jet engines is not coming from his television set.

Still looking for work, Thomas Trapasso is making phone calls from the deck of his home in Arlington Village about one mile south of the Pentagon and just west of the Interstate 395 when he is startled by a big American Airlines jet as it passes perhaps 300 feet overhead. Both engines are screaming at full power, and the plane-though low enough to land-has its wheels up.

Not far away, architect Terrance Kean has been packing to move from his 14-story apartment building. On hearing rapidly approaching jet engines, he looks straight out his window and sees a “very, very large passenger jet.”

Fate finds truck driver Steve Eiden taking the Highway 95 loop past the Pentagon. Bound for New York City, the trucker is staggered to see an airliner coming right at him at lamp-pole height. Eiden wonders what the plane is doing so low in restricted airspace. As he later recalls, “You could almost see the people in the windows.” Then the big red, white and silver American airliner disappears behind a line of trees.

On the other side of the road, Salvadoran Omar Campo is cutting the grass when Flight 77 zooms low his head.

Information management specialist Frank Probst has just left his office trailer near the Pentagon's south parking lot. Walking north along Route 27, he is enjoying the mild fall weather when a commercial airliner crests the hill above the Navy Annex coming straight at him.

Father Stephen McGraw is heading to a graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery when he mistakenly takes the Pentagon exit onto Washington Boulevard. Driving in the left hand lane closest to the Pentagon with his windows closed, the preoccupied priest doesn't hear a thing-until a jumbo jetliner passes about 20 feet over his car. Only then does Father McGraw realize that the plane has clipped the top of a light pole, injuring a taxi driver a few feet away.

Computer programmer Asework Hagos, 26, is stuck in the same traffic jam on Columbia Pike trying to get to work when a “huge screaming noise” prompts him to stomp the brakes and leap out of his car. An airliner is flying very low and too close to nearby buildings. It's coming down on me, he thinks. He knows it's going to crash. Everybody around him starts running in different directions. But Hagos hangs tight, focusing on the big jet. Tilting its wings up and down “like it was trying to balance” the airliner hits some lampposts-and keeps coming.

USAToday.com editor Joel Sucherman watches in disbelief as Flight 77 flies left to right across his windshield just 20 feet off the ground and a mere wingspan away. He's not going to make it across the river to National Airport, Sucherman thinks.

FLIGHT 93
Onboard Flight 93, Jeremy Glick calls Lyz again. This time, he describes the hijackers as Middle Eastern and “Iranian-looking.” Just minutes before, three of the intruders had donned red headbands before standing up, yelling the Arabic equivalent of “Bonzai!” and running forward into the cockpit-where an accomplice must already have been waiting.

Originally seated at the front of Coach Class, Glick has been sent to the back of the plane with most of the other passengers. With all that weight aft, the plane must be drastically out of trim. While family members hurriedly dial 911 on another line, Jeremy Glick tells his spouse that the hijackers claim to have explosives. But the “bomb” is just an ordinary box with something red wrapped around it. Glick's phone will remain connected until the very end.

CHOPPER
Outside the Pentagon, a senior air force officer spots what appears to be a circling U.S. military helicopter. When the craft disappears behind the building in the direction of the helipad, he thinks the nearly simultaneous explosion that follows must be the helo.

Other news agencies will soon be reporting similar impressions. As Dick Cheney later tells NBC's Meet the Press, “The first reports on the Pentagon attack suggested a helicopter” hit it.

At the same time, the Vice-President is told that either another plane or “a helicopter loaded with explosives” is heading for the White House!

The confusion could be coming from an anticipated VIP helicopter arrival. With President Bush previously scheduled to take his Marine One helicopter directly to the Pentagon from nearby Dulles International on his return from Florida, Secret Service personnel are swarming around the Pentagon helipad.

Inside the huge military complex, Representative Christopher Cox is still meeting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld-who is apparently not engaged in the video-linked Threat Conference call, after all. Apparently unimpressed by the Trade Center burning on their television, and supposedly completely oblivious to the approach of Flight 77 that is commanding so much attention in the same building, the two men are discussing missile defense. Why this essential second member of the nation's two-person National Command Authority is allowed to chitchat uninterrupted will never be satisfactorily explained.

Instead, as 9/11 legend will later insist, while watching television coverage from New York City, Rumsfeld calmly tells Cox, “If we remain vulnerable to missile attack, a terrorist group or rogue state that demonstrates the capacity to strike the U.S. or its allies from long range could have the power to hold our entire country hostage to nuclear or other blackmail.”

Rumsfeld does not specify which nation would dare launch a first strike that would see its cities reduced to radioactive glass within an hour by overwhelming U.S. retaliation. Referring to the televised attacks on the WTC, he says to Cox, “And let me tell you, I've been around the block a few times. There will be another event.”

The soothsaying Secretary of Defense repeats that phrase for emphasis.

THE FIRE THIS TIME
Fireman Alan Wallace has just finished fixing the foam-metering valve on the back of his fire truck parked near the Pentagon's helipad. Startled by a familiar but out-of-place sound, he looks up to see Flight 77 coming straight at him. The big plane is only a few hundred yards away and closing fast, about 25 feet off the deck. With its wheels up, it is not intending to land. It is going to crash.

“Runnnnn!” Wallace yells to his buddy.

THE NAVAL ANNEX
Approaching from the west, American Airlines Flight 77 skims a low hill and the five-story Navy Annex overlooking the Pentagon. Defense Protective Service officer Mark Bright is manning the guard booth at the building's mall entrance when the oncoming jetliner pops up low over the Navy Annex, only a few hundred yards away.

Watching it knock down streetlights, he knows it is going to hit the building. Just before it does, Bright hears the plane power-up.

Frank Probst calmly observes that the plane has its landing lights off. The wheels are up, and the nose is down. Seeing the big jet accelerate directly towards him, Probst freezes. He knows he is already dead. Damn, he thinks. My wife has to go to another funeral. I'm not going to see my two boys again.

Then instinctual self-preservation kicks in. Probst dives to his right as one of the plane's gaping turbines passes just feet away. The plane's right wing cuts right through a nearby generator trailer “like butter,” Probst later recalls. The starboard engine almost takes his head off before hurtling past to hit a low cement wall and blow apart.

Dan Creed and two colleagues from Oracle software are stopped in their car near the Naval Annex when they see an oncoming airliner dive down and level off. No more than 30 feet off the ground, the big jet “was just screaming,” Creed will later recall. “I can still see the plane. I can still see it right now. It's just the most frightening thing in the world, going full speed, going full throttle, its wheels up.”

In his peripheral vision, James Cissell sees the plane coming in. It is low. And dropping lower. Cissell will later say, “If you couldn't touch it from standing on the highway, you could by standing on your car.”

Dozens of impressions flash through his mind: This isn't really happening. That is a big plane.

Then he sees the terrified faces of the passengers onboard.

DRIVE TIME
Traffic is normally slow near the Pentagon, where the roadway winds and drivers have to line up to cross the 14th Street Bridge heading into the District of Columbia. Elaine McCusker still doesn't know what made her look up. But she does-in time to see a plane flying so low she easily identifies it as an American Airlines jet. The big plane appears to be accelerating.

No, no, no, no , she thinks.

It is obvious that the plane is not heading for nearby Reagan National Airport.

It is going to crash.

Owens is certain she is about to die, along with the other commuters trapped on Washington Boulevard. Gripping the steering wheel of her vibrating car, she ducks as the wobbling plane screams overhead. Once it passes, she rises slightly and grimaces as the left wing dips and scrapes the helicopter area before impacting the southwest wall of the Pentagon nose-first.

When Mary Ann Owens looks up through her windshield, Flight 77 is already so close she can only see the bottom of the fuselage. She doesn't believe that the careering jetliner will reach the Pentagon. Its downward angle is too steep, its height only about 50 feet and dropping. Streetlights topple as the plane barely clears the Interstate 395 overpass.

Christine Peterson has come to a complete stop right in front of the crowded helipad. So much for the morning's shortcut, she thinks. Glancing idly out her left window, she sees a big airplane flying way too low and coming right at her. Holy shit, that plane is going to hit my car, she thinks. Before she can react, her vehicle rocks on its springs as the plane passes over the roof so close she can read the numbers under the wing.

Then it disappears. Her mind cannot comprehend what has just happened. Where did the plane go? For some reason, Peterson had expected it to bounce off the Pentagon in pieces. But there is no plane visible, “only huge billows of smoke and torrents of fire.”

Driving into the Arlington National Cemetery exit off Interstate 395, construction supervisor Kirk Milburn finds himself directly underneath a descending jetliner. “I heard a plane. I saw it. I saw debris flying. I guess it was hitting light poles,” Milburn says later.
“It was like a WHOOOSH whoosh. Then there was fire and smoke. Then I heard a second explosion.”

Hagos glimpses an American Airline insignia just before it impacts the Pentagon. The sound seems to stop the world. Billowing smoke is followed by flames.

Former Presidential write-in candidate Gary Bauer is also driving past the Pentagon. Actually, he is inching a yard or so ahead in heavy traffic every few minutes. He has just passed the exit onto 395, the closest road point to the massive structure, when “all of a sudden” he hears the roar of approaching jet engines.

Instead of looking up, Bauer glances at a woman in the car next to him. The startled look on her face convinces him that he isn't imagining the impossible. Swiveling his gaze out the windshield, he tries to spot the oncoming plane. It isn't until a few seconds later that he and the drivers around him realize that the sound is coming up behind them. Everyone watches dumbfounded as the plane veers to the right and flies straight into the Pentagon. The blast rocks every car on the road.

ROOMS WITH A VIEW
After watching TV coverage of the burning Trade Center, Deb Anlauf decides to return to her 14th-floor room in the Sheraton National Hotel. Located less than two blocks from the Pentagon, she is just getting settled when a loud roar brings her to the window to see what's happening.

“Suddenly I saw this plane right outside my window,” Anlauf said during a telephone interview from her room later that morning. “You felt like you could touch it-it was that close. It was just incredible. Then it shot straight across from where we are and flew right into the Pentagon. It was just this huge fireball that crashed into the wall. When it hit, the whole hotel shook.”

Anlauf flees her room immediately after the blast, searching frantically for her husband. Then the couple joins hundreds of dazed and crying people in front of the hotel.

Steve Patterson is watching television coverage of the World Trade Center crashes when he sees what he thinks is a silver commuter jet flying past the window of his 14th-floor apartment in Pentagon City. His mind refuses to accept anything else. The plane is about 150 yards away, approaching from the west about 20 feet off the ground with the high-pitched screech of a fighter jet. Appearing to hold “about eight to 12 people,” the plane overflies the Arlington cemetery so low, Patterson thinks it must be going to land on I-395.

Oh my God, there's a plane truly misrouted from National , Patterson thinks. Oh my God, what's next? Then he see the Pentagon “envelop” the plane. Bright orange flames shoot out the back of the building.

Thomas Trapasso watches the low-flying airliner disappear over the trees. A moment later, he hears a dull boom and knows that “something awful” has happened. An airliner has crashed somewhere in Washington, D.C.

Architect Terrance Kean watches in disbelief as the red-and-silver airliner plows right into the side of the Pentagon. He sees the nose penetrate the portico. Then it sort of disappears. Then there is fire and smoke everywhere. “It was very sort of surreal,” he later says.

PASSERSBY
Flight 77 thunders over Omar Campo's head. “It was a passenger plane, I think an American Airways plane,” Campo later told reporters. “I was cutting the grass and it came in screaming over my head. I felt the impact. The whole ground shook and the whole area was full of fire. I could never imagine I would see anything like that here.”

Pentagon office worker David Battle is about to enter the Pentagon when the American airliner arrives. “It was coming down head first,” he later relates. “And when the impact hit, the cars and everything were just shaking.”
William Middleton Senior is running his street sweeper through Arlington Cemetery when he hears a harsh whistling sound close overhead. Looking up, Middleton sees a commercial jet coming in no higher than the tops of telephone poles.

Its pilot seems to be fighting the controls. Instead of pulling up, the big jet appears to accelerate across the last few hundred yards to the Pentagon.

Standing less than 100 feet away from impact zone, Mickey Bell is nearly struck by the plane's wing as it slices past him. Groggy with shock, he gets into his truck and drives away. Only later will coworkers notice plastic and rivets from an airliner imbedded in its sheet metal. Bell has no idea that shrapnel from the exploding jet had hit it.

Fireman Wallace and his crewmate sprint maybe 30 feet before hearing a terrible, nerve-shattering roar from the direction of the Pentagon. Chased by intense heat, both firefighters dive underneath a van. Sliding across the blacktop like a baseball player stealing home, Wallace's shirt slides up and he skins his stomach. But it's worth it. The van protects both firefighters from burning fragments zipping through the air.

A few seconds later, after checking on his friend, who is dazed but unhurt, Wallace races back to the fire truck. The motor is still running. He jumps in, throws it into gear, and stamps the accelerator. But nothing happens. Only then does he realize that the entire back of the truck is demolished.

Then he notices that the cab he is sitting in is on fire.

Bailing out of the burning fire truck, he runs back to the van. Grabbing a headset dangling from the dashboard, he radios his chief at the nearby Fort Myer fire station to report the unimaginable: “We have had a commercial carrier crash into the west side of the Pentagon at the heliport, Washington Boulevard side. The crew is OK. The airplane was a 757 Boeing or a 320 Airbus.”

Pilot Tim Timmerman's reaction is professional. He immediately identifies the low-flying airliner as an American Airways 757. “It added power on its way in,” Timmerman later recounted. “The nose hit and the wings came forward, and it went up in a fireball.”

Sucherman also sees the heavy plane slam into the west wall of the Pentagon, just 100 yards away.

Father McGraw watches the entire crash sequence, followed by a fireball flaring out of two upper windows in the Pentagon.

Trucker Eiden hears a soul-shattering explosion and sees a towering plume of black smoke rising over the trees.

At work in an Arlington office building, Carla Thompson glances up from her desk in time to see Flight 77 ram the Pentagon's reinforced concrete west wall at nearly 500 miles-per-hour, about 1,000 yards away. Thompson sees the plane make an indentation in the building … “And then it was just blown-up-red, everything red.”

Everyone in her office “just started to go crazy,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I was petrified.”

From his office perch, Steve Anderson watches in horror as the American Airlines jet careens past below him. Banking slightly to the left, the Boeing airliner drags one wing along the ground just before slamming into the Pentagon. A giant orange fireball sends thick black smoke skywards. Then the fireball vanishes and the plume turns white.

Driving toward the Pentagon, Major Lincoln Leibner parks in the south parking lot before continuing on foot. When he first hears the approaching plane, he figures its direction as somewhere over the Arlington cemetery. From his vantage point, Major Leibner looks up and watches the big plane come in. “I was about 100 yards away,” he later says. “You could see through the windows of the aircraft. I saw it hit.”

Coming in hard and level, the airliner was flown full throttle into the building, dead center mass, he recounts. “The plane completely entered the building. I got a little repercussion, from the sound, the blast. I've heard artillery, and that was louder than the loudest has to offer.”

GOLF ZERO SIX
Seconds after impact, Lieutenant Colonel Steve O'Brien reports to the Reagan control tower from his C-130, saying, “Looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir.”

Excerpted from Days of Deception by William Thomas

THE PENTAGON
by
William Thomas