Welcome To My Blog. I respect and appreciate comments, questions, information and theories you might have. Even if i agree with you or not, i won't delete your comments as long as they are not purposefully attacking anyone. I will not condone bullying of any kind. If you that is your intent, don't bother posting because i will delete it the moment i see it.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 at 8:50 a.m. is the last normal radio communications from American Airlines Flight 77 to air traffic control.
At 8:54 a.m., the plane began to deviate from its normal, assigned flight path and turned south.
At 8:56 a.m., the plane's transponder was switched off.
The pilots had been shoved to the back of the plane with the rest of the passengers.
The hijackers set the flight's autopilot on a course heading east towards Washington, D.C. The FAA was aware at this point that there was an emergency on board the airplane.
Flight 11 had already crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and Flight 175 was known to have been hijacked.
Gerard Arpey had already ordered a nationwide ground stop for the airline.
Flight 77 was flying over an area of limited radar coverage and air controllers unable to contact the flight by radio.
At 9:12 a.m., flight attendant Renee May made a two minute call to her mother in Las Vegas.
May said her flight was being hijacked by six people, and staff and passengers had been moved to the rear of the airplane.
May asked her mother to contact American Airlines, which she did.
Between 9:16 a.m. and 9:26 a.m., passenger Barbara Olson called her husband and reported that the airplane had been hijacked and that the assailants had box cutters and knives.
She said that the passengers and the pilots, had been moved to the back of the cabin and that the hijackers were unaware of her call.
A minute into the conversation, the call was cut off.
Five minutes later, Barbara Olson called again, told her husband that the "pilot" had announced on the intercom, the flight was hijacked, and asked,
"What do I tell the pilot to do?"
Her husband asked her location and she reported the plane was flying low over a residential area.
He told her of the attacks on the World Trade Center and then the call cut off again.
Dulles International Airport Air traffic controller, Danielle O'Brien stated,
"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.
You don't fly a 757 in that manner.
It's unsafe."
An airplane was detected again by Dulles controllers on radar screens as it approached Washington, turning and descending rapidly.
Controller thought this was a military fighter, due to its high speed and maneuvering.
Reagan Airport controllers asked a passing Air National Guard Lockheed C-130 Hercules to identify and follow the aircraft.
The pilot, Lt. Col. Steven O'Brien, told them it was a Boeing 757 or 767.
He said its silver fuselage meant that it was probably an American Airlines jet.
He had difficulty picking out the airplane in the "East Coast haze", but then saw a "huge" fireball, and assumed it had hit the ground. As he approached the Pentagon, he saw the impact site on the building's west side and reported to Reagan control,
"Looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir."
At 9:37 a.m., Flight 77 had crashed into the west side of Pentagon, not before knocking over five street lampposts with it's wings.
The right wing also struck a portable generator, creating a smoke trail.
The plane hit the Pentagon at the first-floor level.
At the moment of impact, the airplane was rolled slightly to the left, with the right wing elevated. and the front part of the fuselage disintegrated on impact.
The mid and tail sections moved for another fraction of a second, with tail section debris penetrating furthest into the building.
The airplane took eight-tenths of a second to fully penetrate 310 feet into the three outermost of the building's five rings.
It unleashed a fireball that rose 200 feet above the building.
18,000 people worked in the Pentagon and the section that was struck, which had recently been renovated at a cost of $250 million, housed the Naval Command Center.
125 die in the Pentagon building in addition to the 64 that died on board the aircraft.
Passenger Barbara Olson was en route to a recording of the TV show Politically Incorrect.
A group of children, their chaperones, and two National Geographic Society staff members were also on board.
They were on an educational trip west to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California.
Of those 125 killed, 92 were on the first floor, 31 were on the second floor, and two were on the third.
Another 106 were injured on the ground and were treated at area hospitals.
The side where the plane hit, the Pentagon is bordered by Interstate 395 and Washington Boulevard.
Motorist Mary Lyman, who was on I-395, saw the airplane pass over at a "steep angle toward the ground and going fast" and then saw the cloud of smoke from the Pentagon.
Omar Campo, was cutting the grass on the other side of the road when the airplane flew over his head.
Later he said,
"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."
Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was stuck in a traffic jam near the Pentagon when the airplane flew over.
"There was a huge screaming noise and I got out of the car as the plane came over.
Everybody was running away in different directions.
It was tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance.
It hit some lampposts on the way in."
Daryl Donley witnessed the crash and took some of the first photographs.
USA Today reporter Mike Walter was driving on Washington Boulevard when he witnessed the crash.
"I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming.
And I thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.'
And I saw it.
I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings.
It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon."
Terrance Kean lived in a nearby apartment building.
Heard the noise of loud jet engines, glanced out his window, and saw a "very, very large passenger jet".
He watched
"it just plow right into the side of the Pentagon.
The nose penetrated into the portico.
And then it sort of disappeared, and there was fire and smoke everywhere."
Tim Timmerman is a pilot himself, noticed American Airlines markings on the aircraft as he saw it hit the Pentagon.
Former Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson had originally booked a ticket on Flight 77.
He had been scheduled to appear on Jim Rome's radio show, on September 12, 2001.
Thompson was planning to be in Las Vegas for a friend's birthday on September 13.
He initially insisted on traveling to Rome's Los Angeles studio on the 11th, however, this did not work for the show.
Thompson changed his travel plans.
He felt the impact from the crash at his home near the Pentagon.
Rescue efforts were initially led by the military and civilian employees within the building.
The first fire companies arrived and found these volunteers searching near the impact site and ordered them to leave as they were not properly equipped or trained to deal with the hazards.
Firefighters from Fort Myer and Reagan National Airport arrived within minutes.
Rescue and firefighting efforts were impeded by rumors of additional incoming planes.
Two evacuations were ordered during the day in response to these rumors.
One firefighter remarked that they "pretty much knew the building was going to collapse because it started making weird sounds and creaking".
At 10:10 a.m., the upper floors of the damaged area of the Pentagon collapsed.
The amount of time between impact and collapse allowed everyone on the fourth and fifth levels to evacuate safely before the structure collapsed.
The interior fires intensified, spreading through all five floors.
After 11:00, officials estimated that the temperatures reached up to 2,000 °F
Progress was made against the interior fires by late afternoon.
A flammable layer of wood under the Pentagon's slate roof had caught fire and begun to spread.
Firefighters were unable to reach the fire to extinguish it, so instead they made firebreaks in the roof on September 12 to prevent further spreading.
Firefighters continued to put out smaller fires that ignited in the succeeding days
Lt. Kevin Shaeffer was on fire as he was escaping the Navy Command Center.
He observed a chunk of the aircraft's nose cone and the nose landing gear in the service road between rings B and C.
On the morning of Friday, September 14, Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team members Carlton Burkhammer and Brian Moravitz came across an "intact seat from the plane's cockpit".
Paramedics and firefighters located the two black boxes nearly 300 feet into the building near the punch out hole in the A-E drive.
The cockpit voice recorder was too badly damaged retrieve any information.
The flight data recorder did yield useful information.
A part of Nawaf al-Hazmi's driver's license was found by investigators in the North Parking Lot rubble pile.
Personal effects belonging to victims were found and taken to Fort Myer.
By 5:30 p.m. on the first day, it was surmised that no one remained alive in the damaged section of the building.
In the days after the crash, it was reported that up to 800 people had died.
A Navy photographer surveying the Navy Command Center after the attacks, remarked
"there were so many bodies, I'd almost step on them. So I'd have to really take care to look backwards as I'm backing up in the dark, looking with a flashlight, making sure I'm not stepping on somebody".
Debris from the Pentagon was taken to the north parking lot for more detailed search for remains and evidence.
Remains that were recovered were photographed, and turned over to the Armed Forces Medical Examiner office, located at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The medical examiner's office was able to identify remains belonging to 179 of the victims.
Eventually 184 of the 189 people who died in the attack were identified by investigators.
The remains of the five hijackers were identified through a process of elimination, and were turned over as evidence to the FBI.
By October 2, 2001, the search for evidence and remains was complete.
In 2002, the remains of 25 victims were buried together at Arlington National Cemetery, with a five-sided granite marker inscribed with the names of all the victims in the Pentagon.
The ceremony also honored the five victims whose remains were never found.
She was 59 years old when she went missing from Cedar City, Utah on April 28, 2015.
She attended the Tulip Festival in Lehi, Utah with people from the Southwest Behavioral Health Center (SWBHC). She was last seen sitting near the front door of her Cedar Springs apartment that night, when a staff member from SWBHC brought her her medication.
She has never been heard from again. It's uncharacteristic of Carver to leave without warning.
Around the time of her disappearance she was 5'2 tall, 130 pounds with gray hair and blue eyes. She was in the early stages of dementia at the time and had other medical problems as well.
She was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager.
She may be disoriented and confused as the result of her conditions.
Carver has a tattoo of a five-pointed star on her left foot and left hand and wears eyeglasses with plastic frames.
She was 23 years old when she went missing from East Layton, Utah on July 4, 1975.
She was last seen at the Fina gas station in the 200 block of south Highway 89.
She worked there as a service station attendant.
A police officer on patrol saw her working alone there, and at 5:30 p.m.
Less than fifteen minutes later, she was discovered missing. There was no evidence of robbery and no indications of a struggle. There, however was about $10 worth of gasoline from pumps had not been paid for.
Her car was found locked and parked in the station lot, and her purse was inside the station, containing her medication and $167. Her ex-husband and two male friends were questioned.
All of them had been out of state at the time she disappeared and passed polygraph examinations.
Baird left behind a four-year-old son.
Witnesses saw a truck at the station just before her disappearance. It was never identified and it's unclear whether it had anything to do with her case.
Authorities believe Baird was a victim of the serial killer Ted Bundy, however Bundy never confessed to her murder.
Bundy never drove a truck, and Baird was the only presumed victim to be abducted from a gas station.
She was a 15 year old student at Woods Cross High School when she went missing on June 27, 1975 from Provo, Utah.
Susan was on the track team and the girl's baseball team during her freshman year.
She is from Bountiful, Utah and was attending the Bountiful Orchard Youth Conference at Brigham Young University in Provo when she went missing.
She'd ridden her bicycle fifty miles from Bountiful to Provo to attend the two day conference.
Susan was last seen on evening of the conference. Following a formal banquet at the Wilkinson Student Center, she left her friends to walk back to her dormitory and brush her teeth., which was about a quarter of a mile away.
Authorities don't believe she ever arrived at her dormitory, because her toothbrush it was dry.
She has never been heard from again.
At the time of her disappearance Susan was 5'7 tall,120 pounds with light brown hair and hazel eyes. She was last seen wearing a full-length yellow evening gown.
She wore braces on her teeth and her ears are pierced. Her nicknames are Sue and Sue-Sue.
Serial killer Ted Bundy confessed to Susan's murder before his 1989 execution.
He said that he had buried her body along a highway near Price, Utah.
It was a beautiful morning on September 11th, 2001 when tragedy struck in New York City.
At 8:14 a.m., Captain John Ogonowski and the other pilot of American Airlines flight 11 stopped responding to requests from the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center.
It is believed that Captain Ogonowski was stabbed to death in order for the hijacker pilot Mohamed Atta to gain control of the plane.
Before dying, Ogonowski keyed the cockpit microphone, pushing its button intermittently to signal that something was wrong and at one point allowing them to hear the voice of the hijacker.
At 8:16 a.m., the aircraft leveled off at 29,000 feet and shortly after deviated from its scheduled path.
At 8:21 a.m., the flight stopped transmitting its Mode-C transponder signal.
Flight attendants Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong, contacted American Airlines during the hijacking.
The hijackers had stabbed flight attendants Karen Martin and Barbara Arestegui and slashed the throat of passenger Daniel Lewin.
One of the supposedly hijackers, Suqami, may have stabbed and killed Lewin after he attempted to stop the hijacking.
At 8:24 a.m., Atta tried to make an announcement to the passengers. Pressing the wrong button Atta sent the following message to Boston ARTCC.
"We have some planes.
Just stay quiet and you'll be O.K.
We are returning to the airport. Nobody move.
Everything will be okay.
If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane.
just stay quiet."
This is when air traffic controllers at Boston ARTCC realized the flight had been hijacked.
At 8:26 a.m., the plane turned south.
At 08:33:59, Atta announced,
"Nobody move, please.
We are going back to the airport.
Don't try to make any stupid moves."
At 08:37, was Flight 175's last transmission.
Air traffic controllers asked the pilots whether they could see American Airlines Flight 11.
The crew said that Flight 11 was at 29,000 feet, and controllers ordered Flight 175 to turn and avoid the aircraft.
The pilots declared that they had heard a suspicious transmission from Flight 11 upon takeoff.
"Sounds like someone keyed the mic and said everyone stay in your seats".
Between 08:42 and 08:46, it is believed that "muscle hijackers" Fayez Banihammad and Mohand al-Shehri forcibly entered the cockpit and killed the pilot.
All of this while Hamza al-Ghamdi and Ahmed al-Ghamdi started moving passengers and crew to the back of the aircraft.
AT 8:43 a.m., Atta completed the final turn towards Manhattan.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines flight 11, is traveling from Boston with 92 souls on board.
“ We are in rapid descent ... we are all over the place. Oh, my God, we are too low! ”
The plane is traveling around 470 miles per hour when it rockets into the North tower of the World Trade Center, setting the tower a blaze.
Most people aren't sure that it is a plane yet. Some people think a bomb went off inside. This rendered all stairwells and elevators from the 92nd floor up impassible. This trapped 1,344 people killing hundreds instantly. The rest were trapped and died from the subsequent fire and smoke, the eventual collapse, or after jumping or falling from the building.
Elevator shafts channeled burning jet fuel through the building. One elevator shaft carried burning fuel downward, exploding on the 77th floor, the 22nd floor, and at street level on the West Side Lobby.
At 8:47 a.m., the Flight 175's transponder signal changed twice within the span of one minute, and the aircraft began deviating from its assigned course.
At 8:51 a.m., the plane changed altitude.
At 8:52 a.m., flight attendant Robert Fangman called a United Airlines office in San Francisco, and spoke with Marc Policastro. Before getting disconnected, Fangman said that the hijackers were likely flying the plane and that both pilots were dead and that a flight attendant was stabbed.
At 08:52 a.m., passenger, Peter Hanson, called his father, telling him of the hijacking.
Hanson was traveling with his wife, Sue, and a 2½-year-old daughter, Christine.
The family was originally seated in Row 19, in seats C, D, and E, but Peter placed the call to his father from seat 30E.
Speaking softly, Hanson said that the hijackers had commandeered the cockpit, that a flight attendant had been stabbed.
He said that possibly someone else in the front of the aircraft had been killed and that the plane was flying erratically.
Hanson asked his father to contact United Airlines, but his father could not get through and instead called the police.
Around 8:54 am., the flight had a near midair collision with Delta Air Lines Flight 2315, reportedly missing the plane by only 300 feet, as air traffic controller Dave Bottiglia frantically tried to tell the Delta pilot to take evasive action.
This is when he discovered that the plane is hijacked.
It also avoided another near collision with Midwest Express Flight 7.
At 8:58 a.m., Shehri completed the final turn toward New York City, the plane was in a sustained power dive, descending more than 24,000 feet in 5 minutes 4 seconds.
New York Center air traffic controller Dave Bottiglia reported,
"We're counting down the altitudes, and they were descending, right at the end, at 10,000 feet per minute.
That is absolutely unheard of for a commercial jet."
A passenger, Brian David Sweeney, tried calling his wife, at 8:58 a.m., but ended up leaving a message, telling her that the plane had been hijacked.
At 9:00 a.m. Brian spoke with his mother, and told her about the hijacking.
He mentioned that passengers were considering storming the cockpit and taking control of the aircraft.
Also at 9:00 a.m. Peter Hanson made a second phone call to his father and said,
"It's getting bad, Dad.
A stewardess was stabbed.
They seem to have knives and mace.
They said they have a bomb.
It's getting very bad on the plane.
The plane is making jerky movements.
I don't think the pilot is flying the plane.
I think we are going down.
I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.
Don't worry,
Dad. If it happens, it'll be very fast...Oh my God...oh my God, oh my God."
As the call abruptly ended, Hanson's father heard a woman screaming
At 09:01, Flight 175 came in from the southwest, apparently heading for the Empire State Building, but turned right, then left into the South Tower.
At 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines flight 175, with 65 souls on board, is traveling at 590 miles an hour, crashes into the corner of the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
It rips a diagonal gash from the from the 84th to the 78th floors. Around 637 people were killed instantly or trapped at and above the floors of impact in the South Tower.
Part of the plane's landing gear and fuselage came out the north side of the tower and crashed through the roof and two of the floors of 45–47 Park Place, between West Broadway and Church Street.
Three floor beams of the top floor of the building were destroyed, causing major structural damage.
One of the three stairwells was still intact and 18 people passed the impact zone through through it.
Stanley Praimnath, was on the 81st floor, and his office suffered a direct hit.
He witnessed Flight 175 coming toward him, one of the wings sliced through his office and wound up wedged in a doorway, 20 feet away from him.
Some people above the impact zone made their way upward toward the roof in hopes of a helicopter rescue. However, access doors to the roof were locked. In any case, thick smoke and intense heat prevented rescue helicopters from landing.
At 9:59 a.m., after burning for 56 minutes, the South Tower comes tumbling down sending a dust cloud escaping out for blocks.
At 10:28 a.m., the north tower then collapses. The long-lasting fire ignited by jet fuel was blamed for the structural failure of the tower. Along with civilians there are hundreds of firefighters and emergency personnel still trapped in the rubble of the towers, while hundreds more rush to help. Debris from both towers ignite fires in World Trade Centers 4,5, 6 and 7, which are now a blaze. The South face of World Trade Center 7 is damage from the debris between Floors 7 and 17 and between Floor 44 and the roof. Other structural damage included a large vertical gash near the center between Floors 24 and 41. The sprinkler system required manual initiation of the electrical fire pumps.
The floor-level controls had a single connection to the sprinkler water riser and the sprinkler system required some power for the fire pump to deliver water.
Water pressure was low, with little or no water to feed sprinklers.
World Trade Center 7 burns unchecked for 7 hours.
At 5:20 p.m., World Trade Center 7 collapses. Fires smoldered at the World Trade Center site for three months.
Within days of the attack rescue workers at the World Trade Center site began to discover body fragments from Flight 11 victims.
Bodies were found trapped to airplane seats and discovered the body of a flight attendant with her hands bound.
Within a year, the remains of 33 victims who had been on board Flight 11 had been identified.
In 2006, Flight 11 victims, including purser Karen Martin were found, while other unrelated body fragments were discovered near Ground Zero around the same time.
In April 2007, a newer DNA technology identified another Flight 11 victim.
The remains of two hijackers, potentially from Flight 11, were also identified and removed from Memorial Park in Manhattan.
The remains of the other hijackers have not been identified and are buried with other unidentified.
Soaked in jet fuel, Suqami's passport survived the crash and landed in the street below,
It was picked up by a passerby who gave it to a New York City Police Department (NYPD) detective shortly before the South Tower collapsed.
In Mohamed Atta's luggage, which had not been loaded onto the flight, they found Omari's passport and driver's license, a videocassette for a Boeing 757 flight simulator, a folding knife, and pepper spray.
In a recording, a few months later in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden supposedly took responsibility for the attack.
He had expected only the floors above the plane strikes to collapse.
The flight recorders for Flight 11 and Flight 175 were never found.
On April 26, 2013, a piece of the wing flap mechanism was discovered wedged between two buildings at Park Place, near where other landing gear parts were found.
Flight 175 landing gear was found on top of a building on the corner of West Broadway and Park Place, an engine found at Church & Murray Street, and a section of the fuselage landed on top of 5 World Trade Center.
Small fragments were identified from some passengers on Flight 175.
A six-inch piece of bone belonging to Peter Hanson, and small bone fragments of Lisa Frost.
In 2008, using DNA samples, the remains of Flight 175 passenger Alona Avraham were identified.
Remains of many other victims of Flight 175 were never recovered.
55 year old Diana Bober was found dead off a hiking trail near Mount Hood on Monday. She was likely killed by a cougar. DNA samples are being sent to the Oregon Fish & Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland to find more evidence of what harmed Bober.
Bober was reported missing by out-of-state relatives on Friday after not hearing from her since August 29.
She appeared to have fought the animal that attacked her.
Although she died of her wounds, the wild animal didn't come back to her," Allison Bober said.
Nancy Wilcox was a 16 year old cheerleader when she went missing on October 2, 1974. She was last seen riding with a man in a yellow Volkswagen Bug near her home in Holiday, Utah. At the time of her disappearance she was 5ft 5in tall, 120lbs with brown hair and brown eyes. Two days before his execution, serial killer Ted Bundy confessed to kidnapping her from her front yard, sexual assaulting and then murdering her. She was his first victim. Her body has never been found.
