Guest Post; September 11, 2001 – Timeline
The following was written by MCPO USN NYC (Ret) and posted at his request;
Lest we forget 13 years ago today . . .
7:59 am – American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 with 92 people aboard, takes off from Boston’s Logan International Airport en route to Los Angeles.
8:14 am – United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 with 65 people aboard, takes off from Boston; it is also headed to Los Angeles.
8:19 am – Flight attendants aboard Flight 11 alert ground personnel that the plane has been hijacked; American Airlines notifies the FBI.
8:20 am – American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. The Boeing 757 is headed to Los Angeles with 64 people aboard.
8:24 am – Hijacker Mohammed Atta makes the first of two accidental transmissions from Flight 11 to ground control (apparently in an attempt to communicate with the plane’s cabin).
8:41 am – United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 with 44 people aboard, takes off from Newark International Airport en route to San Francisco. It had been scheduled to depart at 8:00 am, around the time of the other hijacked flights.
8:46 am – Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11 crash the plane into floors 93-99 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, killing everyone on board and hundreds inside the building.
8:47 am – Within seconds, NYPD and FDNY forces dispatch units to the World Trade Center, while Port Authority Police Department officers on site begin immediate evacuation of the North Tower.
9:03 am – Hijackers crash United Airlines Flight 175 into floors 75-85 of the WTC’s South Tower, killing everyone on board and hundreds inside the building
9:08 am – The FAA bans all takeoffs of flights going to New York City or through the airspace around the city.
9:21 am – The Port Authority closes all bridges and tunnels in the New York City area.
9:24 am – The FAA notified NEADS of the suspected hijacking of Flight 77 after some passengers and crew aboard are able to alert family members on the ground.
9:37 am – Hijackers aboard Flight 77 crash the plane into the western façade of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing 59 aboard the plane and 125 military and civilian personnel inside the building.
9:59 am – The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.
10:07 am – After passengers and crew members aboard the hijacked Flight 93 contact friends and family and learn about the attacks in New York and Washington, they mount an attempt to retake the plane. In response, hijackers deliberately crash the plane into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers and crew aboard.
10:28 am – The World Trade Center’s North Tower collapses, 102 minutes after being struck by Flight 11.
5:20 pm – The 47-story Seven World Trade Center collapses after burning for hours; the building had been evacuated in the morning, and there are no casualties, though the collapse forces rescue workers to flee for their lives.
8:30 pm – President Bush addresses the nation, calling the attacks “evil, despicable acts of terror” and declaring that America, its friends and allies would “stand together to win the war against terrorism.”
. . .
Editorial Note: At approximately 0100 on May 2, 2011, a 79 member joint team, including MWD Cairo, delivered by the Night Stalkers and operating with Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU aka SEAL Team SIX) RED Squadron raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden with one shot to the head followed by another shot to the chest. Mission Commander of OPERATION NEPTUNE SPEAR and DEVGRU RED Squadron OIC on scene reported, “for God and country … Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo”, and then, after being prompted for confirmation, “Geronimo E.K.I.A.” (enemy killed in action). Within 24 hours of his death, the lifeless and soulless body of bin Laden was unceremoniously dumped in to the Indian Ocean by a lone junior Sailor from the USS Carl Vincent for the sharks and sea snakes to feed upon.
Category: Military issues, Terror War, Veterans Issues, We Remember
On 9/11/01 while I watched live on television Flight 11 crashing into the WTC, I had no idea I was watching the lives of people I had met, interviewed with, and who worked with my brother in law perish. It was not until later I learned that he was supposed to have been on thet trip.
Another young woman who perished was brand new to the company, only having just been hired weeks earlier. She was a friend and coworker of my current(and last)girlfriend.
Just 7 of the lives snuffed out that horrendous day.
I will Never Forget!
Sometime during that time frame Rick Rescorla was saving the lives of thousands of people at the cost of his own. School children ought to be taught his story, but I’ll bet not one person in a thousand knows his name.
And I’ll bet that far fewer than that know that Rescorla was a Platoon Leader at Ia Drang (Hal Moore called him the best Platoon Leader he ever saw) and earned the Silver Star in Vietnam. Or that on 9/11, Rescorla was seriously ill with cancer, yet still put others’ welfare before his own.
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rescorla.html
Ace this morning had a post about another American badass-Danny Levin-I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know his story until now.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/351708.php
Thanks for the link Hondo,
I have spent an hour or so reading all I could about Mr. Rescorla. His insistence the evacuation drill be held (Annoying the bosses) Saved over 2700 lives.
His war record is incredible.
Thanks for posting!
Thanks for sharing
I was a midshipman at Pitt at the time. It really hit home when 93 was still in the air and we could see the F-16s turning and burning over downtown Pittsburgh.
The Loop was evacuated. We were all sent home. I got home and turned on the TV about 5 minutes ahead of the north tower’s collapse, and asked out loud ‘What is happening in my country?’
My niece was an Army nurse assigned to Walter Reed. I called her late that day and asked her how things were. She was bone-tired, hadn’t had even a bathroom break for hours, and said that Washington was like a war zone. She deployed later to Baghdad.
Thank you Hondo and Master Chief. I will never forget and I will make sure my family will never forget.
I did not understand really my parents saying they would never forget where they were and what they were doing when the news of December 7, 1941 was heard. Now…I do. I will never forget where I was and what I was doing and my sense of urgency and expectation it brought.
God bless and protect the United States of America, today and forever.
Sparks: see my comment replying to MGySgtRet below. Jonn had a hand in this as well.
Thanks Hondo and thank you as well Jonn.
The thing that sticks out the most in my mind was the footage from immediately after the first collapse. The camera had maybe ten feet of visibility in the dust cloud, everything looked so otherworldly. Here and there, a firefighter or cop would materialize out of the dust, but the whole time, all you hear is the shrieking of the Distress Tone of the integrated PASS devices on the Scott SCBAs of FDNY firefighters, and occasionally you hear somebody screaming over a police or fire radio when the camera gets close enough.
PASS devices are a motion-sensitive alarm beacon for a downed firefighter. They used to be a seperate device, but since the late 90s, they have been integrated into SCBAs. Nowadays every new SCBA has an integrated PASS. If the device doesn’t feel the wearer moving for thirty seconds, it emits a warning tone. If the wearer still doesn’t move or press the RESET button, it switches to the louder and more distinctive distress tone.
Some of those PASSes were worn by guys standing or sitting still trying to collect themselves, but you can hear many others in the footage. Some of them are muffled by the debris on top of them. I don’t know if the average viewer picked up on that at the time, but I knew exactly what that sound meant when I saw the live coverage that morning.
At the time, estimates were over a hundred firefighters buried in that pile. The final count eventually reached 343 firemen, 65 cops, and 2,600 taxpayers. If not for the 343 and the 65, that 2,600 would have been more like 15,000.
To this day, I still purely hate the sound of a Scott integrated PASS. Not a PTS response, mind you. My PTS comes from things that actually happened to or around me, not from something I saw on TV. But I still hate that sound.
Thank you Master Chief.
Master Chief, thanks for writing it. Hondo, thanks for posting it. To all of you who have served thanks for holding the line. Never forget Brothers and Sisters, Never Forget!!
Thank Jonn too, MGySgtRet. I posted the draft; Jonn gave it the final once-over and tweaking.
Well then thanks to Jonn too. And not just for tweaking that draft. Thanks for this blog. Semper Fidelis.
My 9/11 story isn’t very special – I was supposed to fly from Chicago to Atlanta later in that awful day, so obviously there was no flying for me. The next day the airline arranged Greyhound buses for everyone who was supposed to fly out. I was popular on that bus, too … I had a portable TV and everybody kept buying me batteries for it at each stop so we could all keep up with the news.
Two things stand out in my memory from that time period … the eerie feeling of passing the world’s two busiest airports and seeing nothing flying at all, and the quiet on the bus as every passenger who could get near me watched my little portable TV for the coverage.
Why are comments being moderated?
I’m not moderating you. The spam filter is. I don’t know why.
Now I know why – your IP address was on the moderated list, probably because someone else was using it sometime in our past to troll. It should work for you now.
I was living in SoCal and just driving in to work that morning , and had stopped in the drive-thru for a coffee when I heard about the first plane hitting. I remembered about a bomber hitting the Empire State building and figured it might be much the same thing.
A couple of moments later, the news came over that a second plane had hit the other tower and I knew that it was no accident.
I immediately went over to the job site at which I was working that day. We did our outage as quickly as possible, then hauled ass home. When I was driving down the 710 towards the 105, it was the usual morning rush hour traffic, and one could still see planes headed towards LAX.
By the time we were done at noon, the freeways were nearly deserted, and not hearing the planes flying overhead made it eerily silent.
Later found out the daughter of one of my coworkers was on Flight 11.
Rest in peace, Lisa Frost.
Another hero of 911 who will not be forgotten. NYPD SGT. Kevin O’Rourke, RIP Sir.
http://www.heart911.org/2012/ret-nypd-esu-sgt-kevin-orourke/
Killed in a green on blue attack by those other non-islamists, the taliban Sept. 29, 2012. Tangi Valley entrance, Sayed Abad, Wardak Afghanistan.
I was heading home to shower after PT when the first plane hit. When I got to the house I heard about the second plane. I just threw on my uniform a hauled assuming back to unit. We had a formation after each of the other two planes went down. I will always remember my 1SG saying “men your pucker factor should be high right now because we’re going to war.”
I really don’t have anything to say that will mean nearly as much as the testimonies of those who were adults at the time.
I was just a kid, and home from school for some reason, possibly because I was ill. I remember seeing it live, a special news broadcast that had interrupted the kid’s programming.
I didn’t understand it, not completely, but I knew something had happened. I believe I woke up my mother, and told her about it, but my memories of that day are foggy at best.
Since then, I have grown up in an America at War. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to it, or even forget about it, when you’re some snot-nosed kid going through the public school system. I want to say I’ve gotten better, that I’m more aware, but at the end of the day I don’t think about what people have done miles away, and I’m not sure if that makes me normal, or a horrible human. Perhaps both.
I can’t make any promises about my future, or what I will do after college. I hope to serve, and serve honorably, but I have no idea if I will make it in or not.
I can say for certain that this evil that reached out and touched us on September 11th, 2001, is on a path to its destruction. Evil never wins, and it never will win, so long as we give our all to stop it. And I believe we can, and we will.
We will win, no matter how long it takes. Because this isn’t a world where evil triumphs. So long as there are good men, there will be a good end.
Sadly, there is a caveat – it’s Americas’s Military At War, not America at War. Outside the military community, it’s Kardashians and Bieber as usual, and has been since about 9/18/01.
As much as I wish I could disagree with you, David, I have to say that you’re right.
Aside from the families of those serving, not nearly enough people pay attention to what braver men and women than us at home are doing so that we live the life we live.
I hope that someday, that’ll be reversed. That we will all be aware of sacrifices being made, lives being lost.
I was working on the 757 Final assembly line in the Renton Boeing plant when the first plane hit. Needless to say, all work stopped. We stood and watched TV as the second plane hit, and as the towers started falling. I needed a smoke and stepped outside to get my fix. I noticed that something was wrong, there was not a plane in the sky! The landing patterns for Boeing Field and Sea-Tac pass off to the west and the planes form an almost continuous line for landing. I can’t ever remember not seeing at least one airliner in that pattern.
A mechanic joined me and I said, “This sounds like Osama Bin Laden’s work!”. Who knew I would be so right.
I was working on Johnston Island with the chemical weapons destruction project. Our crew was working nights that week but 9/10-9/11 was our night off so me and the soon to be Mrs. had dozed off in bed with the TV on. About 3 AM our time she woke me up saying there was something weird going on on the TV. About that time is when the second plane hit. Within probably 15 minutes, the whole island (2000+ personnel) knew something bad was going on.
For us out there, two things were bad: we really had no way of effectively communicating with anyone back home in a timely manner as our phones were connected to a 22-line undersea cable that ran 800+ miles to Hawaii. No way that everyone could jump on the phone to see if loved ones were okay and to let them know that were okay. Internet was connected to the same cable and obviously we were too far away for cell phone service. Another issue involved the ground-stop of the aircraft. Except for a once a month barge, all of our supplies and personnel flew in from Hawaii. We didn’t know when we’d get supplies, food or anything like that. We damn near ran out of beer (ha).
That was definitely a few days that I will never forget.
RM2 Kevin Yokum.
Not particularly a badass,just quick with a smile and the love of a joke. I tacked on his crow and helped him transition from a slimy wog to a Trusty Shellback.
Fair winds and following seas shipmate.