So, I was a little bit — I was happy, kind of goofing around, calling up my boss, you can't fire me now, I have made my probationary period, you know. But when I came into his office, he was talking to another attorney. And they had New York on TV.
And so it made things suddenly serious. But, also, there was a lot of confusion. Nobody really knew what was going on. I was in and out of the office for the next almost hour, it seemed like. And then I happened to be in his office when the second plane flew in, hit the second tower. And then it's just a — hard to describe, but I would just say that, in a moment, you knew that you were a nation at war.
And I don't think anybody had any real idea who we were at war with. I had an administrative chief, an admin chief, a young corporal named Tim Garofola. He was a Marine. I asked him to get the security status of the Pentagon, thinking, hey, we're in the flight pattern for National Airport. Seemed like a good idea. He called down to the security office, and, in the midst of all the running around, comes back into my office and reports the threat condition is normal, THREATCON normal.
And I said, that's obviously a mistake. You need to check. Like, every five minutes, report back to me. And about nine-thirty AM, he came into my office.
And this is how many times it is. He showed up every five minutes. And he says, threat condition still normal. And I jumped up from my desk. And I just started to rant: "You know, we're in the flight pattern for National Airport, for Christ's sake," you know? And I left my office. We're in an interior suite.
The office runs parallel to the west wall. And I turned to go to my office, my boss' office, Peter Murphy. And right about time I got to the door, it was just boom. The experience of being blown up is more like a lost time experience. I'm walking, and then I'm over there, waking up on the floor kind of thing. I was very fortunate. I had been on the south side of the building and blown to the north side.
I started to pick myself up. I recognized I'm looking through my boss' windows from a distance. I can see a tumbling cloud going up the other side of the windows. It's the — it's the fireball. When the plane exploded, it pushed the fuel out into every crack it could find, of course.
And because it had opened up a very large hole in the bottom of the building, it had plenty of oxygen to fuel the fire. Well, our windows didn't blow out. The Pentagon had just been reconstructed. And it had these blast-proof windows put in. And God bless the guys who put those in. That saved our lives. With air controllers unable to contact the flight by radio, an Indianapolis official declared that the Boeing had possibly crashed at Two people on the aircraft made phone calls to contacts on the ground.
During the call, which lasted nearly two minutes, May said her flight was being hijacked by six persons, and staff and passengers had been moved to the rear of the airplane. May asked her mother to contact American Airlines, which she and her husband promptly did; American Airlines was already aware of the hijacking. Between and , passenger Barbara Olson called her husband, United States Solicitor General Theodore Olson, and reported that the airplane had been hijacked and that the assailants had box cutters and knives.
She reported that the passengers, including 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. Theodore Olson contacted the command center at the Department of Justice, and tried unsuccessfully to contact Attorney General John Ashcroft.
About five minutes later, Barbara Olson called again, told her husband that the "pilot" possibly Hanjour on the cabin intercom had announced the flight was hijacked, and asked, "What do I tell the pilot to do? He told her of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Soon afterward, the call cut off again.
You don't fly a 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.
Controllers initially thought this was a military fighter, due to its high speed and maneuvering. The pilot, Lt. Steven O'Brien, told them it was a Boeing or , and 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 initially assumed it had hit the ground. Approaching 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. ASCE concludes it was made by the jet's landing gear, not by the fuselage. FACT: Some windows near the impact area did indeed survive the crash.
But that's what the windows were supposed to do—they're blast-resistant. Some were knocked out of the walls by the crash and the outer ring's later collapse. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and helped coordinate the emergency response. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box. Kilsheimer adds: "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts.
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