Timetable of terror

Here are the tragic events as they unfolded in America. All times quoted are local times in New York and Washington:

08.45: An American Airlines Boeing 767, hijacked shortly after taking off from Boston for Los Angeles, flown into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.

09.03: The second of the landmark towers was hit 18 minutes later by a United Airlines Boeing 767, also hijacked after it took off from Boston en route to Los Angeles.

09.43: A third plane, an American Airlines Boeing 777, was hijacked after taking off from Washington Dulles airport for Los Angeles and flown into the west wing of the Pentagon.

09.50: All airports across the US shut down.

10.07: The south tower of the World Trade Centre tower collapses.

10.12: UK Prime Minister Tony Blair describes the attacks in the US as "the most terrible shocking event."

10.25: Car bomb explodes outside the State Department in Washington.

10.27: The north tower of the World Trade Centre collapses.

10:30 Reports emerge of a Boeing 767 crashing near Somerset County Airport 80 miles south-east of Pittsburgh.

13.00: President Bush warns: "Make no mistake. The US will hunt down and punish those responsible for this cowardly act."

17.25: Another World Trade Centre building - the 47-storey Building 7 - collapses.

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Bin Laden's Attack on America

In the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, two hijacked commercial jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City around 9 a.m. Tuesday, toppling both 110-story towers, where thousands of people had just arrived for work.

The First Wave
The first plane hit the World Trade Center's north tower at 8:45, ripping through the building's skin and setting its upper floors ablaze.   People thought it was a sonic boom, or a construction accident, or freak lightning on a lovely fall day; at worst, a horrible airline accident, a plane losing altitude, out of control, a pilot trying to ditch in the river and missing.  

But as the gruesome rains came--bits of plane, a tire, office furniture, glass, a hand, a leg, whole bodies, began falling all around--people in the streets all stopped and looked, and fell silent.  As the smoke rose, the ash rained gently down, along with a whole lost flock of paper shuffling down from the sky to the street below, edges charred, plane tickets and account statements and bills and reports and volumes and volumes of unfinished business floating down to earth.

United flight 175 left Boston at 7:58 a.m., headed to Los Angeles. When it passed the Massachusetts-Connecticut border, it made a 30-degree turn, and then an even sharper turn and swooped down on Manhattan, between the buildings, to impale the south tower at 9:06. This plane seemed to hit lower and harder; maybe that's because by now every camera in the city was trained on the towers, and the crowds in the street, refugees from the first explosion, were there to see it. Desks and chairs and people were sucked out the windows and rained down on the streets below.

The Second Wave
The first crash had changed everything; the second changed it again. Anyone who thought the first was an accident now knew better.  Then the second front opened. Having hit the country's financial and cultural heart, the killers went for its political and military muscles.  

Just west of the Pentagon, an American Airlines jet swooping in, its wings wobbly, looking like it was going to slam right into the Pentagon.  It sounded like the pilot had the throttle completely floored. The plane rolled left and then rolled right. Then he caught an edge of his wing on the ground.  There is a helicopter pad right in front of the side of the Pentagon. The wing touched there, then the plane cartwheeled into the building.

The Third Wave
But that was not all; there was a third front as well. At 9:58 the Westmoreland County emergency-operations center, 35 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, received a frantic cell-phone call from a man who said he was locked in the rest room aboard United Flight 93. Glenn Cramer, the dispatch supervisor, said the man was distraught and kept repeating, "We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!" He also said this was not a hoax, and that the plane "was going down." Said Cramer: "He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane. Then we lost contact with him."

Tragic Twist of Fate
Ruth Clifford McCourt and Paige Farley Hackel were inseparable in life. Tuesday, in a fluke of airline ticketing, they became inseparable in death. The best friends, along with McCourt's 4-year-old daughter, Juliana Valentine McCourt, planned to fly from Boston to Los Angeles together but couldn't get tickets on the same jet. So Hackel boarded American Airlines Flight 11. McCourt and her daughter boarded United Airlines Flight 175. Barely an hour later, both jets, commandeered by terrorists, crashed into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.

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