September 11 Attacks - Attacks

Attacks

See also: Timeline for the day of the September 11 attacks

Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers took control of four commercial airliners (two Boeing 757 and two Boeing 767) en route to California (three headed to LAX in Los Angeles, and one to San Francisco) after takeoffs from Boston, Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. Large planes with long flights were intentionally selected for hijacking because they would be heavily fueled.

The four flights involved were:

  • American Airlines Flight 11: Left Boston's Logan Airport at 7:59 a.m. enroute to Los Angeles with a crew of 11 and 76 passengers, not including five hijackers. The hijackers flew the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
  • United Airlines Flight 175: Left Logan Airport at 8:14 a.m. enroute to Los Angeles with a crew of nine and 51 passengers, not including five hijackers. The hijackers flew the plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m.
  • American Airlines Flight 77: Left Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia at 8:20 a.m. enroute to Los Angeles with a crew of six and 53 passengers, not including five hijackers. The hijackers flew the plane into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.
  • United Airlines Flight 93: Left Newark International Airport at 8:42 a.m. enroute to San Francisco, with a crew of seven and 33 passengers, not including four hijackers. After the passengers revolted, the hijackers crashed the plane into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m.

Media coverage was intense during the attacks and aftermath, beginning moments after the first crash into the World Trade Center.

Read more about this topic:  September 11 Attacks

Famous quotes containing the word attacks:

    “Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.”
    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    “Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.”
    —Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    “There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.”
    —Victor Hugo (1802–1885)