The work done, Trotman snapped shut the fueling panel. The plane’s two enormous wing tanks sloshed with highly combustible Jet A fuel—essentially kerosene refined to burn more efficiently—for the six-hour flight across the country. Trotman had filled the wings with fuel weighing 76,400 pounds, about the same weight as a forty-foot fire truck.
As Trotman moved on to another plane, the ground crew finished loading luggage and delivering catering supplies. While they worked, John Ogonowski walked under the plane to inspect the landing gear, part of a pilot’s routine preflight check.
Meanwhile, inside the 767, flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney was upset. Blond and blue-eyed, thirty-five years old, Amy had recently returned to work after spending the summer at home with her two young children. This would be the first day she wouldn’t be on hand to guide her five-year-old daughter Anna onto the bus to kindergarten. Amy used her cellphone to call her husband, Mike, who comforted her by saying she’d have plenty of days ahead to see their kids off to school.
AMY SWEENEY, BETTY Ong, and Kathy Nicosia were three of the nine flight attendants, eight women and one man, who’d be working with Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr., a former Navy fighter pilot. They were the eleven crew members of American Airlines Flight 11, a daily nonstop flight to Los Angeles with a scheduled 7:45 a.m. departure.
Boarding moved smoothly, a process made easier by the wide-bodied plane’s two aisles between seats and a light load of passengers. The youngest passenger through the cabin door was twenty-year-old Candace Lee Williams of Danbury, Connecticut, a Northeastern University student and aspiring stockbroker en route to visit her college roommate in California. The oldest was eighty-five-year-old Robert Norton, a retiree from Lubec, Maine, heading west with his wife, Jacqueline, to attend her son’s wedding.
Daniel Lee from Van Nuys, California, a roadie for the Backstreet Boys, had slipped away from the pop group’s tour and bought a ticket on Flight 11 so he could be home for the birth of his second child. Cora Hidalgo Holland of Sudbury, Massachusetts, needed to interview health aides for her elderly mother in San Bernardino, California. Actress and photographer Berry Berenson, widow of the actor Anthony Perkins, was headed home to Los Angeles after a vacation on Cape Cod.
Also on board was seventy-year-old electronics consultant Alexander Filipov of Concord, Massachusetts, a gregarious, insatiably curious father of three. He knew how to say “Do you like Chinese food?” in more than a dozen languages, which enabled Filipov to strike up conversations with foreigners on business trips like this one. Nearby, missing his wife, Prasanna, after a three-week work trip, Los Angeles computer technician Pendyala “Vamsi” Vamsikrishna called home and left a message saying he’d be there for lunch.
As boarding continued, thirty-year-old Tara Creamer walked down the aisle and slid into window seat 33J. Tara was a woman who didn’t rattle easily. Years earlier, on a first date, on Valentine’s Day no less, a fellow college student took her to dinner at a red sauce Italian dive called Spaghetti Freddy’s, then to the cannibal-versus-serial-killer movie The Silence of the Lambs. She married him.
Tara had met John Creamer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when she was a vivacious, curly-haired brunette sophomore. John was a shy, blue-eyed football lineman for the UMass Minutemen, named for the Revolutionary War patriots. Tara lived on a dorm floor near some of John’s friends, so he hung around her hallway long enough for her to notice him. After that first date of pasta and fava beans, they were a couple.
Both twenty-three when they wed, Tara and John had scraped together a down payment for a sweet yellow Cape Cod–style house with a screened porch in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where John’s parents lived. They renovated it themselves after long days of work. After one seemingly endless paint-and-wallpaper binge, John lost patience. While he stewed, Tara, several months pregnant, calmly went to their unfinished basement, carrying a wide brush dripping white paint. On a rough gray wall, she painted “Tara
Their son, Colin, arrived in 1997, followed three years later by a daughter, Nora. A fashion merchandising major in college, Tara became a planning manager at TJX Companies in Framingham, Massachusetts, parent firm of the big-box retailer T.J.Maxx. She sang to Colin and Nora on the way to work and spent lunch hours with them in an onsite company daycare center. Tara meticulously updated their milestone books, recording first crawls and first steps, first teeth and first words. When a company supervisor urged Tara to get into the habit of working late, Tara declined. Time with her children came first.
Tara and John never traveled together by air in the years after Colin’s birth. She worried about leaving him, and then both Colin and Nora, in the event of a crash. Tara’s mother died of cancer in 1995, and the loss still ached. But in May 2001, one of John’s closest friends invited them to his wedding in Florida. Before the trip, Tara went on a planning spree, arranging insurance, guardians, and family finances, just in case. She also took the opportunity to explain the concept of death to Colin. He had only one grandmother, Tara told him, because the other one, her mother, was an angel in heaven, looking after him. Colin seemed to understand, but Tara couldn’t be sure.
By late summer 2001, Nora had celebrated her first birthday, and Tara was ready to resume traveling for work. On this trip, Tara had the option of staying in California through the weekend to see a close friend, but she scheduled a red-eye return so she’d be home Friday morning. Packed and ready the night before Flight 11, Tara completed one last task before bed. Fulfilling her self-appointed role as family planning manager, she typed a detailed memo for John. Titled “Normal Daily Schedule,” it was a mother’s guide to caring for their children. It began: “Wake Colin up around 7–7:15. Let him watch a little cartoons (Channel 52). Nora—if she is not up by 7:30—wake her up. Just change her and give her milk in a sippy cup!”
In the seat next to Tara was auburn-haired Neilie Anne Heffernan Casey of Wellesley, Massachusetts, also a TJX Companies planning manager. Two days earlier, Neilie and her husband, Mike, had run a 5K race to raise money for breast cancer research. They ran pushing a stroller with their six-month-old daughter, Riley. In nearby rows were five of their TJX colleagues, also headed to California on business: Christine Barbuto, Linda George, Lisa Fenn Gordenstein, Robin Kaplan, and Susan MacKay.
Susan’s husband, Doug, was an FAA air traffic controller. He’d switched his schedule to an early shift that day so he could attend a nighttime school event for their eight-year-old daughter and make dinner for their thirteen-year-old son. When he got to work, Doug planned to radio American Flight 11’s cockpit to ask Captain John Ogonowski to surprise Susan by saying hi for him.
IN A WIDE leather seat in the first row of first class sat financier David Retik of Needham, Massachusetts, a practical-joking, fly-fishing family man whose wife, Susan, was seven months pregnant with their third child. His colleagues considered David a rare bird: a venture capitalist whom everyone liked. On his drive to the airport, David had spotted a familiar car on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He sped up, pulled alongside, and waved to his surprised father, a doctor on his way to work.
Next to David sat travel industry consultant Richard Ross, whose family in Newton, Massachusetts, counted on him to spontaneously break into Sinatra songs; to raise money for brain cancer research; and to be chronically late. He held true to form this morning, as the last passenger to arrive for Flight 11. A flustered Richard told a gate agent that terrible traffic had made this the worst day of his life. Another agent took pity and upgraded him