Tuesday, September 11, 2001 · New York · Washington · Pennsylvania
On a clear September morning, nineteen members of al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger jets. Two struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers fought back. 2,977 people were killed. From the first impact to the collapse of the North Tower, 102 minutes passed. This is everything we know about that day and what followed.
Timeline · all times EDT (Central Europe is 6 hours ahead)
When the first plane struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., it was 2:46 p.m. in Slovakia. People around the world were already watching live on CNN when the second plane hit the South Tower.
Four transcontinental flights
The hijackers deliberately chose early cross-country flights: large aircraft with full tanks (tens of tonnes of jet fuel) and relatively few passengers. Their weapons were knives and box cutters, pepper spray and the threat of a fake bomb.
Flight attendants Betty Ong and Madeline "Amy" Sweeney relayed the hijackers' seat numbers by phone. Thanks to them, the FBI knew who the attackers were the same day.
Aboard was the youngest victim of the day, 2½-year-old Christine Lee Hanson, traveling with her parents. The plane hit the South Tower off-center, near a corner, which left one stairwell (A) partly passable.
Before impact the plane made a nearly 330-degree turn over Arlington; at the end of the turn it was descending through about 2,200 feet (670 m). Passenger Barbara Olson, a CNN commentator, twice called her husband, U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson.
The only flight that did not reach its target. According to the 9/11 Commission, it was most likely headed for the Capitol or the White House. More under Flight 93.
1966 – 2001
The World Trade Center was a seven-building complex in Lower Manhattan built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Its two 110-story towers were the tallest buildings in the world from 1971 to 1973.
The architect was Minoru Yamasaki, an American of Japanese descent; the structural engineers were Leslie Robertson and John Skilling. Construction began on August 5, 1966. The North Tower opened in stages from December 1970, the South Tower from January 1972, and the complex was formally dedicated on April 4, 1973.
The structure was revolutionary: each tower stood on a dense "tube" of steel perimeter columns (59 per side) and a central core holding stairwells and elevators. That created vast column-free office floors. It is also why the windows were so narrow, only about 46 cm (18 in); Yamasaki was afraid of heights and wanted occupants to feel secure.
Excavation produced 917,000 m³ of earth, which was used to create new land on the Hudson River. Today the Battery Park City neighborhood stands on it.
On a normal weekday about 50,000 people worked in the complex and another 140,000 passed through as visitors. It had its own ZIP code (10048). On the 107th floor of the North Tower was Windows on the World, one of the highest-grossing restaurants in the U.S.; the South Tower had an observation deck on the 110th floor.
On August 7, 1974, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked a cable strung illegally between the towers, 417 meters up. In 45 minutes he crossed eight times. The Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire tells the story.
On February 26, 1993, a van carrying about 600 kg of explosives detonated in the North Tower's underground garage, killing 6 people and injuring more than 1,000. It was organized by Ramzi Yousef, nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future architect of 9/11. The goal was to topple one tower into the other.
In July 2001, just six weeks before the attacks, developer Larry Silverstein leased the towers for 99 years for $3.2 billion.
| Figure | North (1 WTC) | South (2 WTC) |
|---|---|---|
| Roof height | 417 m | 415 m |
| With antenna | 526 m | — |
| Floors | 110 | 110 |
| Footprint | 63.4 × 63.4 m | 63.4 × 63.4 m |
| Elevators | 99 | 95 |
| Opened | 1970 | 1972 |
| Hit on 9/11 | 8:46 · fl. 93–99 | 9:03 · fl. 77–85 |
| Burned for | 102 min | 56 min |
| Collapsed | 10:28:25 | 9:58:59 |
The complex had 7 buildings with about 1.24 million m² of office space. On September 11 all of it was destroyed: both towers, the Marriott hotel (3 WTC), buildings 4, 5, 6 and 7, and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.
NIST investigation 2002–2008
The towers were designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, and they did survive the impacts. What brought them down was the fire that followed.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) spent three years studying the collapses, with hundreds of experts and thousands of photographs and hours of video. Its 2005 final report describes a chain of events:
The South Tower fell first even though it was hit later. The plane struck it lower (about 30 floors of load above the impact instead of 15), faster and off-center, doing more damage to the core.
The 47-story building was hit by debris from the North Tower, and uncontrolled fires broke out on multiple floors. With the water mains destroyed, firefighters let it burn. According to NIST's 2008 report, thermal expansion pushed a key girder off its seat and column 79 failed. It was the first known case of a tall building collapsing primarily because of fire. More under Myths and facts.
Arlington, Virginia · 9:37:46
Headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense and one of the largest office buildings in the world, where about 23,000 people worked at the time.
Flight 77 hit the west façade at ground level and punched through three of the building's five rings. 125 people in the building (70 civilians and 55 service members, most from Army and Navy staff) and 59 people aboard were killed, 184 victims in all. The youngest was three-year-old Dana Falkenberg, a passenger on the plane.
The section that was hit had, in a sense, been lucky: it had just been renovated (the so-called Wedge 1) with steel reinforcement, blast-resistant windows and a sprinkler system, and many offices were not yet occupied. Had the plane struck elsewhere, the toll would likely have been much higher.
The fire burned for more than a day. The damaged section collapsed at 10:15. Reconstruction, called the Phoenix Project, took less than a year: employees returned to the rebuilt offices on August 15, 2002.
The Pentagon Memorial opened on September 11, 2008. It consists of 184 benches over small pools of water, one for each victim. Benches for victims aboard the plane are oriented so that a visitor reading the name faces the sky along the flight path; for victims in the building, the visitor faces the Pentagon.
Shanksville, Pennsylvania · 10:03:11
The only plane that never reached its target. Its passengers and crew stopped it.
Flight 93 was 42 minutes late because of runway traffic at Newark. By the time the hijackers struck at 9:28, the towers were already burning. Passengers were herded to the back of the plane, where many made calls on seatback airphones and cell phones to family and authorities. They learned that other planes had hit the World Trade Center, and understood this was no ordinary hijacking.
They voted to fight back. At 9:57 the assault on the cockpit began. The cockpit voice recorder captured blows, breaking dishes and shouting. Hijacker Ziad Jarrah rocked the plane violently to throw them off their feet. At 10:02 one hijacker said, "Pull it down." The plane rolled over and slammed into a reclaimed strip mine at about 900 km/h (560 mph). All 40 passengers and crew and the 4 hijackers died.
According to the 9/11 Commission, the target was the Capitol or the White House; the plane was about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington. At that moment the Capitol was being evacuated.
The plane was not shot down. Vice President Cheney authorized shooting down hijacked aircraft only after Flight 93 had crashed, and the order never reached the fighter pilots in time.
"Are you guys ready? Okay. Let's roll." Todd Beamer, Flight 93 passenger, on the phone with operator Lisa Jefferson
Todd Beamer (32), software account manager · Mark Bingham (31), PR executive and former rugby player · Tom Burnett (38), chief operating officer · Jeremy Glick (31), former national judo champion · Sandy Bradshaw, flight attendant who boiled water to throw at the hijackers · CeeCee Lyles, flight attendant and former police officer.
The Flight 93 National Memorial (opened 2011) stands at the crash site. It includes the 28-meter (93-ft) Tower of Voices with 40 wind chimes, one for each passenger and crew member.
102 minutes inside
At 8:46 there were about 17,400 people in the two towers. Roughly 87% of them survived, most of them by walking down the stairs in a dense stream while firefighters climbed up.
The impact destroyed all three stairwells. For about 1,355 people on the 92nd floor and above, there was no way out. Many called loved ones to say goodbye; in offices, people broke windows to breathe. The heaviest loss: financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, on floors 101–105, lost 658 employees, two-thirds of its New York staff. At Windows on the World, 72 restaurant workers died along with every guest, including attendees of a breakfast conference.
The doors to the roof were locked. The roof was not designed for evacuation, and smoke and the antenna would have made a helicopter rescue impossible.
About 200 people fell or jumped from the windows to escape the flames and smoke. Photographer Richard Drew captured one of them at 9:41:15 in the image known as The Falling Man.
After the first impact, many people in the South Tower decided to leave on their own, despite the announcement that the building was safe. Those 17 minutes saved thousands of lives. Stairwell A remained partly passable after the impact, yet only about 18 people from the impact zone and above made it down. Among them was Brian Clark, who turned back for Stanley Praimnath, trapped on the 81st floor.
Only 20 people were pulled alive from the rubble. The last was Genelle Guzman-McMillan from the North Tower's 64th floor, found about 27 hours later, around 12:30 p.m. on September 12. Port Authority police officers Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin survived under the debris for 13 and 22 hours (their story is told in the film World Trade Center).
Morgan Stanley's security chief and a war veteran. He evacuated the firm from the South Tower despite the all-clear announcement, saving about 2,700 people. He went back for others and died.
A 24-year-old equities trader with a red bandana over his face led at least five people down from the South Tower's 78th floor. He died in the collapse.
The FDNY chaplain died in the North Tower lobby. As the first officially recorded victim of the day, he is Victim 0001.
Six firefighters helping Josephine Harris down from the 73rd floor survived the North Tower's collapse in the only surviving section of stairwell.
2,977 names
The attacks killed 2,977 people aged 2 to 85, plus the 19 hijackers. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in history and the greatest single-day loss of firefighters and police officers in U.S. history.
Scale 0–3,000. WTC figures include 147 people aboard Flights 11 and 175; Pentagon figures include 59 people aboard Flight 77.
Scale 0–343. The firefighters included Chief of Department Peter Ganci and First Deputy Commissioner William Feehan. Including paramedics and other agencies, more than 400 rescuers died.
The victims came from more than 90 countries. The largest group of foreign nationals was from the United Kingdom (67). According to international victim lists, the dead included one citizen of Slovakia and one of the Czech Republic.
The youngest victim, Christine Lee Hanson (2½), was flying with her parents on Flight 175. The oldest, Robert Norton (85), was on Flight 11 with his wife, heading to a family wedding. Eight children were aboard the planes. Ten pregnant women were killed.
About 3,000 children lost a parent. More than 100 of them were born after September 11, 2001.
New York City's Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) is still working on the largest forensic identification effort in U.S. history. Of the 2,753 WTC victims, 1,654 had been identified as of August 2026. The remains of 1,099 people (40%) have not yet been identified.
In August 2026, a victim was identified for the first time using forensic investigative genetic genealogy (FIGG), which compares DNA against family-tree databases. Unidentified remains are kept in a repository beneath the 9/11 Museum at bedrock level, accessible only to families.
Al-Qaeda · "The planes operation"
The attack was planned by the terrorist network al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden. It cost the group roughly $400,000 to $500,000.
Osama bin Laden, son of a Saudi construction magnate, founded al-Qaeda in 1988. In 1996 he "declared war" on the United States, and in 1998 issued a fatwa calling for the killing of Americans, citing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, support for Israel and sanctions on Iraq. In August 1998 al-Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (224 dead), and in 2000 the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was, in the Commission's words, the "principal architect" of the attacks. He pitched the idea of flying hijacked planes into U.S. buildings to bin Laden in 1996; it was approved in 1999. He originally proposed ten planes on both coasts.
The operation on the ground was led by Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian urban-planning student from Hamburg. With Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah he formed the so-called Hamburg cell. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, from the same cell, could not get a U.S. visa and became the go-between.
The pilots trained at U.S. flight schools in Florida, Arizona and elsewhere in 2000–2001, including on Boeing simulators. Most of the "muscle" hijackers arrived in the U.S. only in spring 2001. That summer they took surveillance flights across the country. Atta met bin al-Shibh in Spain in July 2001 and confirmed the date of September 11 in August.
| Hijackers' country of origin | Number |
|---|---|
| Saudi Arabia | 15 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Egypt (Atta) | 1 |
| Lebanon (Jarrah) | 1 |
| Total | 19 |
"A failure of imagination"
The 9/11 Commission concluded that the attacks could have been disrupted. The biggest failure, it said, was one of "imagination": no one connected the scattered signals into a single picture.
| When | What was known |
|---|---|
| Jan 2000 | The CIA monitored an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. It knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar held a U.S. visa and that Nawaf al-Hazmi had flown to the U.S. Neither was put on a watchlist until August 2001. |
| Summer 2001 | CIA Director George Tenet later said "the system was blinking red." Intelligence reports of a coming major attack surged. |
| July 10, 2001 | The "Phoenix memo": an FBI agent in Arizona warned that bin Laden might be sending people to U.S. flight schools. Headquarters did not act. |
| Aug 6, 2001 | President Bush received a daily brief titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." It also mentioned hijackings. |
| Aug 16, 2001 | Zacarias Moussaoui arrested. The FBI's Minneapolis office sought permission to search his laptop; headquarters refused. |
| Aug 23, 2001 | Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi finally added to the watchlist. The FBI searched for them at low priority. On September 11 they boarded Flight 77 under their own names. |
Airport security in 2001 was very different from today: knives with blades under 4 inches (10 cm) were allowed on board, cockpit doors were not reinforced, and crews were trained to cooperate with hijackers and land safely. The CAPPS screening system flagged 9 of the 19 hijackers, but that meant only that their checked bags were held until they boarded.
September 2001 – May 2002
Where the towers stood, a pile of debris rose in places as high as a ten-story building. Beneath it, fires burned for 99 days.
Thousands of firefighters, police officers, construction workers, volunteers and soldiers searched the pile, at first by hand and with buckets, hoping to find survivors. The work went on around the clock. People around the world sent food, clothing and tools; rescue teams and search dogs came to New York.
The last fires under the debris were put out on December 19, 2001. About 1.8 million tons of material was removed by barge and truck to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where it was sifted by hand for remains and personal belongings.
The work officially ended on May 30, 2002, with a ceremony in which the last steel column (the Last Column), draped in a flag, was carried out. Covered in messages from rescuers, it now stands in the 9/11 Museum.
Among the first symbols of recovery were a steel cross found in the wreckage of 6 WTC and Thomas E. Franklin's photograph of three firefighters raising a flag.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was on the scene that day, and his leadership earned him Time's Person of the Year. President Bush visited Ground Zero on September 14 and, standing on the rubble with a bullhorn, said: "I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"
The New York Stock Exchange stayed closed until September 17, its longest closure since 1933. On the first day of trading the Dow Jones fell 684 points (7.1%). U.S. airspace remained almost completely closed until September 13. Airlines laid off tens of thousands of workers, and Congress approved a $15 billion aid package for them. Direct damage in New York was estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.
The invisible victims
The dust from the towers contained pulverized concrete, asbestos, glass fibers, lead and other toxic substances. Thousands of people breathed it for months.
A week after the attacks, EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman declared the air in Lower Manhattan safe to breathe. Many rescuers worked without respirators. Today it is regarded as one of the most criticized mistakes of the entire response.
Responders and area residents show elevated rates of respiratory disease (the "WTC cough"), sarcoidosis, reflux, more than 60 types of cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the FDNY, more firefighters have now died of illnesses linked to the Ground Zero response than were killed on September 11.
In 2010 Congress passed the James Zadroga Act, named after an NYPD detective who died of lung disease. It created a health program and reopened the victim compensation fund, which Congress made permanent in 2019 after a campaign led by comedian Jon Stewart and detective Luis Alvarez.
| WTC Health Program (CDC) | As of June 30, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Total enrolled members | 145,275 |
| of which responders | 71,417 |
| of which survivors and residents | 56,692 |
| Pentagon and Shanksville responders | 1,481 |
| members living outside the U.S. | 1,359 |
Source: CDC, World Trade Center Health Program, quarterly summary as of June 30, 2026. Categories do not cover every member.
2001 – 2021
The attacks launched the "war on terror": two long wars, a new security architecture, and a change in how we travel and how governments watch their citizens.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Sept 12, 2001 | NATO invokes Article 5 on collective defense for the first time ever. UN Security Council Resolution 1368 condemns the attacks. |
| Sept 20, 2001 | Bush before Congress: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." He demands that the Taliban hand over bin Laden. |
| Oct 7, 2001 | The war in Afghanistan begins (Operation Enduring Freedom). Kabul falls on November 13 and the Taliban lose power. In December, bin Laden escapes from Tora Bora into Pakistan. |
| Oct 26, 2001 | The USA PATRIOT Act greatly expands surveillance powers. |
| Nov 19, 2001 | The TSA, a federal airport security agency, is created. Reinforced cockpit doors, shoe checks (2001), the liquids ban (2006) and body scanners follow. |
| Jan 11, 2002 | The first detainees arrive at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. |
| Nov 25, 2002 | The Department of Homeland Security is created, the largest U.S. government reorganization since 1947. |
| Mar 20, 2003 | The invasion of Iraq. The government justified it partly as counterterrorism, but the Commission found no operational relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda on 9/11. No weapons of mass destruction were found. |
| 2004–2005 | Al-Qaeda and its followers strike Madrid (191 dead) and London (52 dead). |
| May 2, 2011 | U.S. Navy SEALs kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan (Operation Neptune Spear). |
| Aug 30, 2021 | The last U.S. plane leaves Kabul. After 20 years, the Taliban are back in power. |
| July 31, 2022 | A drone strike kills bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Kabul. |
Brown University's Costs of War project estimated in 2021 that the post-9/11 wars cost the U.S. about $8 trillion, and that more than 900,000 people, including civilians, died as a direct result of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. About 2,400 U.S. service members were killed in Afghanistan.
The view from Slovakia
In Slovakia it was 2:46 p.m. when the first plane hit. TV stations interrupted their programming, people watched CNN, and the images ran late into the night. The Slovak government condemned the attacks and expressed solidarity with the United States; people brought flowers and candles to the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava.
Slovakia was not yet a member of NATO at the time (it joined on March 29, 2004), but as a candidate country it joined the anti-terrorism coalition and opened its airspace to allied flights.
From 2002, Slovak soldiers served in Afghanistan, first an engineering unit at Bagram, later in the ISAF and Resolute Support missions (Kandahar, Kabul). The mission ended in 2021 with the allied withdrawal. Slovakia also sent troops to Iraq (2003–2007), where they cleared mines.
According to international victim lists, the dead in New York included one Slovak citizen. For a generation of Slovaks, as for Americans, the attacks became a "where were you when…" moment.
Reports and trials
Congress created the independent commission in November 2002. It was chaired by former governor Thomas Kean, with Lee Hamilton as vice chair. It interviewed 1,200 people in 10 countries and on July 22, 2004, released The 9/11 Commission Report, which became a bestseller. It made 41 recommendations, including creating a Director of National Intelligence and a National Counterterrorism Center (both established in 2004–2005).
The technical investigation into the collapse of the towers (2005) and Building 7 (2008) led to changes in building codes: more robust stairwells, better fireproofing, wider exits and elevators for firefighters.
A section of a 2002 congressional report on possible contacts between Saudi officials and the hijackers remained classified until 2016. Victims' families are pursuing a civil lawsuit against Saudi Arabia in U.S. courts; the kingdom denies any involvement.
The only person convicted in a U.S. civilian court in connection with 9/11. He pleaded guilty in 2005 and in May 2006 was sentenced to life without parole.
KSM was captured on March 1, 2003, in Pakistan. In secret CIA prisons he was subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques"; he was waterboarded 183 times. Since 2006 he has been held at Guantánamo with four co-defendants.
The military commission case has dragged on since 2008. A plea deal that would have spared them the death penalty was revoked by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in August 2024. A military judge later ruled Mohammed's 2007 confession inadmissible because of his earlier torture. Trial is scheduled for June 2028, though the date remains uncertain. All five defendants remain in custody.
Reflecting Absence
Where the towers stood are now the two largest man-made waterfalls in North America. A new neighborhood has grown up around them.
Designed by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, it opened for the 10th anniversary, on September 11, 2011. Two square pools sit exactly in the towers' footprints; water falls nine meters (30 ft) and disappears into a central void.
Around the edges, bronze parapets are inscribed with the names of 2,983 victims: everyone killed on September 11 and six killed in the 1993 bombing. The names are not alphabetical but arranged by "meaningful adjacencies": colleagues, crews and friends side by side, at families' request. On each victim's birthday, a white rose is placed in their name.
The Survivor Tree (a Callery pear) was found in the rubble in October 2001, burned and with a single living branch. It was nursed back to health in the Bronx and returned to the memorial plaza in 2010.
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened on May 21, 2014, underground at the level of the towers' foundations. It displays remnants of steel columns, the destroyed Ladder 3 fire truck, the Survivors' Stairs and the Last Column.
Every year on the night of September 11, 88 searchlights in Lower Manhattan send two beams into the sky, visible up to about 100 km (60 miles) away.
The main tower of the new complex, originally called the Freedom Tower, was designed by David Childs (SOM) and opened on November 3, 2014. With its spire it stands 541 m, or 1,776 feet, after the year of the Declaration of Independence. It is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Its base is a solid concrete podium; the One World Observatory is on floors 100–102.
| The new WTC | Opened |
|---|---|
| 7 World Trade Center | 2006 |
| 9/11 Memorial | 2011 |
| 4 World Trade Center | 2013 |
| 9/11 Museum | 2014 |
| One World Trade Center | 2014 |
| Oculus (transit hub, S. Calatrava) | 2016 |
| 3 World Trade Center | 2018 |
| St. Nicholas Church | 2022 |
| Perelman Performing Arts Center | 2023 |
| 2 and 5 World Trade Center | under construction / planned |
Other memorials: the Pentagon Memorial (2008), the Flight 93 National Memorial (2011), and memorials at hundreds of fire stations and towns, including pieces of WTC steel donated around the world.
Conspiracy theories examined
Dozens of conspiracy theories have grown up around 9/11. Independent engineers, scientific journals and journalists have examined them in detail. Here are the most common.
Wrong about the cause
It is true that kerosene burns at about 1,000 °C and steel melts only at about 1,500 °C. But steel does not have to melt for a structure to fail. At 600 °C it loses about half its strength. And what burned in the towers was mainly office contents; the fuel acted as a huge fire starter, and the impact stripped away the fireproofing.
False
Controlled demolition of a skyscraper takes weeks of preparation: removing walls, drilling columns, miles of wiring. No one saw anything like that. The towers began to collapse exactly where the planes hit and the fires burned, not from the base. Neither seismographs nor audio recordings captured demolition charges. The "explosions" witnesses described are consistent with falling elevators, transformers and air being forced out of the floors.
Misleading
Building 7 was heavily damaged by debris from the North Tower and burned for seven hours on multiple floors without firefighting, because the water mains were destroyed. By afternoon firefighters warned it was leaning and pulled back. According to NIST, thermal expansion displaced a key girder and column 79 failed. Some independent engineers dispute details of NIST's model, but not fire as the cause.
False
Dozens of people saw the impact; the plane knocked down light poles on the highway. Wreckage of a Boeing 757, landing gear, engines and both flight recorders were recovered at the scene. Almost all passengers were identified by DNA. The passengers of Flight 77 have never been seen again.
False
The cockpit voice recorder captured the passenger revolt and the hijackers' words right up to impact. The fighters were far from the plane, and the shoot-down order reached pilots only after the crash. The wreckage lay mostly in a single crater; light fragments (paper, insulation) were carried farther by the wind, which is common in such crashes.
False · antisemitic myth
This lie was spread by propaganda within days of the attacks. An estimated 270 to 400 people of Jewish heritage were killed, including five Israeli citizens.
Investigated and debunked
The SEC and the 9/11 Commission examined the unusual options trades. They were made by institutions with no connection to al-Qaeda; the largest came from a single U.S. investor as part of a documented trading strategy.
What is true
Authorities had many warnings (see Missed warnings), but not of a specific time, place and method. The Commission documented a series of bureaucratic failures, poor information sharing between the CIA and FBI, and an underestimated threat. It found no evidence that anyone deliberately allowed the attack.
Quick answers
Americans write dates month/day, so September 11 is 9/11. By coincidence, 911 is also the U.S. emergency phone number. In Slovak the site's name, dvojičky, means "the twins," the common Slovak name for the Twin Towers.
Of the roughly 17,400 people in the towers at the time of the first impact, about 87% survived. Nearly everyone who died was on or above the impact floors, or was a rescuer inside.
NORAD had only 4 fighters on alert in the entire northeast sector. The military learned of Flight 11's hijacking 9 minutes before impact, of Flights 175 and 77 essentially only after they hit, and of Flight 93 only after it crashed. The system was prepared for threats from outside, not hijacked domestic flights with transponders off.
No. The roof doors were locked (rooftop rescue was not planned after 1993), and the smoke and heat above the towers would have made landing or lowering a line impossible. An NYPD helicopter that circled the towers around 9:00 reported that a rooftop landing was not possible.
It cost al-Qaeda $400,000 to $500,000. Direct property damage and recovery ran into the tens of billions, the total economic cost into the hundreds of billions, and the cost of the wars that followed into the trillions of dollars.
From the first takeoff (7:59) to the last crash (10:03), 2 hours and 4 minutes passed. From the first impact to the North Tower's collapse, 102 minutes.
Documentaries: 9/11 (the Naudet brothers, 2002), Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (Netflix, 2021), 102 Minutes That Changed America (2008). Feature films: United 93, World Trade Center, Zero Dark Thirty, Worth. Books: The 9/11 Commission Report; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (Pulitzer Prize); Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes; Garrett Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky.
Yes. The memorial plaza in Lower Manhattan is open to the public daily and free. The museum and One World Observatory charge admission; see 911memorial.org and oneworldobservatory.com for current hours and prices.
What we drew on