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Mike
Walter
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USA Today's Mike Walter was
driving near the Pentagon when he saw an American
Airlines jet fly directly into the country's
military nerve center. [544kB WAV download]
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Steve
Anderson, Director of Communications, USA TODAY
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A few moments later, as I was looking down at
my desk, the plane caught my eye.
It didn't register at first. I thought to myself
that I couldn't believe the pilot was flying so
low. Then it dawned on me what was about to
happen. I watched in horror as the plane flew at
treetop level, banked slightly to the left, drug
it's wing along the ground and slammed into the
west wall of the Pentagon exploding into a giant
orange fireball. Then black smoke. Then white
smoke.
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Deb Anlauf
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| Anlauf was watching TV coverage of the Trade
Center burning shortly before 9:30 a.m. when she
decided to return to her 14th-floor room from
another part of the hotel. Once in her room, she
heard a "loud roar" and looked out the
window to see what was going on. "Suddenly
I saw this plane right outside my window,"
Anlauf said during a telephone interview from her
hotel room this morning. "You felt like you
could touch it; it was that close. It was just
incredible. "Then it shot straight across
from where we are and flew right into the
Pentagon. It was just this huge fireball that
crashed into the wall (of the Pentagon). When it
hit, the whole hotel shook."
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David
Battle
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| Battle, an office worker at the Pentagon, was
standing outside the building and just about to
enter when the aircraft struck. "It was
coming down head first," he said. "And
when the impact hit, the cars and everything were
just shaking."
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Omar Campo
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Omar Campo, a Salvadorean, was cutting the
grass on the other side of the road when the
plane flew over his head.
"It was a passenger plane. I think an
American Airways plane," Mr Campo said.
"I was cutting the grass and it came in
screaming over my head. I felt the impact. The
whole ground shook and the whole area was full of
fire. I could never imagine I would see anything
like that here."
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Gary
Bauer, former Presidential candidate
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| “I was going past the Pentagon, really
inching a yard or so every couple of minutes. I
had just passed the closest place the Pentagon is
to the exit on 395 . . . when all of a sudden I
heard the roar of a jet engine. “I looked
at the woman sitting in the car next to me. She
had this startled look on her face. We were all
thinking the same thing. We looked out the front
of our windows to try to see the plane, and it
wasn’t until a few seconds later that we
realized the jet was coming up behind us on that
major highway. And it veered to the right into
the Pentagon. The blast literally rocked all of
our cars. It was an incredible moment.
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Mickey
Bell
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Bell, who had been less than 100 feet from
the initial impact of the plane, was nearly
struck by one of the planeīs wings as it sped by
him. In shock, he got into his truck, which had
been parked in the trailer compound, and sped
away. He wandered around Arlington in his truck
and tried to make wireless phone calls. He ended
up back at Singletonīs headquarters in
Gaithersburg two hours later, according to
President Singleton, not remembering much.
The full impact of the closeness of the crash
wasnīt realized until coworkers noticed damage
to Bellīs work vehicle. He had plastic and
rivets from an airplane imbedded in its sheet
metal, but Bell had no idea what had happened.
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Mark
Bright, Defense Protective Service officer
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Mark Bright, actually saw the plane hit the
building. He had been manning the guard booth at
the Mall Entrance to the building.
"I saw the plane at the Navy Annex
area," he said. "I knew it was going to
strike the building because it was very, very low
-- at the height of the street lights. It knocked
a couple down." The plane would have been
seconds from impact -- the annex is only a few
hundred yards from the Pentagon.
He said he heard the plane "power-up"
just before it struck the Pentagon. "As soon
as it struck the building I just called in an
attack, because I knew it couldn't be
accidental," Bright said. He jumped into his
police cruiser and headed to the area.
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James R.
Cissell
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''Out of my peripheral vision,'' Cissell
said, ''I saw this plane coming in and it was low
- and getting lower.
''If you couldn't touch it from standing on the
highway, you could by standing on your car.''
In the next seconds dozens of things flashed
through his mind.
''I thought, 'This isn't really happening. That
is a big plane.' Then I saw the faces of some of
the passengers on board,'' Cissell said.
He remembers the helipad the plane flew over
before smacking into the Pentagon was close
enough to him that ''I could have thrown a
baseball at it and hit it.''
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Dan Creed
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He and two colleagues from Oracle software
were stopped in a car near the Naval Annex, next
to the Pentagon, when they saw the plane dive
down and level off.
"It was no more than 30 feet off the ground,
and it was screaming. It was just screaming. It
was nothing more than a guided missile at that
point," Creed said.
"I can still see the plane. I can still see
it right now. It's just the most frightening
thing in the world, going full speed, going full
throttle, its wheels up," Creed recalls.
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Don
Fortunato
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| “Traffic was at a standstill, so I
parked on the shoulder, not far from the scene
and ran to the site. Next to me was a cab from
D.C., its windshield smashed out by pieces of
lampposts. There were pieces of the plane all
over the highway, pieces of wing, I think.”
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Afework
Hagos
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| Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was on
his way to work but stuck in a traffic jam near
the Pentagon when the plane flew over.
"There was a huge screaming noise and I got
out of the car as the plane came over. Everybody
was running away in different directions. It was
tilting its wings up and down like it was trying
to balance. It hit some lampposts on the way
in."
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Tom Hovis
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Being a former transport type (60's era) I
cannot understand how that plane hit where it did
giving the direction the aircraft was taking at
the time.
As most know, the Pentagon lies at the bottom of
two hills from the west with the east side being
next to the river at 14th street bridge. One hill
is at the Navy Annex and the other is Arlington
Cemetery. The plane came up I-395 also known as
Shirley Hwy. (most likely used as a reference
point.) The plane had been seen making a lazy
pattern in the no fly zone over the White House
and US Cap. Why the plane did not hit incoming
traffic coming down the river from the north to
Reagan Nat'l. is beyond me. Strangely, no one at
the Reagan Tower noticed the aircraft. Andrews
AFB radar should have also picked up the aircraft
I would think. Nevertheless, the aircarft went
southwest near Springfield and then veered left
over Arlington and then put the nose down coming
over Ft Myer picking off trees and light poles
near the helicopter pad next to building. It was
as if he leveled out at the last minute and put
it square into the building. The wings came off
as if it went through an arch way leaving a hole
in the side of the building it seems a little
larger than the wide body of the aircraft. The
entry point was so clean that the roof (shown in
news photo) fell in on the wreckage.
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Terrance
Kean
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Terrance Kean, 35, who lives in a 14-story
building nearby, heard the loud jet engines and
glanced out his window.
"I saw this very, very large passenger
jet," said the architect, who had been
packing for a move. "It just plowed right
into the side of the Pentagon. The nose
penetrated into the portico. And then it sort of
disappeared, and there was fire and smoke
everywhere. . . . It was very sort of
surreal."
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Charles H.
Krohn
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| One of the aircraft's engines somehow
ricocheted out of the building and arched into
the Pentagon's mall parking area between the main
building and the new loading dock facility, said
Charles H. Krohn, the Army's deputy chief of
public affairs. Those fleeing the building heard
a loud secondary explosion about 10 min. after
the initial impact.
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Maj.
Lincoln Leibner
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Maj. Leibner drove in and made it as far as
the south parking lot, where he got out on foot.
"I heard the plane first," he said.
"I thought it was a flyover Arlington
cemetery."
From his vantage point, Maj. Leibner looked up
and saw the plane come in. "I was about 100
yards away," he said. "You could see
through the windows of the aircraft. I saw it
hit."
The plane came in hard and level and was flown
full throttle into the building, dead center
mass, Maj. Leibner said. "The plane
completely entered the building," he said.
"I got a little repercussion, from the
sound, the blast. I've heard artillery, and that
was louder than the loudest has to offer.
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Elaine
McCusker
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| Traffic is normally slow right around the
Pentagon as the road winds and we line up to
cross the 14th Street bridge heading into the
District of Columbia. I don’t know what made
me look up, but I did and I saw a very low-flying
American Airlines plane that seemed to be
accelerating. My first thought was just ‘No,
no, no, no,’ because it was obvious the
plane was not heading to nearby Reagan National
Airport. It was going to crash.
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William
Middleton Sr.
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| William Middleton Sr., was running his street
sweeper through the cemetery when he heard a
harsh whistling sound overhead. Middleton looked
up and spotted a commercial jet whose pilot
seemed to be fighting with his own craft. Middleton
said the plane was no higher than the tops of
telephone poles as it lurched toward the
Pentagon. The jet accelerated in the final few
hundred yards before it tore into the building.
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Mare Ann
Owens
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Looking up didn't tell me what type of plane
it was because it was so close I could only see
the bottom. Realising the Pentagon was its
target, I didn't think the careering,
full-throttled craft would get that far. Its
downward angle was too sharp, its elevation of
maybe 50 feet, too low. Street lights toppled as
the plane barely cleared the Interstate 395
overpass.
The thought that I was about to die was immediate
and certain. This plane was going to hit me along
with all the other commuters trapped on
Washington Boulevard.
Gripping the steering wheel of my vibrating car,
I involuntarily ducked as the wobbling plane
thundered over my head. Once it passed, I raised
slightly and grimaced as the left wing dipped and
scraped the helicopter area just before the nose
crashed into the southwest wall of the Pentagon.
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Christine
Peterson
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I was at a complete stop on the road in front
of the helipad at the Pentagon; what I had
thought would be a shortcut was as slow as the
other routes I had taken that morning. I looked
idly out my window to the left -- and saw a plane
flying so low I said, “holy cow, that plane
is going to hit my car” (not my actual
words). The car shook as the plane flew over. It
was so close that I could read the numbers under
the wing.
And then the plane crashed. My mind could not
comprehend what had happened. Where did the plane
go? For some reason I expected it to bounce off
the Pentagon wall in pieces. But there was no
plane visible, only huge billows of smoke and
torrents of fire.
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Frank
Probst
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American Airlines Flight 77 approached from
the west, coming in low over the nearby
five-story Navy Annex on a hill overlooking the
Pentagon.
"He has lights off, wheels up, nose
down," Probst recalled. The plane seemed to
be accelerating directly toward him. He froze.
"I knew I was dead," he said later.
"The only thing I thought was, 'Damn, my
wife has to go to another funeral, and I'm not
going to see my two boys again.'."
He dove to his right. He recalls the engine
passing on one side of him, about six feet away.
The plane's right wing went through a generator
trailer "like butter," Probst said. The
starboard engine hit a low cement wall and blew
apart.
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Clyde
Ragland
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| Ragland described billowing black smoke and
"what looked like white confetti raining
down everywhere." He said it soon became
apparent "that the 'confetti' was little
bits of airplane, falling down after being flung
high into the bright, blue sky."
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Tim
Timmerman
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| A pilot who saw the impact, Tim Timmerman,
said it had been an American Airways 757.
"It added power on its way in," he
said. "The nose hit, and the wings came
forward and it went up in a fireball."
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Thomas D.
Trapasso
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| Thomas D. Trapasso, a political appointee in
the Clinton Administration who is now looking for
work, was making telephone calls from his deck in
Arlington Village, about 1 mi. south of the
Pentagon and just west of the Interstate 395
(I-395) highway. He was startled by the large
American Airlines aircraft flying about 300 ft.
overhead. "The engines were just screaming,
and the wheels were up," Trapasso said.
"It disappeared over the trees, and I heard
a boom. I knew something awful had happened--that
an airplane had crashed somewhere in Washington,
D.C.
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Alan
Wallace
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About 9:40, Alan Wallace had finished fixing
the foam metering valve on the back of his fire
truck parked in the Pentagon fire station and
walked to the front of the station. He looked up
and saw a jetliner coming straight at him. It was
about 25 feet off the ground, no landing wheels
visible, a few hundred yards away and closing
fast.
"Runnnnn!" he yelled to a pal. There
was no time to look back, barely time to
scramble. He made it about 30 feet, heard a
terrible roar, felt the heat, and dove underneath
a van, skinning his stomach as he slid along the
blacktop, sailing under it as though he were
riding a luge. The van protected him against
burning metal that was flying around. A few
seconds later he was sliding back out to check on
his friend and then race back to the firetruck.
He jumped in, threw it into gear, but the
accelerator was dead. The entire back of the
truck was destroyed, the cab on fire. He grabbed
the radio headset and called the main station at
Fort Myer to report the unimaginable.
The sun was still low in the sky, obscured by the
Pentagon and the enormous billowing clouds of
acrid smoke, making it hauntingly dark. The
ground was on fire. Trees were on fire. Hot
slices of aluminum were everywhere.
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