A warning for listeners. Throughout this podcast, we have audio from 9-11 itself,

plus recreations of the day's events. It's important history to hear, but it can also be disturbing.

A major stormfront swept across the east coast on the evening of Monday,

September 10th, 2001. It brought behind it a high pressure ridge of dry Canadian air

that created a unique meteorological phenomenon that pilots call severe clear.

What that meant was that when the next warning dawned Tuesday, September 11th,

the sky up and down the east coast was blue, bright blue.

Firefighter Jay Jonas had worked the overnight shift with latter six, his FDNY unit

in Manhattan's Chinatown. It's like the air was scrubbed clean. The sky was so blue and

hearted your eyes looking at it. It was so dramatic that every time I see a sky like that,

I call it a September 11th sky. Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this message is for

our passengers traveling on our region. At Logan International Airport in Boston,

passengers were trickling on to American Airlines, Flay the 11th, a Boeing 767 scheduled to arrive

at LAX, later that morning. The plane left Boston at 7.59 AM, with

92 people on board. The last word from the pilots came at 813 for a routine check-in.

Exactly what happened next is not fully clear, but within a few minutes,

air traffic controllers noticed something was off with the flight.

The plane now appeared to be flying low. Then it started banking to the right,

veering off course. Controllers tried reaching the cockpit again.

At the time, plane hijackings were rare, but common enough that there were established response

procedures that unfolded with a certain grim rhythm. To this point, hijackings had rarely

resulted in civilian casualties, and never before had the hijackers ever actually commandeered the

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