[Excerpts from The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Authorized First Edition. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.]

The Hijacking of American 11

United Airlines Flight 11 provided nonstop service from Boston to Los Angeles. On September 11, Captain Michael Loesky and First Officer Reginald Hong were piloting the Boeing 767. It carried its full capacity of nine flight attendants and eighty-one passengers (including the five Azifist cultists).

The plane took off at 7:59. Just before 8:14, it had climbed to 26,000 feet, not quite its usual assigned cruising altitude of 29,000, because of the aerospace alert announced three days prior for the states of Massachussetts and Vermont. An empty ATK transorbital ore hauler (USSTC Des. AT933) was being maneuvered down from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) to the Yuggothian mining facilities at Bald Mountain, Vermont, and had been given priority clearance. All communications and flight profile data for Flight 11 were normal. About this time the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign would normally have been switched off and flight attendants would have begun preparing for cabin service.

At the same time, American 11 had its last routine communications with the ground when it acknowledged navigational instructions from the FAA’s air traffic control (ATC) center in Boston. The ore hauler had begun its descent and would be entering the atmosphere in several minutes. Sixteen seconds after that transmission, ATC updated the flight’s pilots with the ore hauler’s descent path and instructed them to maintain altitude at 26,000 feet. That message and all but one subsequent attempts to contact the flight were unacknowledged. From this an other evidence, we believe the hijacking began at apprixmately 8:14.

Reports from two flight attendants in the coach cabin, Christina Bi and Clark Duranty, give us most of the information we have concerning how the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 took place. Because of its detailed nature, this information would later prove vital to the military response during the subsequent Manhattan crisis.

The hijacking began when three of the cultists—Satam al Suqami, Wail al Shehri and Waleed al Shehri, all of whom were seated in the second row of the first class section—leaped up and stabbed two unarmed flight attendants preparing for in-flight service. Christina Bi, who was preparing flight service at the attendants’ station in coach, from which she had a clear view of the first class section, witnessed the attack. According to her description, she initially thought the men were attacking with disposable plastic cutlery, but when she got a better look at the men she saw that the blades “were either strapped to their wrists or were coming out of their wrists or the palms of their hands.”

It is uncertain how the hijackers then got access to the cockpit. FAA rules require that cockpit doors remain closed and locked during a flight. Bi said that they “broke down the door,” but it’s also possible that the terrorists had gotten a cockpit key from one of the attendants they’d stabbed, or had persuaded the pilots to open the door with threats of further violence. As soon as the cockpit door was opened, Muhammud al Quthuli—the only Azifist on board who was trained to fly a jet—and Abdulhazred al Omari entered the cockpit to take control of the plane. The three remaining hijackers released Mace, pepper spray, or some other form of aerosol irritant in the first class cabin to force the flight attendants and passengers toward the rear of the section. Though Bi did not witness this event, she later reported what a first class passenger had told her. One of the terrorists had appeared to vomit at the front of the plane, and the fumes from the vomit had been extremely noxious to everyone but, apparently, the terrorists themselves. All the while they taunted the frightened passengers, claiming they had a bomb or weapon they were going to use that would “break a hole in the sky” which would swallow them all.

Many passengers from first class fled into the coach section, but the majority of them took cover behind the seats in the rear of first class since the terrorists did not seem intent on leaving the very front of the plane. There has been some popular speculation that the passengers who remained in the first class cabin were following the orders of fellow passenger Michael Guilder, a former career officer in the Israeli military, who is believed to have been attempting to organize resistance against the hijackers. However, there is no evidence to support this. Though Guilder was listed as a first class passenger on the plane, neither Bi nor Duranty ever mentioned him or a “counterattack” in any context.

Of those passengers that did enter coach, several immediately commandeered drink and food carts to blockade the door between coach and first class. Flight attendant Clark Duranty was among them, and remained at the blockade, watching through the window in the door as events further unfolded in first class.

Shortly after she’d witnessed the attendants’ stabbing, Christina Bi ran to the back of coach and contacted the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, via the AT&T airphone at the rearmost attendant’s station to report an emergency aboard the flight. This emergency call lasted 30 minutes, as first Bi and then Duranty frantically relayed information about the events taking place aboard the airplane to authorities on the ground. Bi’s first words were, “We’re being hijacked—some people were just killed in first class—I don’t know what’s going on but I don’t think they’re Human.”

Christina Bi’s statements were proven true at 8:20, when al Omari emerged from the cockpit with the two pilots in tow. Duranty was watching, and described everything taking place in first class to a fellow flight attendant, who shouted the details back to Bi; Bi, in turn, repeated the information as calmly as she could to authorities on the ground.

Al Omari was naked, and according to Duranty, his skin looked bruised, as if he’d been severely beaten, and “he had weird symbols all over him.” Duranty could not describe the symbols, but did say that they looked like they’d been cut or burnt into his flesh. Duranty also said that the cultist had looped belts or possibly “some kind of ropes” around the pilots’ necks, but when al-Omari forced them to their knees, Duranty corrected his description: the restraints were “growing from his belly…big thick purple tentacles…that he was choking them [the pilots] with.”

As soon as al Omari left the cockpit, the Azifists in the first class cabin began chanting loudly in a language that Duranty (incorrectly) identified as Arabic. As soon as the pilots were kneeling, two of the armed men came up and slit the pilots’ throats. Al Omari immediately threw himself down on top of their bodies and began to smear their blood all over himself.

The passengers remaining in first class immediately began to panic and many tried to force the door to the coach section. Duranty wanted to let them in, but the terrified passengers who had blocked the door in the first place refused to remove the carts. An altercation broke out among them and the carts were eventually moved out of the way by other passengers, but only a handful from first class made it through into coach before the armed terrorists began assaulting the knot of people that had formed on the first class side of the door. A foul gas was used again to subdue the passengers, many of whom were immobilized by its nauseating effects. Though sickened by the fumes, too, Duranty and the passengers he’d been struggling with managed to pull a few more first class passengers into coach before shoving the carts back into place to keep the Azifists from entering.

Duranty was experiencing severe respiratory and gastric distress from the hijackers’ chemical agent, but he remained at the door to observe the horrors being enacted in first class because “someone on the ground has to be told what was happening up here.” An unidentified passenger now ran between him and Christina Bi.

At 8:21, one of the employees monitoring the call from Flight 11 alerted the American Airlines operations center in Fort Worth, Texas. Manager on duty Cyril Kilborn quickly realized this was an emergency completely unlike anything in his or his company’s experience. He instructed the airline’s dispatcher responsible for the flight to contact the cockpit immediately. At 8:23 the dispatcher received this brief statement from al Quthuli: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh fhtagn a’tquan.” (“In his city at R’Lyeh dead Cthulhu waits no longer.”) There would be no further communication with the cockpit of Flight 11. Moments later, an air traffic control specialist at the operations center contacted the FAA’s Boston Air Traffic Control Center about the flight. The center was already aware of the problem.

At 8:25, Duranty replaced Bi on the airphone and related the following details for the remainder of the call. He was almost incoherent with terror, and it wasn’t until several hours later, after the recording of the call had been analyzed thoroughly, that a reasonably clear transcript of his portion of the call was released to civil and military authorities.

Duranty had watched the wholesale slaughter of the passengers remaining in first class. The sickening fumes had overcome many of the passengers, who were blinded and vomiting. The three armed Azifists had dragged them one by one toward the front of the plane, where they were routinely dismembered. By now, all of the terrorists had begun to exhibit very noticeable signs of physical alteration. The torsos of the armed men were twisted and deformed, and their arms now ended in long, serrated blades which they were using like cleavers to literally butcher the passengers. Al Omari’s body had almost completely dissolved into a shapeless mass of “purple worms or tentacles” that were devouring the pieces of the passengers’ bodies that the other cultists fed to it. The “thing” was swelling in size much faster than could be accounted for by consumption of the bodies, and had begun making a loud, distinctive “cricket” sound clearly audible on portions of the recorded call.

When the last passenger remaining in first class was murdered and given to the entity, the other three Azifists tried to wrench open the door to coach. Despite the blockade of carts and the efforts of the passengers holding the door shut, the terrorists still managed to pry open a corner of the door and spray another cloud of disabling gas into the attendants station. The passengers collapsed, but the cultists’ attempt to open the door ceased. According to a voice later isolated from the cacophony, one of the entity’s tentacles or pseudopods had snatched the terrorists from the doors. The growing entity consumed the other hijackers just as it had consumed the passengers.

At 8:41, the entity breached the blockade. A tremendous explosion can be heard on the airphone recording as the entity threw aside the carts and came pouring into the coach cabin. Duranty’s last words were: “Somebody shoot us down—please—kill this thing!” The remainder of the recording is nothing but screaming, sounds of intense violence, and the continuous warbling of the entity itself. The call ended at 8:44.

At 8:46:40, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. It is generally accepted that, by the time of impact, all passengers and crew (possibly even pilot al Quthuli) had been consumed by the First-Stage (Gateway) Entity evolving aboard the plane.