When passenger jets became missiles, they investigated. They’re remembering it 25 years later

By Alexandra Skores, CNN

(CNN) — Crumbs of a vanilla ice cream sandwich covered Michael McCormick’s 6-year-old son’s mouth as the two sat on the edge of the fountain between the North and South towers of the World Trade Center.

McCormick was celebrating his 45th birthday with his family on a warm, late summer Sunday in Manhattan in 2001.

He pointed out the North Tower to his son, “I have a friend who’s starting work there on Monday.”

The father and son washed the ice cream off their hands in the fountain. McCormick took his family inside the shopping mall underneath the World Trade Center and purchased a Harry Potter blanket, his son’s favorite.

After the long weekend with his family, McCormick returned to work on Tuesday as an air traffic manager for the Federal Aviation Administration’s New York Air Route Traffic Control Center near Long Island, responsible for tens of thousands of square miles of airspace in the Northeast.

“Checking emails, going through in baskets,” he described of that day. “Back in those days, we actually had paperwork.”

At 8:42 a.m., his Blackberry buzzed with a message that soon would upend the day – and ultimately the lives – of every American.

“Possible hijack. American 11. Boeing 767. Flight level 310. Albany, southbound.”

It was September 11, 2001.

What was that?

FAA intelligence specialist Chris Rocheleau was nearly 15 minutes from heading home on his overnight shift to his wife and daughters when he received word there had been a plane crash in New York.

He and a colleague he was training, Angela Stubblefield, had spent their shift reviewing intelligence reports that came in during the last 24 hours. It was a pretty slow night, Stubblefield said, until they got word of the crash from the Intelligence Operations division of the FAA, on the 3rd floor in the DC headquarters.

“Initially there was this confusion about, ‘Was it a small plane like a Cessna 172, a general aviation aircraft, or was it a helicopter, a sightseeing helicopter?’” they wondered. “’Was it just an accidental commuter plane that made a mistake?’”

It was a gorgeous, clear day, he recalled. How could a pilot make that mistake?

“There was this kind of like shock for seconds,” Rocheleau said. “We kind of kicked into action.”

The FAA began ticking through scenarios of what it could be.

“What didn’t come up initially that morning was something intentional,” Rocheleau said. “It felt accidental.”

There is no ‘playbook’

American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:46 a.m.

Erik Grosof’s phone began ringing within 20 minutes; people were checking in with him. The National Transportation Safety Board investigator was a liaison between the air carriers and often worked closely with law enforcement. They would come up with a plan with how the airlines would respond to victims’ families after incidents.

In the NTSB’s situation room, he watched the news coverage from New York on a 60-inch television set and looked at the hole the aircraft had left in the tower – it had to have been a large commercial airplane.

He was right.

The plane that crashed into the 93rd to 99th floors of the tower was a Boeing 767 that had taken off from Boston less than an hour before.

“We really didn’t have a playbook for a high-rise accident,” Grosof said.

‘It’s too late’

Back at the FAA’s center in New York, McCormick was only beginning to comprehend what had happened to American Flight 11 when the New York Center controller sitting behind him said, “I have another one.”

“We are under attack,” McCormick warned. “Be prepared for anything.”

McCormick tried to call Frank Hatfield, the air traffic division manager for the FAA in the Eastern region, but was placed on hold by his administrative assistant. He needed to tell him about the second hijacked aircraft.

“I need to speak with him,” McCormick said. More people could die.

He hung up and tried again.

Put on hold.

He hung up. Got put on hold.

Six times.

Finally, he got on a teleconference to track the second plane.

United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767 aircraft, which departed from Boston, was descending and heading for New York City. McCormick was certain it was heading for the World Trade Center. On board were 56 passengers and nine crew members.

He told his deputy to turn on CNN and report everything he saw to him.

At 9:03 a.m., New York Center’s air traffic control team watched live as United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. Five hijackers were on board.

At that moment, pilots in airborne fighter jets radioed controllers to ask for the location of the hijacked aircraft.

“I told them it’s too late,” McCormick said. “They both hit the World Trade Center.”

He thought to himself, “OK, we’re under attack, and they’re using aircraft as weapons, so the only way I can defend us from this attack is to remove the aircraft from the sky.”

Calmly, at 9:05 a.m., he walked back to the watch desk and declared New York Center ATC Zero, effectively grounding all aircraft in his airspace.

“It was more anger that I felt than anything else,” McCormick said. “I was angry that people would use something that I love, something I’m passionate about, which is aviation, and use as a weapon against my country, and I kind of channeled that anger into action.”

Pushing past the emotions

For years, as part of his job in FAA intelligence, Rocheleau had studied and learned about the “bad guys” to keep the skies safe.

After the second tower was hit, he said, it was evident that this was an intentional attack.

He walked upstairs to the FAA floor operations center, the 10th floor of the agency’s headquarters. Teams from several parts of the FAA were in the room, including intelligence, air traffic and aviation safety organizations.

“There was obviously heightened emotion,” he said. Several people experienced what he called “stages of grief,” at the FAA. Some were angry or visibly upset. Others began to feel a sense of unity with their colleagues.

The FAA was trying to discern what actually happened. The agency had the transmissions between air traffic controllers and the hijacked aircraft, but now, it was putting the rest of the pieces together.

Many people working in the room tried to block the immediate emotions, but it was hard to push past what had occurred, Rocheleau said.

“We had not been exposed to something of this magnitude, this intentional,” Rocheleau said.

For a brief second, Rocheleau pondered whether the attackers might target the FAA headquarters in Washington, DC.

“In the moment, that feels very kind of selfish,” Rocheleau said. “But you couldn’t help but think it was an aviation-oriented thing. So why wouldn’t they come after us? But then when you start to really do your full objective analysis, you realize, there’s the White House. There’s the Capitol.”

The countdown to the White House

American Airlines Flight 77 leaving Washington-Dulles International Airport and heading to Los Angeles International Airport had changed course over Ohio.

Someone onboard the Boeing 757 turned off the transponder air traffic controllers used to track it. The plane was flying back toward Washington. In New York, air traffic teams, including McCormick, were watching it.

Then, McCormick said, there was a countdown: 10 miles from the White House, 9 miles, 8 miles.

At 1 mile, the aircraft veered right.

It didn’t surprise McCormick, he said, because the Washington Monument was in the way.

For a moment, he worried the plane might head for the Capitol, potentially an easier target since it sits on a hill at the end of the open National Mall. The Capitol was evacuated early that morning, as Congress was back in session after a summer recess.

But the aircraft was both too high and too fast.

It continued back out over northern Virginia.

It did a 180-degree turn over Arlington and Alexandria.

And then it dove into the Pentagon, at 9:37 a.m., destroying about 50 structural columns in the five-sided military headquarters.

Call the FAA and get an airplane

At first, nobody in the NTSB moved.

The building began to “vibrate,” Grosof described, much like the seismic vibrations of an aircraft above them.

Then, a woman in the lobby screamed.

“Oh my God, the Pentagon’s on fire.”

The staff at the NTSB headquarters in Washington, DC, just across the Potomac River, watched the black smoke rising.

Grosof called his mother and stepfather in Michigan and told them to go home from work, which was near Grand Rapids International Airport. At first, they gave Grosof a hard time, but then, they could hear in his voice that this was not a joke and complied.

“I’m going to New York,” he told them. “I will be in touch with you when I can. I will be safe, but if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, that’s going to be the norm.”

Even as the NTSB worked to figure out how to respond, one final hijacked plane was in the air.

United Airlines Flight 93, another Boeing 757, had taken off from Newark International Airport headed to San Francisco when controllers heard a mayday call from the pilots and the hijackers taking over the plane at 9:28 a.m.

“Ladies and Gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board,” a hijacker – thinking he was speaking to passengers in the cabin – told air traffic controllers in Ohio.

The plane’s transponder was turned off as it headed east toward Washington, DC.

At 9:42 a.m., the FAA grounded all flights nationwide.

Passengers onboard United Flight 93 learned about the other attacks in calls made from seatback air phones. They decide to fight back and storm the cockpit.

Amid the struggle, at 10:03 a.m, the hijackers crashed United Airlines Flight 93 in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

By 12:16 p.m., the last flight in the US had landed, clearing the country’s skies of 4,500 commercial and general aviation aircraft.

The NTSB investigators gathered in a room at approximately 3:30 p.m. to figure out how to help in the investigations.

They had to get investigators to the crash sites while the nation’s airspace was closed and no commercial planes were flying.

Acting NTSB chairwoman Carol Carmody told her assistant to call the FAA and get an airplane.

Who did it? How did they do it?

Everybody had questions for Rocheleau and his intelligence colleagues at the FAA. How many aircraft had been hijacked? Who could have done this? What was the available intelligence?

The news media, plus the Department of Defense, the FBI, the CIA and other federal agencies needed to be briefed on what was going on.

“The White House, the Department of Transportation — everyone was coming to the FAA, going, “What the hell just happened?” he said.

When he left the FAA headquarters that day, after working a nearly 20-hour shift, Rocheleau said there were still “a good number” of unanswered questions.

Prior to September 11, hijackings took place all over the world, but planes being used as weapons on this scale were new territory.

Who did it? How did they do it? Rocheleau was still pondering as he left work.

At the end of the marathon day, he would collapse when he got home to his wife and daughters, around 6 p.m. on September 11.

“We were so tired,” Rocheleau said. “There’s something energetic about an event like that. It’s sad. It’s tragic. It makes you furious.”

Planes across the country were still grounded, and the FAA needed to figure out when it would be safe again to let them back in the air.

‘The entire world had ceased to exist’

At approximately 6:30 p.m., NTSB investigator Grosof got into a cab and headed to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport’s hangar six, where the FAA kept its jets.

“I felt like I was in a science fiction movie,” Grosof said, as the crew drove through empty streets in Washington, DC. “The entire world had ceased to exist.”

The stench of jet fuel, debris and fire from the burning Pentagon spread throughout the city.

The airport had been barricaded, and the NTSB investigators had to show badges to police officers with long guns to pass through. They arrived at the hangar and boarded the FAA plane with tail number N1. It was white and baby blue with United States of America written across the side.

The plan was to fly to Johnston, Pennsylvania, and drop off half the team. The rest, including Grosof, would continue to New York, the nation’s most populous city – and the place Grosof was born.

Normally, on the way to an accident, the NTSB team would feel a driving, energetic force for the mission they had to complete, Grosof said.

This time was different.

It was a very somber flight, he said.

“This was a lot of people in shock…” Grosof said. “(I was) never forgetting that there’s victims behind all this, and families.”

The plane circled the United Airlines Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania as they landed. It was a sobering moment.

As the plane taxied to the terminal in Pennsylvania, Grosof looked out the window and noticed members of the military in ghillie suits, a type of camouflage, with long guns in bushes surrounding the runway. An FBI agent met Grosof on the plane’s stairs.

“We’re in a crazy time here,” the agent told him.

A law enforcement officer checked everyone’s IDs who were on the plane once more before they took off for New York. It was around 8 p.m.

As they began to approach the city, the pilot told the NTSB members to listen to air traffic control overhead speakers in the cockpit.

Silence.

“There is nothing in the sky,” Grosof said.

Grosof looked out over the pilot’s shoulder through the cockpit window and saw the cloud of smoke by Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center had stood until that morning.

“I knew where LaGuardia is, I knew where Kennedy was, I knew where Newark was from the sky — they were black holes,” Grosof said. “All the lights were turned off.”

After landing, the NTSB grabbed car rentals at LaGuardia Airport but were told to not return them until they were “absolutely positive” they no longer needed them – there was no telling whether or not they could get a car later. Many travelers in the US had taken to the roads.

A blanket from the towers

Hours went by on September 11 as McCormick was working around the clock to understand what had happened and if there were any remaining threats to the country’s skies.

McCormick would later call a friend to find out what happened to his other friend starting work in the North Tower that week. His friend was OK.

He asked his wife to meet him that afternoon with some toiletries, extra clothes and a pillow and blanket so he could sleep in his office.

He would be at work for 10 days.

Lying on a large couch in his office every evening, McCormick draped himself with the blanket she brought him. It was the Harry Potter blanket he bought the weekend prior at the World Trade Center.

“I assumed that I was in it for the long haul,” he said.

He would shut his eyes momentarily, only to get back up and get back to work.

The search continues

As Grosof drove with his NTSB coworkers through New York City at 80 mph through the Midtown tunnel, there was not a cab, a bus, or a car to be seen. Just New York firefighters and police cars.

“It really was the end of the world,” Grosof said.

The fires at Ground Zero were still burning, and would keep smoldering for 99 days, filling the air with the smell of “burning wet garbage,” Grosof said.

He was dispatched to the FBI’s interagency command post in Lower Manhattan in a 1940s brick building with heavy concrete floors and a parking garage.

He coordinated with American Airlines and United Airlines to make sure they could take care of the families of the passengers on board the hijacked planes. A “no compete” agreement was signed. If one victim’s family received a hotel suite, the other airline would match that for the families they were taking care of, he said.

Grosof was later tasked to work with the FBI to coordinate and assist in any way with the investigation.

At each of the crash sites, the search for the cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders – encased in orange metal, though often called black boxes – from the hijacked planes was underway.

In New York, investigators stood on the top of apartment buildings with binoculars looking for anything that was bright orange and might have been scattered when the aircraft hit the towers. None of the recorders from the New York planes were ever found.

That week, Grosof began seeing the posters and pictures of missing people going up on light posts and buildings. New York was looking for their loved ones who went to work on the morning of September 11 and hadn’t been seen since.

“It was so poignant what people were trying to do,” he said. “It was so basic in their desire to find their loved ones.”

Grosof was in New York for a little over three weeks.

As friends, family and strangers learned what he was doing, he felt a sense of embarrassment, he said.

“I wasn’t rescuing anybody,” he said. “I wasn’t looking for the dead. I was administrating phone calls, clipboards and dealing with questions on top of questions on top of questions.”

Yet even strangers would thank Grosof for his work. It was an odd feeling, he described.

Each night, Grosof would go to the bodega across the street from his hotel. The worker would eventually remember his order: three or four beers and a pastrami sandwich.

“I’d go back to the hotel at night, and I’d be really sad – for the loss of all these people, and the magnitude of it,” Grosof said.

He found himself watching “The Andy Griffith Show” or “The Simpsons” at night to distract himself from the tragedy.

Anything but the news.

Helping the FBI

For three months after the attacks, roughly six days a week doing 10-hour shifts, Rocheleau was assisting the FBI.

He was working on the investigation, codenamed “PENTTBOM,” short for Pennsylvania, Pentagon and Twin Towers Bombs.

“We were trying to figure out where these bad guys stayed, how they got their pilot training, where they were identified earlier in the process that nobody picked up on,” he said.

He also worked to decide how the FAA could reopen the skies safely, which included developing a “no-fly list.”

“They wanted to put everybody that had ever been on a bad guy list – they wanted to put them on the no-fly list, but we didn’t have the information for everybody,” Rocheleau said.

Airports and commercial flights began to reopen two days after the attacks, on September 13, but with stricter security policies and checks, according to the FAA.

‘Get the bad guys’

On November 19, 2001, the Transportation Safety Administration was created as a direct response to the terrorist attacks.

Rocheleau would work with the FBI through December, then eventually began to help develop the TSA in the new year. One of Rocheleau’s primary duties was to brief the new TSA administrator, John Magaw.

“The whole idea there was we have to make aviation security better,” he said. “We have to make airplanes better with cockpit doors. We have to have better procedures for talking to for pilots talking to controllers about suspicious behavior.”

But the country had other plans for Rocheleau, a special agent with the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

In spring 2002, he received orders to deploy to Saudi Arabia in July. He was proud of the work he was doing, but it was tough to leave his wife, 3-year-old and 1-year-old daughters.

“There’s thousands of people that have done that,” Rochleau said. “That’s a difficult thing to kind of say, ‘Hey, wife, you got the little ones. I’m going to war.’”

But he was driven by a bit of anger at the terrorists who attacked the US and his determination to “get the bad guys.”

“You’re trained to do this, and there was there was determination and pride about what we were about to do, how we were going to go in and make sure that these bad guys understood we were the best nation in the world,” he said. “We were going to take care of them and never let them do this again.”

Before he departed, he made a video tape to play on a VCR for his two young daughters, hoping they would remember his 35-year-old face and voice during the six months he was gone.

“Daddy’s away,” he told them repeatedly. “He’ll be back.”

Rocheleau spent the summer and fall of 2002 working with Saudi officials to gather intelligence on people who wanted to attack the US.

His work included wearing a disguise, sometimes posing as British or Canadian with an accent. He smoked flavored tobacco in a hookah with “bad guys” or cops to gather information. At night, he went back to tents on base that sometimes slept up to 30 people.

The intelligence Rocheleau gathered would help “make sure that people weren’t targeting the pilots that were flying missions over Iraq,” he said. “We didn’t want anybody getting kidnapped or getting shot at on the highways.”

He knew what he was there to do, but as he sat around a table in a chow hall on Thanksgiving, eating turkey and stuffing, he wanted more than anything to be at home with his family.

Rocheleau was in the Middle East until shortly before New Year’s Day 2003.

And eventually, the US did get some of the “bad guys.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators, is still awaiting trial. On May 2, 2011, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces during an early morning raid at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Several others have also been detained or accused of conspiring about the attacks.

Rocheleau came back to the US and worked with the TSA and the new Department of Homeland Security before returning to the FAA in 2005, where he served in various roles until 2022.

Last year, after a midair collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet over the Potomac River killed 67 people, Rocheleau returned to the FAA to serve as acting administrator.

He hasn’t forgotten what he learned from 2001 and the years after. Those are the principles that guided him as he led an organization tasked with keeping 44,000 flights and more than 3 million airline passengers safe each day.

He ran the agency until FAA administrator Bryan Bedford was confirmed in July 2025, then became deputy administrator. This summer, he returned to the National Business Aviation Association as chief operating officer.

Every year he’ll connect with some people that he worked with on September 11. He said there’s about five people he’ll grab a drink with and reflect.

“We will get together,” Rocheleau said. “We will reflect. We’ll probably share a drink and remember and catch up and move on.”

Teaching the next generation

McCormick retired from the FAA over 10 years ago and today teaches air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

He doesn’t want the next generation of air traffic controllers to forget what happened in 2001, despite most of them not even having been born yet.

“Many young adults now have no direct recollection of that day at all,” McCormick said.

While he said it may seem “trite,” he lives by “never forget, always remember, and never again.”

They never forget

Grosof hasn’t been to any of the 9/11 memorial sites since he finished up his work with the FBI in New York, aside from one trip to Shanksville to record an oral history for the National Park Service.

He said he doesn’t need to go visit – he remembers exactly what happened that day.

Twenty-five years later, he still carries the memories of those weeks in 2001 with him. He is currently the chief of the NTSB’s special operations division.

A friend and former FBI agent keeps Grosof and a list of others on an email chain and sends them a letter of remembrance on every anniversary. Several people have died since the attacks.

Grosof also keeps in touch with those he worked with when commercial airplanes were turned into weapons, and the world changed forever.

Every year, they never forget.

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