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The Phone Calls That Bought Eight Minutes - Did Anyone Reach Safety? · Aviation Survival Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 9.03 in the morning on September 11th, 2001, a
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Boeing 767 traveling at 590 miles per hour struck the
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: South Tower of the World Trade Center. Inside that cockpit,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: two men had already been dead for the better part
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: of 20 minutes. Nobody on the ground would ever hear
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: their last words because the two instruments built to survive
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: exactly this kind of catastrophe, the flight data recorder and
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: the cockpit voice recorder were never recovered, not destroyed in
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: any provable sense. not damaged beyond recognition, simply gone and
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: never found. One piece of that same aircraft would surface
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: 12 years later, wedged into a gap between two buildings
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: four blocks from where the tower had stood. Nobody would
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: know it was there until a routine inspection found it.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: That is where this story ends. It does not start there.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: It starts 49 minutes earlier, and 49 minutes is not much.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: It is not hours of dread. It is not a
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: slow unraveling anyone could see coming and step off of.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: It is barely enough time for a routine flight to
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: become the second deadliest aviation disaster in history, and for
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the instruments that were supposed to explain how to vanish
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: along with it. At a gate in Boston, 60 people
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: boarded a plane built to carry more than 150. Whole
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: rows sat empty that morning. In seat 30E sat Peter Hansen,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: his wife Sue, and their daughter Christine. Christine had turned
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: two years old seven months before, on her way to
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: California to see her grandparents. Her father would later say
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: the trip was supposed to give her a first real
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: memory of the Pacific Ocean. She never got one. Neither
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: did anyone else on United Airlines Flight 175. This is
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: not a story about what was inevitable. It is a
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: story about what was visible. The warnings that surfaced and
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: then disappeared, the phone calls made in the final minutes,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: and the 56 minutes that followed impact before the South
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Tower fell. Victor Saraceni had flown for United for 16
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: years when he took the left seat that morning. He
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: was 51, a former Navy fighter pilot who had spent
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: years landing jets on carrier decks in conditions that would
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: ground most civilian pilots for a week. He understood controlled violence.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: He understood mechanical failure. The Navy trains a pilot for
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: exactly the kind of crisis military aviation expects. Engines failing,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: weather closing in, a deck pitching under a landing gear
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: at night. Nothing in 16 years of procedure manuals or
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: in a career built on handle and control danger, had
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: prepared a 51-year-old airline captain for five men rising quietly
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: from their seats with knives already in hand. His first officer,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Michael Horrocks, was 38, a former Marine Corps fighter pilot,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: two years into flying for United. Between the two men
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: in that cockpit sat some of the most demanding flight
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: training in the world. Carrier landings, combat maneuvers, split-second decisions
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: under fire. That is what makes what happened to them worse,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: not better. The evidence shows neither man ever had a
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: real chance to respond. Behind them, the cabin crew was
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: mostly new. Purser Catherine Labrie led six flight attendants, three
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: of whom had been with the airline less than a year.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Robert Fangman, Alfred Marchand.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: And Alicia Titus were all still in the early months
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: of careers they had likely pictured stretching for decades. Years
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: of routine flights, layovers, ordinary passengers. Fangman was 23. Before
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: the morning was over, he would make one of the
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: most important phone calls in the entire investigation. From a
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: service phone in the back of the aircraft, he was
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: still learning to call routines. The plane itself carried its
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: own quiet history. Registration N612UA, a Boeing 767-200, delivered to
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: United in 1983. 18 years old that morning, serviced, certified,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: mechanically sound in every respect investigators would later check. Nothing
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: was wrong with this airplane. The investigation would confirm it
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: performed exactly as designed, right up until the moment five
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: men decided otherwise. Only 60 seats were filled that day,
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: against a plane built for more than double that. 162
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: seats sat empty. The season's average load on this route
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: ran near half full. This flight was a third full.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: Empty air rows meant more distance between strangers, more silence
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: between rows, and more room for five men to move
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: down the aisle without anyone standing in the way. Somewhere
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: in the reshuffling before boarding, the Hansons had been moved.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: They were originally ticketed in row 19 near the front.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: By the time the doors closed, they were further back,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: in row 30. That shift put them nearer to where
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: passengers would soon be forced to gather. It also put
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Peter Hansen within reach of a phone he would use
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: twice in the last eight minutes of his life. The
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: oldest person aboard was Dorothy D'Araujo, 82, from Long Beach, California,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: the same city the flight was bound for. She was
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: not headed toward a first memory of anywhere. She was
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: simply flying home, the way people her age fly, unremarkably,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: the destination already familiar. At 8.42, Captain Saraceni made his
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: last radio call to New York Center. He told controller
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: Dave Battiglia, that he had heard something strange bleed through
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: on the frequency. A voice, not his own crew's, saying,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Everyone stay in your seats. He was reporting a transmission
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: from American Airlines Flight 11, hijacked 28 minutes ahead of him.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: He did not know that yet. He did not know
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: that the men who would take his own airplane had
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: been sitting quietly in their seats, watching him, for those
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: same 28 minutes. Four minutes later, Flight 175 dropped off
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: the frequency.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: For good. No one can say the exact minute the
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: hijacking began.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Somewhere between 8.42 and 8.46, in a window with no
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: surviving recorder to mark it. What exists instead comes from
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: three sources, a radar track, a transponder, and the voices
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: of people who picked up airplane phones while the aircraft
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: was still in the sky. Fayez Bani Hamid and Mohand
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Al-Sheri moved toward the cockpit first. The Al-Ghamdi brothers used knives, mace,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: and the threat of a bomb to drive passengers and
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: crew toward the back. A flight attendant was stabbed. Both
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: pilots were killed. Marwan Al-Shihi, who had spent months training
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: on a commercial license in South Florida, took the controls.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: The transponder told its own version of events, in numbers.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: The code jumped three times in rapid succession, from 1470
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: to 3020 to 321, each change in attempt to slip
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: off the radar screen to disappear.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: It did the opposite.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: To Batilia, watching his scope, it announced that something on
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: that airplane had gone catastrophically wrong.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: He called five times. Silence, five times.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: He began clearing other aircraft out of the way, and
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: the airspace over New York nearly kept this from becoming
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: a two-plane story. Flight 175 passed a Delta jet with
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: roughly 300 feet to spare. It passed a TWA flight
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: with roughly 500. Both crews felt turbulence roll through their
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: own cabins in its wake and had no idea, in
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: that moment, what had just gone by them. Then, in
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: the final seconds of its descent, it missed a Midwest
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Express DC-9 by 30 feet.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: 30 feet.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: While the controller working that corridor screamed into his headset
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: in a way the Midwest Express pilot... said he had
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: never heard from a controller in his career. Four people
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: on that plane were hurt bracing for a collision that
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: never came. At 8.52, Robert Fangman reached United's maintenance.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Office in San Francisco.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: 23 years old, less than a year on the job,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: and he stayed on the line with a man named
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Mark Pulicastro for one minute and 15 seconds. He said
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: the hijackers were likely flying the plane. He said both
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: pilots were dead. He said a flight attendant had been stabbed.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: He said it in the flat, procedural language a 23-year-old
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: had been trained to use when reporting an emergency. because
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: that training was the only structure he had left to
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: hold on to. Then the call cut out. Helicastro, still
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: not fully grasping what he had just heard, sent a
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: message straight to the cockpit. I heard of a reported
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: incident aboard your aircraft. Please verify all is normal.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: Nothing came back.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: At almost the same moment, Peter Hansen reached his father, Lee,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: in Easton, Connecticut. Hijackers in the cockpit, he said. The
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: plane is flying erratically.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: Call United. Lee tried. He could not get through. He
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: called the police instead.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: At 8.58 and 45 seconds, flight attendant Brian David Sweeney
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: tried his wife Julie and got her voicemail. He left
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: a message. 17 seconds later, his mother, Louise, picked up.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: He told her the plane had been hijacked. He told
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: her some of the passengers were talking about storming the cockpit. Then,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: before anything else, mother and son said goodbye to each other.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Three seconds into that call, Peter Hansen dialed his father
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: a second time. What Lee Hansen heard in those final
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: seconds has never left the record.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: Peter's voice.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: It's getting bad, Dad. A stewardess was stabbed. They seem
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: to have knives and mace. They said they have a bomb.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: I don't think the pilot is flying the plane. I
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: think we are going down. I think they intend to
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it'll be very fast.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: My God. My God.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: My God. The call ended. Lee Hansen heard a woman
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: screaming behind it. Then nothing.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: He turned on his television. Across the state, Louise Sweeney
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: turned on hers. Two mothers and fathers, two living rooms.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: The same image arriving as confirmation of what a phone
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: had already told them. At 9.03, Flight 175 struck the
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: South Tower's southern face in a banking left turn. In
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: its last minutes the descent rate had reached 10,000 feet
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: per minute. A number Batilia would later call absolutely unheard
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: of for a commercial jet, dropping more than 24,000 feet
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: in five minutes and four seconds. Al-Shahi did not merely
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: aim the airplane at the tower. He accelerated into it.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: Above the impact zone, on the floors the plane had
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: just torn through, 18 people found a single stairway still standing,
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Stairway A, and got out. Everyone else on those floors
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: searched for stairwells the aircraft had already destroyed and did
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: not find one in time. Below them, rescue workers were
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: climbing toward floors that no longer existed in any stable
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: structural sense, and telephone operators stayed on lines with people
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: on those floors they could not reach and could not
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: save for 56 minutes, because 56 minutes, because 56 minutes
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: was how long the tower held. At 9.59, The south
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: tower came down. Everyone still inside it. Above the line
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: the plane had cut through the building. Died in that collapse.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Including everyone who had survived the impact itself, but had
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: not reached a stairwell in time. The 18 who had
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: escaped made it out just before the building they had
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: been standing in. in ceased to be a building at all.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: Of the 60 people who had boarded Flight 175 in Boston,
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: the remains of many were never recovered. A six-inch bone
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: fragment was later identified as Peter Hansen's. Small fragments matched
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Lisa Frost. In 2008, seven years after the attack, DNA
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: analysis finally put a name to remains belonging to Alona Abraham.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Christine Hansen, two years old, on her way to her
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: first memory of an ocean she never saw, was not
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: among those the public record names by name. Ahmed Al-Ghandi
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: left almost nothing behind. His Saudi Arabian driver's license was
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: pulled from the wreckage at the World Trade Center site,
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: intact enough to read.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: It is the only trace of him the investigation could identify.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: The man could not answer his own security screening questions
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: clearly enough that the counteragent repeated them to him twice,
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: and he still boarded, And in the end, the one
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: thing that survived him was a laminated card confirming who
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: he was. In April of 2013, 11 years and seven
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: months after the crash, a property inspector working four blocks
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: from the Old World Trade Center site found a five-foot
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: section of a Boeing 767 wing flap wedged into the
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: narrow gap between two buildings on Park Place. Investigators confirmed
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: the part was consistent with a 767. A small tag
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: still attached to it read N612UA, the tail number of
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: flight 175. It had been sitting there, unseen, through more
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: than a decade of foot traffic on a Manhattan sidewalk,
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: while the city rebuilt around it. It is now held
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: by the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, cataloged as
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: physical evidence of a flight whose black boxes never turned up.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: That failure, the missing recorders, sits inside a larger one.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, built specifically to flag
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: exactly this kind of threat, flagged none of the five
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: men who boarded Flight 175, Hamza and Ahmed Al-Ghamdi struggled
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: to answer standard questions at the counter. The agent asked again.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: They still passed. Their weapons, two pocket knives, a utility
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: knife set, a multi-tool, had been bought weeks earlier at
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: a Walmart and a sports authority in Florida. All of
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: it perfectly legal, none of it tripping a single alarm.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Sixty people died, two of them decorated military pilots with
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: more flight discipline than almost anyone else on that airplane,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: because a screening system did not ask one more question,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: and because everything the five men carried onto that plane was,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: on paper, ordinary. Walk that morning forward from any single point,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: and change one detail, a flagged boarding pass, a bag
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: pulled for a second look, a question answered differently at
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the counter, and the entire chain breaks before it reaches
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: the runway. Not one of those details changed, not one.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: And yet one person aboard that flight understood what was
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: happening faster than any of the institutions built to catch it.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: Peter Hansen had no training, no radio, no data, only
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: a phone and eight minutes, and whatever he could see
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: and hear around him.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: Picture what that actually required.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: A passenger with no access to the cockpit, reconstructing the
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: shape of a suicide attack from the behavior of five
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: men with pocket knives, from the angle of the plane's turns,
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: from how fast it was losing altitude. From that alone,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: reasoning in real time under terror, he told his father
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: the hijackers intended to fly the plane into a building
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: He guessed Chicago. He was wrong about the city, and
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: right about everything that mattered.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: He named a suicide attack.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Out loud, to another human being, before air traffic control
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: fully understood it. Before the military understood it. Before the
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: government understood it. A passenger with a phone got there first.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: There is no cockpit recording to compare his account against.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: There never will be.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: What exists instead is a radar track, a transponder that
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: tried and failed to disappear, and the voices of people
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: who were not pilots or investigators. just passengers and one
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: young flight attendant, trying to reach someone who loved them
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: before the line went dead. That is the whole record,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: and it is worth saying plainly what it is not.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: It is not incomplete in the sense of being unclear.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: The sequence of that morning is established with precision, minute
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: by minute, transmission by transmission. What is simply absent is
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: the sound of what happened behind the cockpit door in
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: the final seconds. Whatever Victor Saraceni or Michael Horrocks said
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: or did in the moments they were killed, whether either
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: man had time to reach for a control, a switch,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: anything at all, It will not be recovered. In its
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: place is something a black box could never have given
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: anyone anyway, a father's voice and his son telling him
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: not to worry and meaning it in.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: The last seconds he had. The names of all 60 people.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Aboard Flight 175 are inscribed today at the National September
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: 11th Memorial. They are not arranged alphabetically and they are
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: not grouped by flight number or seat row the way
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: an investigation file would group them. The memorial's architects placed
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: each name near the names of the people that person
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: knew in life so that colleagues stand together. and strangers
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: who happened to be seated near each other on a
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: nearly empty plane stand together, and family stand together. Peter, Sue,
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: and Christine Hansen are inscribed side by side. The design
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: carries a simple idea, built directly against everything a case
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: file does. The 60 people who died on that airplane
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: did not die as a list, a load factor, a
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: transponder code, or a set of forensic samples waiting for
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: a DNA match. They died as a web of people
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: who knew and loved each other, and the memorial was
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: built to hold that shape rather than let it collapse
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: back into an index. Think for a moment about who
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: you would call if you had eight minutes and knew
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: exactly how they would end. Not who you should call,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: who you actually would. Most people would not need to
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: look up the number, would not need to think about
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: it at all, the way you don't think about a
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: number you've dialed a thousand times. Peter Hansen didn't. Neither
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: did Brian Sweeney. That is what those final calls were.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Not statements for an investigation, not testimony for a case
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: file that would take years to close, But the last
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: use of an ordinary and familiar thing, a home phone
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: number known by heart, reached for because there was nothing
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: else left in the world to give. Flight 175 remains
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: the second deadliest aviation disaster on record. Only American Airlines
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Flight 11, which struck the North Tower 17 minutes earlier
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: that same morning, killed more people, flown by a man
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: who had trained alongside Marwan al-Shahi for two years in
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: South Florida. The two flights were planned together and launched
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: within minutes of each other. They are separated in the
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: history books only because the record keeps them that way.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Peter Hansen told his father that if it happened, it
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: would be very fast. He had no way to know that.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: He said it anyway, because it was the only comfort
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: a son had left to offer. And the investigation later
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: confirmed he was right. At 590 miles per hour, the
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: structural failure was instantaneous. For the people in the immediate
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: impact zone, there was no interval between the moment of
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: impact and the end of anything. Christine Hansen was two
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: years old. She was supposed to see the Pacific Ocean
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: for the first time. She never got there, and neither
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: did the 59 people flying with her. And the five
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: men who caused it were never arrested, never tried, never convicted,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: because there was no one left alive to charge. The
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: legal system built to process violence like this had nothing
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: left to process. The screening system built to prevent it
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: had already let them through, twice, without a second look.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: And a father with no training and no way out
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: understood what they were doing before anyone whose job it
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: was to know. What is left of that morning is
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: not a courtroom record. It is a bone fragment identified
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: years later. It is a driver's license, intact, when almost
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: nothing else survived. It is a piece of the airplane
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: that carried Christine toward an ocean she never reached, sitting
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: forgotten in the dark for 11 years, four blocks from
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: where it landed, still wearing the tag that had named
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: it since 1983, waiting for someone to look up and
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: notice it was there.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: This show is made by Oble Media.