IAD, INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT DULLES  

My business colleague picked me up for a trip to the large Internet data center that he hoped to buy, with its strategic location on the Dulles airport campus near the massive fiber routes and Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAE-East) in Reston and Ashburn.
"A plane flew into a big  tower in New York, did you hear?"  
"Didn't have the radio on.  A small plane?"
"No, a big one."

We sat down with our counterparts for the conference that never happened.  The second plane struck.  A younger, thinner man came through the rear doors.  Behind him stood  the rows of racks, the isles of routers and servers, the fiber optic cables coming in along one wall and going out on the other. "I've never seen this much traffic.  Some routes are slowing down.  The Internet is starting to go."

He went back to his buddies in the NOC, the Network Operations Center.  Someone had an "in" to the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Herndon (it has since moved further west to Warrenton).  Soon it seemed the whole airport knew there were more ghost planes up there, and one of them was from our airport, a flight from Dulles Airport.  

It was then that I learned the FAA could not track American aircraft. They had let their primary radars fall into disrepair -- if they broke, there was no money to repair them.  The primaries are the passives,  the powerful radars that can ping a plane and hear the echo off the aluminum fuselage,  whether or not the plane's transponder broadcasts its response.  After murdering the pilots, the hijackers turned the transponders off.  We had lost our own airport's plane somewhere over West Virginia.  

Then a primary radar that still worked picked up the plane in Ohio, but it was turning around.  By this time, all over the airport campus, people were coming outside and looking at the sky, as if shielding their eyes with a hand would do what radar could not do.  Then Ohio had another plane turning around, towards Pennsylvania.  By now, we all knew what hijacked airplanes turned around to do.  

The Network Operations Center guy came out again.  "The Internet's down.  It's going down everywhere. I can't get through.   It's hard to find out anything."

It saw how the next attack would unfold -- first the virtual, then the physical.  Today we were going down under traffic overload, but next time they could take down the Internet and then strike.  It multiplies the panic.  Structural problems make our computer networks inherently insecure.

On  lawns everywhere, people scanned the sky, looking toward Washington, and argued over what it would try to hit.  The White House was too low, there were too many high buildings in the way, this morning's fog was still too thick along the Potomac River Valley.  "They don't call if Foggy Bottom for nothing. They won't go for the White House."  The plane would hit the Capitol instead, just go down the Mall to the Capitol dome.  Nobody picked the Pentagon, a squat building with nothing to knock over.  

"It's back!"  AA77's flight path returning from Ohio to Washington was straight into town.  By 9:30 it was down from 26,000 to 8,000 feet, but too far south of us to see.  It circled around almost 360 deg before striking.  Later, at a Christmas party, a guy said if they had slammed in on the River Entrance side instead of swinging all the way around to the back, it would have killed all the top brass in DoD. As it was, the entire 7-person Naval Intelligence unit tracking the WTC event was wiped out at their desks.  In this town, it is gospel that flight AA77 was headed for the White House (but lost it in the morning mist) and UA93 would take out the Capitol Dome.  AA77 improvised, repositioned for the Pentagon, and saved the Capitol for his buddies.  

At Dulles, we heard that UA93 had gone off the radar but had no idea what had happened, only that it was over.  Back home, I drove to the town's hardware store and bought my first American flag.  I fly it every Sunday, the house already had flag holders.   In another time, flying the country's flag must have seemed normal.  

PARACHUTE JUMP!  
The Towers captured everyone's imagination.  The first of 3 people to parachute off them was Owen J. Quinn, 1975.  When he got to the top, there was a problem.  The building does not go straight down. A cornice covers the top floors, so you cannot see the marble steps below. To get clear of the cornice, Quinn would need a running start and would have to dive blindly, head first.  He ran and jumped, wearing a jersey saying "But Jesus beheld them and said unto them, with men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible" (Matthew 19:26:).
 
"It was like jumping into a glass full of pencils," says Quinn. "All those other buildings coming up at me. And you know what I did? I laughed. Once I was over the side I was back in my element." Fifty floors down, level with the top of the old New York Telephone Co. Building, he pulled the rip cord. The chute popped open, spun him 180 degrees and...Wham! He smashed into the side of the tower, face-to-face with a very surprised secretary. A modern square parachute might have collapsed, but Quinn had decided to use an old Navy "conical" chute, and it bounced off in good shape. A fashion photographer and a couple of models were at work in the plaza.  "Take my picture!" he yelled, but they just scattered. Security people closed in on Quinn as he began stuffing his parachute back into the pack. He was handcuffed and taken to the First Precinct, where three cops brought him into an interrogation room and slammed the door shut. One of them handed him a pad of paper and a pen. He said, "I want you to sign this first one to my granddaughter...."  Judged sane by two psychiatric exams, he appeared in court 19 times to get charges of trespassing, disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment dropped.  
See Sports Illustrated.  

GLASS & STEEL SKYSCRAPERS

Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) bid on the contract, but the blast-proof glass for lower windows  was  bought from China (Shandong Glass).  At least the upper windows are Made In USA by Viracon in Minnesota (raw glass) and Benson Global in Oregon (finished facade panels).  

Compared to working with dirty iron ore (in blast furnaces we no longer have), clean electric furnaces fed with salvaged steel provide the control you need over metallurgy to convert scrap worth $100/ton to high-strength precision alloys and tool steels worth $600 to $1000/ton.

The steel scrap from the WTC not used for monuments (e.g., National Iron and Steel Museum, 500 tons; Denver Babi Yar Park, 100 tons) was sold mostly to China, Malaysia, Korea and India.  The Twin Towers used 200,000 tons of steel, but the site of so many destroyed buildings yielded 350,000 tons overall.  The I-beams for both the original and the new tower were rolled by a specialty steel mill in Luxembourg (ArcelorMittal) running electric furnaces fed with scrap (salvage) steel, but not ours.   On a happier note, 24 tons of the salvaged steel went to Amite Foundry and Machine in  Louisiana to be re-cast, of which 7.5 short tons (6.8 t) wound up in the USS New York's "stem bar", a part of the bow.  At least one man postponed his retirement just to be able to say his hands helped make it.  

A public contest for rebuilding designs was held and largely ignored.  Perhaps the most poignant suggestion from the  country's people was to place the crowning spire off-center, in evocation of the Statute of Liberty's lofted torch.  Ignored.

Battles long and hard saved the Survivor's Staircase over which so many escaped.   So little listening, so much pushing and shoving.  I was living in Australia as that country struggled with an over-budget, behind-schedule, impossible-to-build monument in their largest, most important city.  Today the Sydney Opera House is the unrivaled symbol of the new Australia.  Perhaps we, too, will stumble our way to proud glory.  We may even get there before it is time to build dikes against this century's multi-meter rise in ocean levels that renders futile everything you see in the photo above.     

--end
I will find the sunflower photo with its rush for life -- a better ending.