American Airlines flight 77

American Airlines flight 77, flight scheduled to travel from Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles International Airport on September 11, 2001, that was hijacked by terrorists and deliberately crashed into the Pentagon as part of the September 11 attacks.

The American Airlines Boeing 757-200 took off 10 minutes behind schedule at 8:20 am on September 11 with a crew of 6 and a scant 53 passengers. They encompassed three children and three teachers and some officials on a National Geographic Society field trip, the political pundit Barbara Olson (wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson), as well as people traveling for work or for vacation and people returning home. In addition, five hijackers boarded the flight. One of the hijackers, Hani Hanjour, was a trained pilot. About half an hour after takeoff, the hijackers took control of the aircraft.

Timeline of American Airlines flight 77

Note: All times listed are Eastern Daylight Time.

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Disasters of Historic Proportion

• 8:54 am: The westbound plane turned to the south, a deviation from its flight plan. Two minutes later the airplane’s transponder was turned off. Radar contact was also lost. An air traffic controller at the Indianapolis Air Traffic Control Center tried repeatedly to make contact with the pilot; receiving no response, he contacted American Airlines, which was similarly unsuccessful. Unaware of the earlier hijackings, the air traffic controllers began notifying other agencies that the plane might have crashed.
• 9:09 am: The Indianapolis Air Traffic Control Center notified the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regional center that it had lost contact with flight 77.
• 9:12 am: One of the flight attendants, Renee May, used her cell phone to call her mother; she asked her mother to tell American Airlines that the flight had been hijacked. A couple of minutes later, Barbara Olson phoned her husband to tell him that the plane had been hijacked and that all the people aboard had been herded to the back of the plane. It was about that same time that the Indianapolis Air Traffic Control Center learned from American Airlines that other planes had been hijacked. A discussion ensued between the FAA command center and Indianapolis, and another confused conversation took place between the FAA and the Northeast Air Defense Sector.
• In the meantime, flight 77 traveled undetected back toward Washington for 36 minutes.
• 9:32 am: Air traffic controllers at Dulles found an unidentified aircraft traveling east at a high rate of speed and notified their compatriots at Reagan National Airport. FAA officials at both airports notified the Secret Service, and controllers at Reagan ordered an airborne National Guard cargo plane to find and follow the unidentified aircraft.
• 9:34 am: Flight 77 was 5 miles (8 km) west-southwest of the Pentagon; it executed a sharp turn and quick descent and dove toward the Pentagon.
• 9:37 am: American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon.

The plane hit the outer wall between the first and second floors and smashed through three of the Pentagon’s five concentric rings. The jet fuel exploded into a fireball, and about half an hour later a section of the building above where the plane hit collapsed. By that time, most people working there had been evacuated. However, 125 people working in the building were killed, as were the 59 crew and passengers, and the 5 hijackers on the plane. The Pentagon had recently been upgraded in response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and this likely prevented worse damage and a higher death toll. The impact, fire, and collapse of the affected part of the building destroyed most of the aircraft, leaving only a few pieces of wreckage.

How does American Airlines flight 77 fit into the larger timeline of events on September 11, 2001? Read Britannica’s Timeline of the September 11 Attacks.

Other hijacked planes

In addition to flight 77, three other planes were also hijacked on September 11, 2001: United Airlines Flight 93, American Airlines flight 11, and United Airlines flight 175. Flight 93 took off from Newark International Airport in New Jersey, with a destination of San Francisco. Following a vote, passengers rushed the cockpit in an attempt to retake the plane. As they started to breach the cockpit door, hijackers crashed the plane into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Forty people died. Flights 11 and 175 were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City. The crashes and subsequent collapse of the North and South towers resulted in the deaths of 2,753 people, per official records.