11 settembre

The Knights expelled from Rhodes held Birgu and Senglea against a huge Ottoman fleet for almost four months, under Grand Master Jean de Valette, until a Spanish relief force landed and the besiegers sailed away.

Christopher Wren gave the King a plan of wide avenues and piazzas radiating from a new St Paul’s and the Exchange, nine days after the fire began. Evelyn brought his own two days later, and Robert Hooke another. None was built: owners rebuilt on their old plots.

The family came to Vienna for the wedding of the Archduchess Maria Josepha, who died of smallpox instead. They fled the epidemic to Olmütz in Moravia, where both children caught it anyway and were nursed in the cathedral deanery. Back in Vienna the Emperor Joseph II suggested an opera, but La…

Lake beat the Maratha army outside Delhi and took the blind emperor Shah Alam into the Company’s “protection”. By now Dalrymple counts the Company’s private army at about 260,000 men, twice the size of the British army.

The Nez Perce road over the Bitterroot Mountains, in early snow. Game was scarce; the men lived on portable soup and their own colts. Clark went ahead with six hunters to find food on the far side.

A parcel arrives from Haarlem for Van Helsing: a bundle of white flowers. He tells Lucy they are medicine, to be hung round her neck and rubbed round the window, and when she says they are “only common garlic” he answers sternly: “No trifling with me! I never jest!”

A 30-year-old monk from Calcutta opened with “Sisters and Brothers of America” and was cheered. He carried Advaita Vedānta to Western audiences as a universal philosophy.

On the opening day in Chicago the young Hindu monk began “Sisters and Brothers of America” and was cheered for minutes. With the Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala and the Zen abbot Soyen Shaku he brought Asian religions to a Western audience. The cover photograph shows the Parliament’s stage.

Needing a word for resistance that was not “passive”, Indian Opinion ran a competition. His cousin Maganlal suggested sadagraha, firmness in a good cause, and Gandhi changed it to satyagraha: holding firmly to truth. Eight years of it sent thousands of Indians to jail.

A new Transvaal ordinance would make every Indian over eight register and give fingerprints. At a mass meeting some 3,000 Indians swore in God’s name not to submit, whatever the penalty. London withheld its assent, and the self-governing Transvaal passed it again in 1907.

On a photographic plate taken at the Königstuhl observatory, Max Wolf found the comet long before anyone could see it by eye: the first return found by photography. Later searches turned it up on an earlier plate, taken on 24 August at Helwan in Egypt, that nobody had noticed.

The first Summer Games shown on television across Europe. Wilma Rudolph, who had worn a leg brace as a child, won three sprint golds, and an 18-year-old Cassius Clay won the light heavyweight boxing.

West Germany’s “cheerful Games”, meant to show a different country from 1936, with light security on purpose. Mark Spitz won seven swimming golds, each in a world record, and Olga Korbut’s gymnastics made her a star.

Air force jets bombed La Moneda, and President Salvador Allende died inside. Washington had worked for three years to undermine his elected socialist government. Under General Augusto Pinochet more than 3,000 people were killed or disappeared, by the count of Chile’s truth commissions.

Warner Communications bought Atari for $28 million in 1976 to pay for it. The Video Computer System, later called the Atari 2600, went on sale in North America for $199 with nine games. Its chips could hold only one line of the picture at a time, so programmers had to redraw the screen in step…

Janet Parker, a medical photographer who worked a floor above a smallpox laboratory at the University of Birmingham Medical School, fell ill in August and died on 11 September: the last person known to die of smallpox. Her mother caught it and survived. The laboratory’s head, Henry Bedson, took…

A Boeing 767 bound for Los Angeles, it left Logan at 7:59 with 81 passengers, five of them hijackers, and 11 crew under Captain John Ogonowski. It was the first of the four flights to take off.

Just before 8:14 the pilots acknowledged a routine instruction to turn; sixteen seconds later they did not answer an order to climb. The Commission put the hijacking at 8:14 or shortly after, about fifteen minutes into the flight.

Also a Boeing 767 from Logan to Los Angeles, with 56 passengers, five of them hijackers, and nine crew under Captain Victor Saracini. It took off at 8:14, the minute American 11 was taken over.

Flight attendant Betty Ong reached American's reservations office in Cary, North Carolina, on a seatback phone and stayed on the line for about 25 minutes. She reported that the cockpit was not answering, that someone had been stabbed in business class and that she thought they were being hijacked.

A Boeing 757 from Dulles to Los Angeles, with 58 passengers, five of them hijackers, and six crew under Captain Charles Burlingame. It took off at 8:20.

Someone in the cockpit switched off the transponder, the device that tags a plane's blip with its identity and altitude. Boston Center could still follow the aircraft as a primary radar return, but no longer read its height.

A hijacker keyed the radio, apparently meaning to address the cabin, and the Boston Center controller heard: “We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport.” The Commission took its first chapter's title from the transmission.

The first word to the military came from Boston Center, by phone to NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector: a hijacked aircraft was headed towards New York. NEADS asked, “Is this real-world or exercise?” The answer: “No, this is not an exercise, not a test.”

The crew of United 175 told New York Center they had heard a suspicious transmission just after leaving Boston, most likely from American 11. It was their last radio call; the Commission judged the hijacking began between 8:42 and 8:46.

A Boeing 757 from Newark to San Francisco, with 37 passengers, four of them hijackers, and seven crew under Captain Jason Dahl. Due out at 8:00, it waited in the morning traffic and took off at 8:42, the last of the four.

Flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney had been reporting to American's flight services office at Logan since 8:25. Asked where the plane was, she said: “We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low.”

NEADS ordered two F-15s at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod to battle stations and then into the air; they were airborne at 8:53, with no target to intercept. American 11 had already struck the North Tower, and the military had no warning of United 175 before it hit.

The plane hit the north face of 1 World Trade Center between floors 93 and 99, killing everyone aboard and an unknown number inside. All three stairwells were cut at the impact zone, so no one above it could get down. NIST's timing, from video and seismic records, is 8:46:30.

For 102 minutes jet fuel and office contents burned across several floors while people below the impact walked down the stairs and firefighters climbed up them. Above the impact zone there was no way out.

The transponder code changed, and changed again within a minute. The New York Center controller was busy with American 11 and did not notice for several minutes; at 8:51 the flight also left its assigned altitude.

A public-address announcement in the South Tower said the trouble was in the other building and that theirs was safe: tenants should stay on or return to their floors. Many had already left; at 9:02 another announcement said they could begin an orderly evacuation if conditions warranted, a minute…

Passenger Peter Hanson called his father in Easton, Connecticut, and asked him to alert United: a flight attendant had been stabbed and the plane seemed to have been hijacked. He called again at 9:00.

Two minutes after turning south off its route to the west, American 77's transponder went off. Indianapolis Center, which was not tracking primary radar there, lost it altogether and believed it had crashed; for over half an hour nobody knew where it was.

Hit second, it fell first: 56 minutes after the impact. NIST found that the plane had struck lower and off-centre, stripping fireproofing from the steel over a wider area and leaving more floors above the damage.

The plane banked into the south face of 2 World Trade Center between floors 77 and 85. Television cameras trained on the burning North Tower carried the impact live. One stairwell survived, and a handful of people from above the impact zone escaped down it. NIST times the impact at 9:02:59.

In a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered to President Bush: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” The President stayed in the room for another five to seven minutes, not wanting to alarm the children.

Flight attendant Renee May called her mother in Las Vegas: the flight had been hijacked and the passengers moved to the back of the plane. She asked her parents to call American Airlines, which they did.

At 9:21 the FAA passed on a mistaken report that American 11 was still airborne and heading for Washington. NEADS scrambled three fighters from Langley, Virginia. Airborne at 9:30, they were sent east over the ocean on a standard route and were far from Washington when the Pentagon was hit.

The FAA's Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, ordered a nationwide ground stop: no aircraft anywhere in the United States could take off, whatever its destination.

United dispatcher Ed Ballinger had begun warning his transcontinental flights to beware of cockpit intrusion. His message reached United 93 at 9:24, and Captain Dahl typed back, puzzled: “Ed, confirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”

At 35,000 feet above eastern Ohio the plane suddenly dropped 700 feet. Cleveland Center heard two transmissions from the cockpit: sounds of a struggle, and a crew member shouting “Mayday”. The hijackers then turned the plane back towards the east.

In the school library, before an audience of about 200, Bush called the crashes “an apparent terrorist attack on our country” and said: “Terrorism against our nation will not stand.”

Controllers at the Dulles approach facility saw a primary radar target moving east at high speed and alerted Reagan National, which warned the Secret Service. At 9:34, about five miles west-southwest of the Pentagon, the plane began a descending 330-degree turn.

Warned of an aircraft approaching Washington, Secret Service agents hurried Dick Cheney from his office into the White House's underground tunnel. He reached the shelter conference room of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center shortly before 10:00.

At about 530 miles per hour, the plane flew into the west face of the Pentagon at ground level, killing all 64 aboard and 125 people in the building.

The hijackers switched off the transponder as the plane flew back across Ohio and Pennsylvania. By then passengers and crew were calling out on airphones and cell phones: at least ten passengers and two crew reached people on the ground, and learned that other planes had hit the World Trade Center.

On hearing that the Pentagon had been hit, the Command Center's national operations manager, Ben Sliney, ordered every aircraft over the United States to land at the nearest airport. It had never been done. About 4,500 commercial and general aviation aircraft came down without incident.

The President's plane took off without a fixed destination; the Secret Service wanted it airborne first. It later flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

About twenty minutes after the impact, the floors above the most heavily damaged part of the outer rings fell in. Firefighters from Arlington County and its neighbours had already pulled back from that section.

After what at least one call described as a vote, the passengers charged the cockpit. One flight attendant ended her call: “Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye.” The cockpit recorder captured the assault on the door.

2 World Trade Center came down in about ten seconds, 56 minutes after it was hit, killing everyone still inside and many in the plaza and lobbies around it, among them firefighters who had gone in to help.

With the passengers still fighting, the plane rolled onto its back and plowed into an empty field at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington. All 40 passengers and crew died. The Commission believed the target was the Capitol or the White House.

1 World Trade Center fell 102 minutes after it was struck. Of the 343 New York firefighters who died that day, most were in or near the towers. Debris from the North Tower set fires in 7 World Trade Center, which burned unchecked until it collapsed at 5:20 in the afternoon.