UAL 175 left
Logan International Airport at 8:14 AM on
September 11, 2001, bound for
Los Angeles International Airport. It was a
Boeing 767 carrying 56 passengers and nine crew members.
At 8:24, a US Airways captain radioed New York City's Air Route Traffic Control Center, and said: "New York, do a favor... were you asked to look for an aircraft, an American flight about about 8 or 9 o'clock 10 miles south bound last altitude 290? No one is sure where he is... we talked about him on the last frequency... we spotted him when he was at our 3 o'clock position. He did appear to us to be at 29,000 feet. We're not picking him up on TCAS. I'll look again and see if we can spot him at 24."
UAL 175 captain Victor Saracini, checking in with New York, added: "We figured we'd wait to go to your center. We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure from Boston: sounds like someone keyed the mike and said 'everyone stay in your seats.'"
The suspicious aircraft was American Airlines flight 11, which had been hijacked and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Only two minutes later, while the controllers continued to receive information from aircraft in the sky, a group of five terrorists took control of UAL 175, and began flying it toward Manhattan.
At 9:03, Flight 175 plowed into the South Tower at over 350 miles per hour. It was the second crash of September 11th. The collision was captured live by scores of news cameras already covering the World Trade Center disaster.
The South Tower stood for 47 minutes before collapsing.
The passengers on board included Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis, scouts for the Los Angeles Kings; BCT Technology chairman Heinrich Kimmig; and University of New Hampshire professor Robert LeBlanc.
The terrorists charged were Marwan Al-Shehhi, Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al Qadi Banihammad, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza Alghamdi, and Mohand Alshehri.