A Reporter Saw a Low Airliner Over Manhattan and Said It Was Terrorism

Eric Shawn was walking to work on the morning of September 11, 2001, heading south down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, when the sound stopped him. It was a clear blue fall day, primary day in New York, and the jet overhead was louder than a cruising plane should have been.

He looked up near 53rd Street and saw a large airliner flying oddly low, its nose pointed a little sideways as it moved, in the way pilots call crabbing. Then it banked and disappeared behind the buildings downtown. Shawn, a veteran New York television reporter who lived on the Upper East Side, first tried to explain it away. The plane was coming from the north, he thought, and would turn left toward LaGuardia Airport. For an instant, he worried it might clip the office tower above Penn Station. Then he kept walking.

What he had seen sent him running to his newsroom to tell viewers what kind of plane it was. Near 51st Street, where local news vans were parked outside the Women's Republican Club campaign headquarters, a crew member he knew shouted that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Shawn could see the burning tower on a monitor, and he ran the few blocks to his newsroom on 47th Street.

There, Vernon Gross, a former NTSB official, was telling viewers by phone that a small private plane had probably gotten lost in the sun. Shawn went to the assignment desk and said he had seen the plane himself.

He went on the air, still out of breath, while John Scott was anchoring. He said it was not a small Cessna, the kind of two or four seat propeller plane many people learn to fly in, but an airliner, which he estimated as a Boeing 737. And, in Shawn's words, "I thought it was a terrorist attack by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden," Al Qaeda being the militant group led by bin Laden that Shawn said he immediately suspected. He said later that he just knew it right away.

He had no official information, only what his eyes and ears had told him on Fifth Avenue, the extra loud engine and the strange angle. He apologized to viewers for breathing hard, and kept reporting.