A captain tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Sir, we just had an aircraft hit the World Trade Center.” I started to correct him, saying, “When you have an exercise input you have to start by saying, ‘I have an exercise input.’ That way it doesn’t get confused with the real world.” Then he just pointed me to the TV screens in the command center. You could see smoke pouring out of the building. Like everyone else in aviation that day, I thought, “How in a clear-and-a-million day could someone hit the World Trade Center?” Karl Rove: I remember [Andy Card] pausing at the door, before he went in, it seemed like forever, but it was probably just a couple heartbeats. I never understood why, but he told me, years later, that he needed to spend a moment formulating the words he wanted to use. The Only Plane in the Sky is nothing less than the first comprehensive oral history of 9/11, deftly woven and told in the voices of ordinary people grappling with extraordinary events. Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, new and archived interviews from nearly five hundred people, historian Garrett Graff skilfully tells the story of the day as it was lived. Aboard Air Force One, en route to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Pictured from left are: Andy Card; Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary; Blake Gottesman, Personal Aide to the President; Karl Rove, Senior Adviser; Deborah Loewer, Director of White House Situation Room, and Dan Bartlett, Deputy Assistant to the President. | U.S. National Archives

At 9:59 a.m., those inside the bunker—as well as millions more glued to TV screens around the country—watched in horror as the South Tower fell. Maj. Scott Crogg: We watched Air Force One come up, but we still don’t really know anything. It’s pretty impressive, seeing Air Force One come up in the air. One of the more striking story arcs within the book — and one of the few stories here with a happy ending — is that of Louise and Pasquale Buzzelli. Pasquale worked in the north World Trade Center tower and had spoken to his pregnant wife on the phone shortly before it collapsed. Knowing her husband hadn't made it out, she assumed she had watched him die on live television when the building went down. He somehow was pulled from the rubble alive and called her later in the day to tell her the news. The only time I laughed reading this book: when Louise recounts how her Italian mother-in-law greeted Pasquale when he finally got home that night. "You must be hungry! Sit down, I want to make you a nice sandwich!"Commander Anthony Barnes : Shortly thereafter, I looked around and there was Condi Rice, there was Karen Hughes, there was Mary Matalin, there was [Transportation Secretary] Norm Mineta. Mr. Mineta put up on one of the TV monitors a feed of where every airplane across the entire nation was. We looked at that thing—there must have been thousands of little airplane symbols on it. Sonya Ross: As we left, they didn’t know how long we’d be gone. They told us that they’d arrange accommodations if we had to be gone a day or two. I told my bureau chief, “I don’t know where we’re going and I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.” Reading a work of historical nonfiction is unique because, unlike fiction, we often know how an event plays out and how the story ends before we even open the book. What was it like to read the opening chapters knowing what was about to happen next?

Sep Ann Compton, reporter, ABC News: We were standing in the press cabin. A lot of people were too nervous to sit down. A Secret Service agent was in the aisle and he pointed at the monitor and said, “Look down there, Ann, we’re at 45,000 feet and we have no place to go.” I’ve never worked on any project as emotional as this one, and even knowing how wrenching the day was, I was unprepared for how emotional writing this book turned out to be. I cried most days while I was compiling the first draft of the book, poring over the oral histories and the words of those who lived through the day. My wife and I had had our first child just as I was starting writing, and, man, I just wept over the stories of children losing their parents that day. But there were all manner of moments I found myself moved by—the undocumented immigrants who wanted to show up at the Pentagon, the coworkers who carried their colleagues down the stairs of the Twin Towers, the phone calls from those trapped to their loved ones. At the same time, I’m always amazed at the bravery of the firefighters and first responders who went up the stairs of the Twin Towers even as everyone else fled. I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a more perfect distillation of what heroism and duty really means. Garrett Graff has deftly used oral history to take us into the one of the most horrific and consequential moments in American history, in a book that will be particularly important for those readers too young to remember September 11, 2001.” —Michael Beschloss, author of Presidents of War Maj. Scott Crogg: No one told us that Air Force One was leaving, so we’re like, “Oh shit, are they starting up?” We’re racing to get our planes in the air, but it takes some time. We met the minimum safety requirements and hit the air. A 747 configured like that, gosh, that’s a fast airplane. We didn’t want to go supersonic, it’d burn up too much fuel, so we talked to them, and we had to reel them in.

Ari Fleischer: As we were flying out of Sarasota, we were able to get some TV reception. They broke for commercial. I couldn’t believe it. A hair-loss commercial comes on. I remember thinking, in the middle of all this, I’m watching this commercial for hair loss. Take turns within the group sharing each person’s experience and memory of 9/11. If everyone is comfortable, collect and record those memories to create your own oral history of the day. Before we get into specifics about The Only Plane in the Sky, it seems the most appropriate place to start is with the question that works its way into every conversation about September 11, 2001: Where were you? What do you remember? Mary Matalin : It took a while for everybody to actually get to that area. It hadn’t been used for its intended purpose—which was to be a bomb shelter—since its inception.