The third plane to strike a target on September 11, 2001, was American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 that crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. The plane had taken off from Washington Dulles International Airport at 8:20 a.m. with 64 people on board: 6 crew members and 58 passengers, including 5 hijackers. It struck the western side of the Pentagon roughly 34 minutes after the second plane hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower.
How the Hijacking Unfolded
Flight 77 was bound for Los Angeles, carrying a mix of passengers headed to business conferences, a credit union meeting in Las Vegas, and other West Coast destinations. Sometime between 8:51 and 8:54 a.m., as the plane flew over eastern Kentucky, the five hijackers took control. One hijacker took over as pilot while the other four forced passengers to the rear of the aircraft.
At about 8:55 a.m., the plane turned south, then reversed course eastward near the junction of West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. A minute later, at 8:56, the hijackers switched off the transponder, the device that broadcasts the plane’s course, speed, and altitude to air traffic controllers. This made the aircraft extremely difficult to track. Controllers effectively lost sight of it.
Barbara Olson, a political commentator on board, managed to make two phone calls to her husband, Ted Olson, who was serving as U.S. solicitor general at the time. She told him the plane had been hijacked and learned from him that other planes had already been flown into the World Trade Center. The two discussed what could be done. The telephone Ted Olson used to receive those calls is now in the Smithsonian’s collection.
The Pentagon Impact
Under the hijacker’s control, Flight 77 approached Washington, D.C., from the south, flew below Alexandria, Virginia, then circled back northeast toward the Pentagon. Its target was the building itself, not the White House or the Capitol. At 9:37:46 a.m., the plane slammed into the Pentagon’s outermost ring on its western face at ground level.
The impact created a hole roughly 75 feet wide in the exterior wall. One wing hit the ground before impact, and the other was sheared off by the building’s load-bearing concrete columns. What remained of the aircraft essentially liquefied on contact, flowing into the structure rather than penetrating it intact. The plane’s landing gear, one of the densest components, punched through to the Pentagon’s middle ring (Ring C), leaving a separate hole about 12 feet wide.
The exterior facade held for about 20 minutes before collapsing. That delay was not an accident. It was a direct result of a massive renovation that had been underway at the Pentagon for years before the attack.
Why the Renovations Saved Lives
Flight 77 struck primarily into Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, which happened to be the section where the first phase of a building-wide renovation had been nearly completed. The 60-year-old building was being modernized one wedge at a time, and the upgrades to Wedge 1 included blast-resistant windows, new sprinkler systems, and reinforced structural elements. Workers had also stripped out old asbestos and installed entirely new mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems.
Those upgrades made a measurable difference. Despite the tremendous force of the impact and the fire fed by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, the renovated section did not immediately collapse. Most of the new blast-resistant windows remained intact, preventing severe injuries and saving lives. By contrast, older windows in the adjacent unrenovated Wedge 2, some as far as 200 feet from the point of impact, blew out from the initial blast wave alone.
Casualties and Recovery
All 64 people on board Flight 77 were killed, including the 5 hijackers. Inside the Pentagon, 125 military and civilian personnel died. The total death toll at the Pentagon was 189 victims (not counting the hijackers), making it the second-deadliest site of the four 9/11 crash locations, after the World Trade Center.
Recovery crews found the plane’s two black boxes at approximately 4 a.m. the following morning, located right where the plane had entered the building. Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were damaged but intact enough for investigators to work with. The flight data recorder, which tracks speed, altitude, and flight path, helped reconstruct the plane’s final maneuvers. The recorders were sent to a National Transportation Safety Board laboratory in Washington for analysis.
Military Response and Timing
One of the most scrutinized aspects of the Flight 77 attack is how close the military came to intercepting it, and why it didn’t. Langley Air Force Base, located in southeastern Virginia, scrambled three F-16 fighter jets at 9:30 a.m. But when Flight 77 hit the Pentagon seven minutes later, those jets were still roughly 150 miles away. The disabled transponder, the confusion of a multi-target attack unfolding in real time, and the lack of established protocols for this kind of scenario all contributed to the gap.
The Pentagon After the Attack
The Pentagon was rebuilt and the damaged section restored within a year. But the attack permanently changed how the building and its surrounding campus were designed. The renovation program shifted to place far greater emphasis on force protection and blast resistance. Roadways around the 276-acre Pentagon site were reconfigured to push traffic farther from the building, reducing the threat of vehicle-based attacks. Fences, bollards, reinforced walls, and engineered earth berms were installed along the adjacent highway to block unauthorized access.
A memorial now stands on the Pentagon’s western grounds, with 184 illuminated benches, one for each victim killed on the plane and inside the building. Each bench is oriented based on whether the person was on Flight 77 or inside the Pentagon, so visitors can tell at a glance where each victim was when they died.