September 13, 2001-June 2002: Conflicting Reports Describe Plane Wreckage Found at Ground Zero

Aircraft debris area. [Source: NIST]In February 2002, the Associated Press reports that the only remaining pieces of the planes that hit the WTC located at the Staten Island landfill, where workers are sorting through the debris from Ground Zero, are some pieces of landing gear and a piece of Flight 175’s fuselage. FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette says, “So little (airplane) debris has been recovered that there’s really no way to quantify it.” [CBS News, 2/23/2002; Associated Press, 2/24/2002] Yet other reports contradict this. According to the New York Times, soon after 9/11, rescue workers find “large sections of one of the airplanes, including passenger seats,” which had landed on the roof and scaffolding on a small skyscraper at 90 West Street. [New York Times, 6/8/2002; New York Times, 3/5/2004] Some early reports even claim that a cockpit of one of the planes and some plane seats with the remains of passengers strapped into them have been found in the WTC debris (See September 12-14, 2001). Other recovered plane wreckage includes life jackets and portions of seats found on the roof of the nearby Bankers Trust building. One of the planes’ jet engines and a landing gear from Flight 175 are found in streets nearby. [Civil Engineering, 5/2002; Federal Emergency Management Agency, 5/1/2002, pp. 2-16, 2-31] In June 2002, parts of one plane’s luggage racks are found among debris in adjacent buildings. [Associated Press, 6/8/2002; New York Times, 6/8/2002] Some photographs of aircraft debris found at Ground Zero can be found in the book Above Hallowed Ground which gathers pictures taken by NYPD officers. [Department, 2002, pp. 66-69] Another photography book, Aftermath by Joel Meyerowitz, includes a picture of an aircraft wheel and fuselage recovered at Fresh Kills. [Meyerowitz, 2006, pp. 223]