9/11 Drone Show to Recreate Perfectly Intact Hijacker Passport Escaping Fiery Inferno
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security on Friday approved a multi-act commemorative drone display for the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The program will depict a hijacker passport landing undamaged on a Manhattan sidewalk, CIA technicians placing charges in World Trade Center Building 7, and a reconstruction of the moment developer Larry Silverstein said “pull it.”
The 12-minute show, scheduled for Saturday evening over the National September 11 Memorial, will use more than 3,400 drones.
The opening act reconstructs the twin towers and the debris field. A single brightly lit drone then separates from the swarm, drifts down in a clean spiral, and lands as a perfect rectangular document. A title card identifies it as a passport belonging to one of the men aboard the hijacked planes. Surrounding formations representing steel, concrete, and aircraft parts disperse. The passport drone remains intact.
The second act shifts to 7 World Trade Center. Drone formations move floor by floor through the building’s interior, placing compact charges along load-bearing columns. The swarm then assembles into the outline of the 47-story structure and drops in near-vertical unison. Officials said the descent is timed at 6.5 seconds.
The third act presents a single figure on a telephone. The formation holds while a recorded line associated with Silverstein — “pull it” — is played. On the final word, the Building 7 swarm collapses again.
A brief coda recreates a 2001 BBC segment in which a correspondent reports that Building 7 “has collapsed” while a second swarm holds the intact building directly behind her. The standing formation then drops.
DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Engagement Marjorie Kellerman said the program was designed to “place widely discussed elements of that afternoon into one continuous visual record.”
“These details entered public discussion immediately and have never left it,” Kellerman said. “The passport was recovered. The building fell. A remark about pulling the building was made. The display renders those points at a scale people can see from the plaza.”
A department fact sheet released with the permit states that the sequences are “artistic reconstructions drawn from contemporaneous reporting, public remarks, and circulating interpretations” and “do not constitute a revision of the 9/11 Commission Report.”
The fact sheet adds that the detonator sequence and the “pull it” cue are “included for completeness, not as an official finding of controlled demolition.”
Several family groups condemned the program as “a government-sponsored conspiracy reel.” One statement asked why an anniversary display would spotlight “the one document that looked planted, the one quote that sounded like a cue, and the one building that fell in the afternoon.”
DHS declined to remove any segment. Kellerman said omitting the material would leave the show “selectively incomplete.”
“Remembrance is not required to be tidy,” she said. “If a passport can be shown surviving what the buildings did not, and if a three-word instruction can be shown preceding a 6.5-second descent, the public is capable of drawing its own conclusions. That is the point of an open society.”
City officials said the flight path meets current Lower Manhattan restrictions. The display is funded through existing public-affairs accounts.
The program will end with the passport drone holding position on the ground while the remaining swarm forms the time 5:20 p.m., the moment Building 7 completed its fall, then goes dark.
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