JOINT BASE ANACOSTIA-BOLLING, Washington, D.C. –
September 11, 2025 marks the 24th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. During the attacks, nearly 3,000 people were killed and more than 6,000 injured in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. For a small U.S. Air Force personnel team located just across the Potomac River from the Pentagon crash site, nothing could have prepared them for this tragedy.
After both towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were hit on Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear the U.S. was under attack. Following the New York attacks, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. EST, killing all 59 passengers onboard and 125 military and civilian members in the building.
Then-U.S. Air Force Maj. Andrew Weaver, commander of the 11th Mission Support Squadron at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., watched the Pentagon crash unfold live on TV from his commander’s office.
“I ran upstairs to speak to the commander and all of the sudden, we saw the fireball and the smoke plume of the plane that hit the Pentagon,” Weaver recalled. “Everyone was stunned. No one had been forewarned or anything; it just came out of the blue.”
As a newly-minted major, Weaver said he was only a few months into his new position when the terrorists attacked. He was tasked to lead Air Force personnel accountability, relocation and recovery efforts immediately after the attack on the Pentagon.
After everyone was safely relocated to a rally point, the first priority for his team was to account for more than 15,000 Air Force personnel in D.C. and at the Pentagon crash site in Arlington, Virginia.
A week prior, the 11th Wing participated in a hurricane exercise, so the team decided to repeat the same accountability protocol and adjust along the way.
“This was a big challenge because not everyone had cell phones and there was no electronic system to keep track of people,” said Weaver. “I remember sending runners to hospitals, homes and work sites to manually check off names.”
Updated accountability lists were sent directly to the Air Force Personnel Center at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, which was accounting for Air Force personnel worldwide.
The 11th MSS also ensured continuity of command-and-control authority for the Air Force Crisis Action Team as it relocated from the Pentagon to its alternate site at Bolling AFB. Simultaneously, they coordinated recovery and identification teams that responded to the crash site at the Pentagon.
“Traffic in D.C. was so bad that day which made it very difficult for people to get places,” said Weaver about the search and recovery process. “People were stranded on the highway because they ran out of gas. It would take a couple of hours just to get to (Bolling AFB) from the Pentagon and vice versa.”
As people were rotating through shifts and volunteering to come back in to support, Weaver said it was starting to take a toll on the already small team.
“As people came back (from the Pentagon), other than the sound of the operations, the room was filled with silence,” said Weaver. “No one was prepared to face what they saw. They weren’t trained for something like this.”
The team worked with Mortuary Affairs elements to determine if personnel recovered from the Pentagon crash site were Air Force members.
“It was the longest day in my entire career,” said Weaver. “Our people had to identify personnel from anything they could find in the rubble like pieces of uniform and military ID cards.”
As participating in recovery operations profoundly impacted the team, Weaver called in additional support from nearby Andrews Air Force Base. Within hours, the personnel team grew to almost 200 military and civilian members working around-the-clock to travel between the Pentagon and Bolling AFB to support the rescue and recovery mission.
Despite the challenges, Weaver and his team accounted for all personnel in the National Capitol Region within 66 hours of the attack.
“A week later, we went back (to the Pentagon) to recover all of the hard copies of Air Force personnel records,” said Weaver. “We had to transport all the folders onto a cart and wheel them onto vehicles. There were about 8,000 personnel records that were recovered that day.”
He said 9/11 prompted a larger push for secure and accessible digital personnel systems as they only had access to hard copies at the time of the attack. This effort accelerated the Air Force's full transition from hard copy to digital records.
It turned out to be the right move; less than four years later, another disaster struck the United States, requiring a comparable level of accountability and mobilization of personnel.
“Hurricane Katrina was evidence that this change greatly benefited the Air Force,” said Weaver. “We were able to account for every single Air Force member.”
Weaver retired from the Air Force in 2017 after 27 years of active-duty service as a personnel officer. He continued to serve the Department of Defense in a civilian capacity and led the first-ever, lead service transfer of responsibility at a joint base in 2020, when the Air Force assumed responsibility for Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling from the Navy.
As JBAB reflects on 24 years since that tragic day, the story of how a crisis response effort from a small personnel team helped push the Air Force’s transition from paper-based records to secure, digital personnel and accountability systems stands out. The legacy of 9/11 includes not only honoring the fallen, but also the lasting improvements in Air Force emergency response and personnel systems, ensuring greater readiness for future crises.