The Only Plane in the Sky
The Only Plane in the Sky is Garrett Graff's oral history of September 11, 2001, assembled from nearly 500 firsthand accounts: firefighters, survivors, fighter pilots, government officials and the families waiting for word. Rather than a single narrative, it stitches together short first-person testimonies into a minute-by-minute record of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the passengers of Flight 93, and the country's chaotic first hours of response.
The narrative is constructed entirely from hundreds of original interviews conducted by the author, alongside transcripts from government archives and private collections, to create an oral history format.
This work functions as a standalone historical account and does not require knowledge of the author's other investigative journalism to follow the narrative.