Could Helicopters Have Saved People From the Top of the Trade Center?

NEW YORK -- When a plane hit the World Trade Center's north tower, Stephen L. Roach phoned his wife twice from the 105th floor and got their home answering machine. In one message, he said he loved her. In the other, Isabel Roach says she could hear the desperate shouts of her husband's coworkers at bond-broker Cantor Fitzgerald LP: "Try the roof! Try the roof!"

Mr. Roach shouted back to them, "There's no way out!" If he was referring to a roof escape, he was correct. The doors to the roof were locked.

Outside, hovering just a few hundred feet away from hundreds of workers trapped above the inferno, were New York police-rescue helicopters. Crews from the Brooklyn headquarters of the police-aviation bureau had scrambled at the first radio call of an explosion at the trade center. Of the two choppers that arrived within five minutes of the plane crash, one was a Bell 412 equipped with a 250-foot hoist and capable of carrying as many as 10 survivors at a time. The three-man crew was specially trained for rooftop rescues.

As the police pilots swooped in and peered through a smoke-free area on top of the north tower, however, they saw no one to save. People were still alive on the top floors, according to the New York Fire Department. But Greg Semendinger, the first chopper pilot on the scene, says, "There was nobody on the roof."

Earlier Rescue

Dangerous as it sounds, this kind of airborne mission can succeed. In 1993, Mr. Semendinger had helped rescue 28 people from the roof of the same north tower. A terrorist bomb had exploded in the trade center's basement garage, sending thick smoke up through the stairwells. That time, a police chopper piloted by Mr. Semendinger had lowered two men by rope to the roof. They cut down antennas to clear a landing area from which the workers were airlifted to safety.