Posted on 10/25/2001 4:04:12 AM PDT by maquiladora
The air traffic controller who watched the last minutes of the hijacked flight which crashed into the Pentagon told today how she believed it was heading for the White House.
Danielle OBrien said the last words heard by the pilots of American Flight 77 as they left Washington Dulles Airport on the morning of September 11, were hers, telling them: Good luck.
Within minutes she was watching in horror as the plane headed for protected airspace over the White House and she began counting down the minutes until it would have reached the Presidents mansion - only to turn away and head for the Pentagon.
It was a very normal day. It was a very beautiful day in the Washington DC area, crystal clear, a very nice temperature, the controller said.
At 8.25am, she handled the take-off of the plane from Dulles, watching as it left her assigned airspace.
Its chilling. I usually say Good day as I ask an aircraft to switch to another frequency. Or Have a nice flight. But never Good Luck, she said.
Twenty minutes later, the first hijacked plane smashed into the World Trade Centre and within minutes, orders came through for all planes to be grounded immediately.
We started moving the planes as quickly as we could, she said. Then I noticed the aircraft. It was an unidentified plane to the southwest of Dulles, moving at a very high rate of speed - I had literally a blip and nothing more. She turned to the controller sitting next to her, Tom Howell, and asked if he saw it. Mr Howell said: I said, Oh my God, it looks like hes headed to the White House. I was yelling, Weve got a target headed right for the White House. But because the plane was flying at 500 miles per hour, Ms OBrien thought it might be a military jet. The speed, the manoeuvrability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You dont fly a 757 in that manner. Its unsafe, she said.
By the time the plane was 14 miles from the White House, a countdown began in the tense control room.
Ten miles west. Nine miles west. Our supervisor picked up our line to the White House and started relaying to them the information, we have an unidentified very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west, Ms OBrien said.
And it went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three, and all of a sudden the plane turned away.
In the room, it was almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to protect our President, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second.
The plane kept turning, but within seconds it was clear it had turned 360 degrees and was back on the same course.
We lost radar contact with that aircraft. And we waited. And we waited. And your heart is just beating out of your chest waiting to hear whats happened, Ms OBrien said.
And then the Washington National controllers came over our speakers in our room and said, Dulles, hold all of our inbound traffic. The Pentagons been hit. I remember some folks gasping. I think I remember a couple of expletives.
No tears. Not a single tear among us. No one broke down. No one strayed from their duties.
It was only after the controllers were sent home that the impact of what they saw sank in.
Mr Howell said: You could sense something was happening when it was all going on, but when it actually did, its just like a big pit in your stomach because you werent able to do anything about it to stop it.
Thats what I think hurt the most.
Ms OBrien said she believed the terrorists were trying to attack the White House but had been unable to locate it and instead headed for the Pentagon.
Ive been down to the Pentagon and stood on the hillside and imagined where, according to what I saw on the radar, that flight would have come from, she said.
And I think that they came eastbound and because the sun was in their eyes that morning, and because the White House was beyond a grove of trees, I think they couldnt see it.
It was too fast. They came over that Pentagon or saw it just in front of them. You cant miss the Pentagon.
Its so telltale by its shape and its size, and they said, Look, there it is. Take that. Get that. They certainly could have had the White House if they had seen it.
News/Current Events
Source: New York Times
Published: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 Author: By MATTHEW L. WALD with KEVIN SACK
Posted on 10/15/01 8:39 PM Pacific by JohnHuang2
'We Have Some Planes,' Hijacker Told Controller
By MATTHEW L. WALD with KEVIN SACK
ASHINGTON, Oct. 15 American Airlines Flight 11 had fallen mysteriously silent. The air traffic controller called over and over for a response. None came. Then he heard an unidentified voice from the cockpit: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport."
The controller, confused, asked, "Who's trying to call me?"
No response. Then he heard the voice again: "Nobody move please, we are going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves."
The man was apparently trying to talk to the passengers, but he was transmitting on the frequency monitored by pilots and air traffic controllers, and his voice was the first hint of the horror of Sept. 11.
Transcripts of the communications between pilots and controllers, obtained by The New York Times, capture the dawning awareness of the terror in cockpits and control centers. Knitted together with interviews and other documents, they offer a previously unseen view of how, moment by moment, a bell-clear and routine morning turned to confusion and then to horrific inevitability.
In the cool, clipped jargon of aviation, signals of unprecedented disaster bounced between the ground and the air as airline and military personnel struggled to understand and then control the chaos.
The first sure sign of a hijacking was picked up by United Airlines Flight 175, which left Boston for Los Angeles at 8:14 a.m. Just after it took off, the air traffic controller had asked for help from other pilots in finding Flight 11, which was already missing.
"We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure from BOS," the pilot reported at 8:41 a.m., just after takeoff. "Sounds like someone keyed the mike and said everyone stay in your seats."
Within 90 seconds, his plane became the next piece of the unspooling disaster. Flight 175 took an errant turn off its scheduled course to Los Angeles and ceased communication with the ground. "There's no transponder, no nothing, and no one's talking to him," the controller said.
And at 8:50 a.m., an unidentified pilot said over the common frequency: "Anybody know what that smoke is in lower Manhattan?"
Flight 11 had struck the north tower of the World Trade Center just minutes before, and the air traffic controller's repeated calls for Flight 175 were met with another awful silence.
At 8:53, with Flight 175 screaming south over the Hudson Valley toward the south tower at 500 miles an hour more than double the legal speed the reality was becoming clear to the controller on the ground on Long Island. "We may have a hijack," he said. "We have some problems over here right now."
But he knew just half of it.
Moments after the first jet hit the World Trade Center, a controller in Indianapolis was trying to make contact with American Flight 77, which was flying from Dulles Airport outside of Washington to Los Angeles. The pilot had confirmed receiving directions to fly towards a navigation beacon at Falmouth, Ky., but then failed to respond to repeated calls from the ground.
"American 77, Indy," the controller said, over and over. "American 77, indy, radio check. How do you read?"
By 8:56 a.m., it was evident Flight 77 was lost. The Federal Aviation Administration, already in contact with the Pentagon about the hijackings out of Boston, notified the North American Aerospace Defense Command of American 77 at 9:24, 28 minutes later. Fighters scrambled immediately.
The F.A.A. controller called American's dispatch office in Dallas and the dispatcher there to try to raise Flight 77 on a different radio, but failed.
At 9:09 a.m., the American dispatcher said he could not reach Flight 77, but said the company had "an unconfirmed report the second airplane hit the World Trade Center and exploded." He seemed to suggest American 77 might be that plane, but in fact American 77 was racing back over Pittsburgh, toward Washington.
At 9:33 a.m., the same air traffic controller at Dulles who had handled the perfectly normal departure of American 77 about 70 minutes earlier, spotted an unidentified blip on the radar screen. The Dulles controllers called their counterparts at Reagan National Airport to report that a "fast moving primary target," meaning an airplane with no transponder, was moving west, headed toward the forbidden airspace over the White House, the Capitol and the Washington Monument.
A Dulles supervisor picked up a hot line to tell the Secret Service at the White House. The president was in Florida, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in the White House; Secret Service agents hustled him into an underground bunker there.
At 9:36 a.m., National Airport, which was on American 77's flight path, asked a military C-130 cargo plane, taking off on a scheduled flight from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, on the other side of the district of Columbia to intercept and identify the fast-moving target. The crew of the C-130 said it was a Boeing 757, moving low and fast.
The airplane was headed for the heart of Washington. But as it crossed the Pentagon at perhaps 7,000 feet the exact altitude is uncertain because its transponder had been turned off it began a 360- degree turn to the right that brought nearly to ground level. It crashed into the west side of the Pentagon at about 9:30 a.m.
At impact, it was moving at well over 500 miles an hour, which both maximized the destruction and made the plane easier to handle. Investigators later determined that it had been flying on autopilot on its path over the Pentagon. Pilots use autopilot to minimize their workload on long days and to assure a precise course and smooth ride. What the hijackers had in mind is unknown.
Just minutes before the crash at the Pentagon, United Airlines Flight 93, flying from Newark to San Francisco, went off course near Cleveland. It now appears that Flight 93 received a warning of the hijackings.
Cutting through the background noise in the cockpit of Flight 93, the crew would have heard the sound of an electronic "ping" like one that might announce the arrival of e-mail on a home computer. It was a text message coming by radio, from a flight dispatcher near Chicago. In green letters on a black background, it said, "Beware, cockpit intrusion."
The message was sent by a dispatcher, sitting at the "transcontinental" desk at United's operations center near O'Hare International Airport, who had been assigned to follow both 175 and 93, as well as 14 other airplanes that morning. After United 175 was confirmed to have been hijacked, he sent the message to all the planes he was monitoring.
In the cockpit of Flight 93, Captain Jason Dall and his first officer, Leroy Homer, continued westbound. Living in the last few moments of the pre-attack world, there was no particular reason for them to react radically.
"Getting a message like that on any day in the U.S.A., well, I'd think, `those poor bastards," said one aviation official. "Then I'd think, `it's already happened, it's probably not going to happen again.' "
Since Sept. 11, details have emerged of a struggled between hijackers and passengers on Flight 93. According to people involved in air- traffic control, the F.B.I. seized the air-traffic tapes of the conversations with that airplane. But according to a person who heard the tape, "a very noise sound of a confrontation was heard on the frequency, very garbled, but with some discernible phrase like, `hey, get out of here!' "
There was the sound of a foreign language on the frequency; controllers thought it was Arabic.
Flight 93 crashed in the woods of western Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m. But before the final cockpit intrusion of the morning, one of the pilots apparently turned to the e-mail unit that carried the warning from Chicago, touched a button that made the screen display a keyboard and typed a one-word reply.
"Confirmed."
By the time the F-16's from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., arrived, the damage was already done.
At both Langley and at Otis Air National Guard Base at Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod, two sets of fighter pilots were spending the morning as usual: sitting, waiting, and wondering whether they would escape the day without hearing the shrill klaxon blast that occasionally sent them racing to the cockpits of their supersonic jets.
For years, the threat of an incoming aerial attack on the American homeland had been considered so minor that defending the country's airspace had been relegated to the National Guard. On the morning of Sept. 11 the entire country was being defended by 14 planes dispersed among seven bases.
The first call came to Otis about the hijacking of Flight 11 came at 8:46 a.m., six minutes after the F.A.A. had first notified the North East Air Defense Sector in Rome, N.Y., a division of Norad. Six minutes later two vintage F-15's, built in 1977 and equipped with heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles, had been scrambled, according to a Norad timeline.
One pilot was a part-time Guardsman who flew a commercial plane as his day job; the other jet was flown by a full-time member of the Air National Guard.
But the orders came too late. The first plane was plunging into the World Trade Center when the Otis pilots were racing to their jets. United Flight 175 hit the second tower at 9:02 a.m., 10 minutes after the fighters were airborne, when the F-15's were about 71 miles and eight minutes away. When they arrived, the helpless pilots got the first aerial views of the devastation.
The planes at Langley were also scrambled too late to intercept American Flight 77 before it crashed into the Pentagon.
But if United Airlines Flight 93 had not crashed in Pennsylvania, the three North Dakota-based F-16 pilots from Langley two of them commercial airline pilots themselves may have faced the nightmarish decision of whether to shoot down the commercial airliner, along with its 38 passengers and crew of seven.
"It kept us from having to do the unthinkable," said Maj. Gen. Mike J. Haugen, adjutant general of the North Dakota National Guard, "and that is to use your own weapons and own training against your own citizens."
The military has not allowed the pilots to be interviewed, and The Times has agreed not to print their names because of security concerns. But details of their activities on the morning of Sept. 11 have emerged through interviews with other Guard officials.
At Langley, the pilot designated as the flight lead, a 33-year-old pilot for Northwest Airlines, was getting a cup of coffee when someone yelled from the television room: "Hey, an airplane just hit the World Trade Center!"
"All of a sudden," said Col. Lyle Andvik, a member and former commander of the unit, "something happens that none of us can believe. They get an order from Northeast Air Defense Sector, the pilots get a scramble horn, and they're down the stairs, out the door, in the jets and off they go. At the time, they didn't realize why they were being scrambled. They didn't realize that other planes had been hijacked."
At 9:30 a.m., six minutes after receiving their orders from the defense sector, code-named Huntress, three F-16's were airborne, according to the Norad timeline. At first, the planes were directed toward New York at top speed, and probably reached 600 miles an hour within two minutes, General Haugen said. Then, flying in formation, they were vectored toward the west and given a new flight target: Reagan National Airport.
The planes, each loaded with six missiles, had slowed slightly to just under supersonic speed, flying at about 25,000 feet, when they heard over their radio headsets that the F.A.A. had ordered all civilian aircraft to land. The next sign of how serious the situation had become arrived in the form of a squawk over the plane's transponder, a code that suggests almost an emergency wartime situation.
"They get the squawk and they've heard that planes are supposed to land and then Huntress says, `Hooligan flight, can you confirm that the Pentagon is on fire?' " General Haugen said, adding that the lead flier looked down and confirmed that the Pentagon was on fire.
Then the pilots received the most surreal order of the awful morning. "A person came on the radio," General Haugen said, "and identified themselves as being with the Secret Service and he said, `I want you to protect the White House at all costs.' "
The strong impression I was left with after watching this segment was that this was more than just a terrorist attack. The controller's story supports a strong argument that the actions on Flights 77 & 93 were intended to take out all the elected officials of two of the three branches of the federal government.
Speaking as an aviation-type, I don't believe these people had never run through an adequate simulation of the attack (thank God). Had they done so, I don't think they would have hit the Pentagon at all but would have hit the White House with Flight 93 going for the Capital chambers.
Now I'm the first to say I'm no big fan of the federal government but, by God, it's my government, and nobody but Americans are going to take it out (and through the ballot box, at that).
Since the attack, O'Brien has been having nightmares. "I've sat up straight in bed many times, reliving it, reseeing it, rehearing it," she says. "And it's in the most absurd ways that only a dream could depict."
In her dreams, events unfold differently.
"The one that comes to mind most, dreaming of a green pool in front of me. That was part of the radar scope. It was a pool of gel, and I reached into the radar scope to stop that flight. But in the dream, I didn't harm the plane," she says. "I just held it in my hand, and somehow that stopped everything."
Can you imagine the heartbreak of this woman? She watched this all unfold on a radar screen in front of her, and could do nothing to stop it. She just wished she could take those men, women, and children, and hold them in her hand.
In her dreams, events unfold differently.
"The one that comes to mind most, dreaming of a green pool in front of me. That was part of the radar scope. It was a pool of gel, and I reached into the radar scope to stop that flight. But in the dream, I didn't harm the plane," she says. "I just held it in my hand, and somehow that stopped everything."
My prayers are with this woman. I think the air traffic controllers were some of the unsung heroes of 9/11. I can only imagine what it was like for them, but they competently--no, excellently--did what they had to do at breakneck speed. God bless them.
First, Flight 93 left Newark 40 minutes late. Had it left on time, the folks on the plane would have had no idea it was on a suicide mission and would probably not have attempted to do anything. They were told they were going to land at Reagan National, and it would have appeared to them they they were landing there until about 10 seconds before they hit the Capitol. Nor would the fighters have had time to intercept it. It would have hit the Capitol at the same time that Flight 77 was hitting the White House (according to their plan.)
Had Flight 93 not been late, and hit the Capitol, it would not have killed many Congressmen, if any at all. The House and Senate do not come into session on Tuesday until noon. Very few of them even come into town until late Tuesday morning. Tuesday mornings are usually reserved for hearings, which take place in the office buildings, not in the Capitol. The terrorists clearly did not understand this, nor did they understand how often planes are late leaving major airports. They might have been trying only to kill Speaker Hastert, who is third in line for the Presidency and has an office in the Capitol. I don't know if he was in his Capitol office on 9/11.
The terrorist who was flying Flight 77 had not been able to rent a small plane to fly any practice missions over Washington so he was going only on maps. He was a poor pilot, according to the instructor who was last known to have taught him in flight school - probably the poorest of all the four who successfully hijacked planes that day. It is highly plausible that at the high speed he was flying, in a 757 for the first time, with the sun in his face, he could not find the White House. He thought his comrades on Flight 93 were going to hit the Capitol, so he went for the Pentagon and had to circle around so the sun would not be in his eyes as he came down. That was lucky too, because if he had come straight in to the river side of the Pentagon he would have hit the side the Secretary's office is on.
The immediate grounding of all planes probably kept at least one other hijacking from occurring. Another Newark plane was on the tarmac with four ME men on it, and turned around and came back to the terminal. My guess is that this plane was late, as was Flight 93. The men were reportedly very agitated and fled the airport as soon as they got off the plane. I think their plan was to head for Andrews Air Force Base to try to hit Air Force One, thinking that the President would be returning immediately.
I also believe that the anthrax attacks were meant to kill our political leaders that they failed to kill on 9/11. They hit some media people too, to make sure the government would not cover it up.
Hey, I registered the domain "theperfectnextmove.com" and have been searching everywhere to find just the right person to be the webmaster. I think you fit the bill. We need someone who may be wrong but who is never in doubt. Are you interested?
There were a number of fires and explosions in D.C. that morning. Why no mention of them anymore?
Wow. It is amazing how our minds work to rectify situations beyond our control.
What a touching story. She felt so helpless and wanted to do something to prevent this tragedy.
I agree. It was a good broadcast. I'm sure Peter Jennings had nothing to do with it.
Even worse, we could have lost the White House and the Capitol. The plane downed in PA was probably targeting the Capitol. God bless those patriots on board.
Yet, she stayed at her post. She felt a personal responsibility to get the other planes in the air down safely. Airport security may not be where it should be, but, if she is an example of air traffic controllers, the system has some assets to build on.
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