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 O’Brien 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 President’s 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.
‘‘It’s 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 he’s headed to the White House’. I was yelling, ‘We’ve got a target headed right for the White House’.’’ But because the plane was flying at 500 miles per hour, Ms O’Brien 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 don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s 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 O’Brien 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 what’s happened,’’ Ms O’Brien said.
‘‘And then the Washington National controllers came over our speakers in our room and said, ‘Dulles, hold all of our inbound traffic. The Pentagon’s 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, it’s just like a big pit in your stomach because you weren’t able to do anything about it to stop it.
‘‘That’s what I think hurt the most.’’
Ms O’Brien 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.
‘‘I’ve 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 couldn’t see it.
‘‘It was too fast. They came over that Pentagon or saw it just in front of them. You can’t miss the Pentagon.
‘‘It’s 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.’’
I trust that you are not holding your breath ;-)
I watched the interview last night on 20/20 with the Dulles Air Traffic Controller. I don't think I took a breath as she described the tower scene.
Spread that ABC link all over the place, if you can. Many here don't watch 20/20, and everyone needs to read the truth of what went on that day.
Anyways, I didn't watch the show, but I saw the preview. I'm glad this came out to make the naysayers look even MORE foolish.
Were they targeting the White House and Air Force One? We'll probably never know for sure. Did the Secret Service and the Administration take prudent security measures. Darn right they did!
"When Cheney appeared on Meet the Press the Sunday after the attack, he said at the time that that was what they theorized -- that the plane couldn't find the White House and therefore went after the Pentagon. Maybe 10 days after that, it was stated that that theory turned out to be incorrect. In fact, they said, radar established that, at all times, its target was the Pentagon. They believed that the plane was initially too high and too fast, so it had to loop around and hit the Pentagon from another direction."
I hope no one would interpret this as saying that the White House was NOT under attack. I think it's pretty clear he White House WAS. If it wasn't this plane, it was another one, that thankfully did not make it.
The media is simplifying the flight path that they actually took, but you can follow it like this... from the 270 heading they turned 180 deg to 90 deg heading east to DC. Coming in over DC at over 400 knots at low altitude, unless you pick up a reference point early, you start to see a blur of white buildings and green trees. The Mall doesn't even stand out, and as you get close to the Washington Monument, it disappears and starts to look like a golf tee.
He was most likely trained to look for the Potomac River to set a frame of reference. Now, this is where the 360 came in... he turned to the right to find the White House and could not ID it. Still turning to the right he completed a 360 circle in the general area of Downtown DC. Now his heading would again be 90 deg heading east, and he just gave up and picked out the Pentagon on the Potomac, as his secondary target. This jives with a local media report heard here in DC that morning. It mentioned a plane circling over the WH and going into the pentagon. That same media report mentioned a fire burning on the mall. The report of the fire has disapeared from the media, but I believe it was intended to be a more visible landmark recognizing that this problem might occur. (More later)"
138 posted on 10/24/01 11:28 PM Eastern by Stealthy
(read about almost to the end)
Link
Coincidently, construction on the Pentagon began on September 11th.
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