Pretty hard to see, IMO.
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.’’
These planes were under radar contact by ATC the whole time, yet some people think feel that having better radar will stop attacks like this.
Did you think I posted this to try to convince anyone of the position? Your minds won't be changed, and mine won't either. We have different opinions, and, contrary to the people who are calling for apology, this article does not prove anything regarding my point--my point concerns the time frame after 11:00. At that time, DC was safe and the entourage was flying around the country, making it look to all GWB's opponents, most neutral observers, and some of his supporters as if there was total confusion, chaos, and cowardice. Sorry, but that's the way I saw it and still see it. Confusion and chaos are understandable. Cowardice is not.
To Tennessean4Bush First, I have admitted on this forum when it was demonstrated I was wrong--once yesterday. After GWB's speech, I not only admitted I was wrong about his "cowardice" (my term), but posted an apology. I don't think he was a coward--I think the SS made him look that way to reasonable observers. And I said that in the post you responded to. The website name is definitely a mischaracterization and cheap shot at my character. It would be much more reasonable to name a website "upgwbsass.com" and ask you to be webmaster.
To babble-on, what can I say? We weren't discussing the feelings of people at the W.H. Besides, you must have been talking to the janitors--your spelling of "conceivable" indicates that an educated person wouldn't talk with you, other than to flip you a quarter at the door.
He would only look like a coward to an observer who thinks it is a good idea to put the President and the Vice President in the same location during a time of national crisis. This is exactly what you do not want to do. When the country is under attack, the President's primary duty is to preserve National Command Authority and to begin to plan for the counterattack. This is what GWB was doing.
GWB lost political capital, because he did not appear within the hour in the Oval Office to institute a big national group-hug. That would have bee a smart political move for him, but it would have been a dereliction of his duty. With this particular President, I think you can be sure that duty comes first.
We all know what Slick would have done. But GWB is not Slick, for which we should all be eternally grateful.
BTW the way, I like your screen name. When they talk about Congressional gridlock, I say great. That's what the country needs for about 50 years. (IMHO)
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."
Stunning.
Pretty hard to see, IMO.
Pretty hard to see, IMO.
Just joking with you, just a gentle jab.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.