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'We Have Some Planes,' Hijacker Told Controller
by Matthew L. Wald with Kevin Sack
The New York Times
October 16, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/16/national/16PLAN.html
WASHINGTON, 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 O.K. 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 transmitting on the frequency monitored by pilots and air traffic
controllers, either because he thought he was talking to the passengers or because
one of the crew had activated the radio microphone, 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, reveal the dawning awareness of the terror in cockpits
and control centers. 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 horror.
In the cool, clipped jargon of aviation, signals of unprecedented disaster
bounced between the ground and 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, after Flight 175 had screamed south over the Hudson Valley at about
500 miles per 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."
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
International Airport outside 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 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 that 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, or Norad,
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 another 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 that 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 east, 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 9:38 a.m.
At impact, it was moving at well over 500 m.p.h., 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.
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 message 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, Capt. Jason Dahl and his first officer, Leroy
Homer, continued westbound. 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,' " one aviation official said. "Then I'd think,
It's already happened; it's probably not going to happen again.' "
Since Sept. 11, details have emerged of a struggle between hijackers and passengers
on Flight 93. People involved in air traffic control said the F.B.I. seized
the air traffic tapes of the conversations with that airplane, and no transcript
was made available of air-to-ground communications for the flight. But according
to a person who heard the tape, "a very noisy 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 a field 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 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 on the morning of Sept. 11, the entire country
was being defended by 14 Air National Guard 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 three F16's at Langley, all of them assigned to the North Dakota Air National
Guard's 119th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Happy Hooligans, 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
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 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 m.p.h. 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.' "
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