Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11. MItchell Zuckoff

report was confusing, so Michael and another Boston-based American Airlines employee ran upstairs to Logan’s Terminal B gates to see if there was maybe a case of “air rage” on a parked plane, or a violent person wandering drunk in the terminal. But all was quiet, and all morning flights had already left. Then it dawned on him.

      “Wait a minute,” Michael told his colleague. “Flight 12 comes in at night. It hasn’t even left Los Angeles yet.”

      They rushed back to the office, where Michael learned that another emergency call had come in. This time they quickly understood that the caller was flight attendant Amy Sweeney, whom Michael had known for a decade. He’d seen off Flight 11 less than a half hour earlier, after that disturbing moment when he locked eyes with Mohamed Atta.

      Michael took over the call.

      “Amy, sweetie, what’s going on?” he asked.

      In a tightly controlled voice, Amy answered: “Listen to me very, very carefully.”

      Michael grabbed a pad of paper to take notes.

      AT 8:29 A.M., a half hour after takeoff, American Flight 11 turned south-southeast, putting it more directly on a route to Manhattan. The 767 climbed to 30,400 feet. Two minutes after adjusting course, it descended to 29,000 feet.

      One second before 8:34 a.m., air traffic controllers at Boston Center heard a third disturbing transmission from the cockpit, a lie apparently intended for the passengers and crew but never heard by them: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

      Controllers at Boston Center fell silent. Then they decided to do something: FAA air traffic control managers called in the military.

      Normally, if the system had worked as designed, top officials at the FAA in Washington would contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, which in turn would call the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization responsible for protecting the skies over the United States and Canada. NORAD, in turn, would ask approval from the Secretary of Defense to use military jets to intervene in the hijacking of a commercial passenger jet. None of that was necessarily a smooth or rapid process.

      Boston Center controllers concluded that it would take too long to bob and weave through the FAA bureaucracy, to get approval from someone in the Defense Department, to scramble fighter planes to chase Flight 11. They knew it wasn’t correct protocol, but they took matters into their own hands. First, they called their colleagues at an air traffic control facility on Cape Cod and asked them to place a direct call seeking help from fighter jets stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base. Then they concluded that even that wasn’t enough. As Flight 11 streaked toward Manhattan, Boston Center air traffic controllers urgently wanted to get the military involved. At the very least, the military might have better luck tracking the hijacked plane; some Boston Center controllers knew that the military had radar that could reveal a plane’s altitude even with its transponder turned off.

      They tried to call a NORAD military alert site in Atlantic City, unaware that it had been shut down as part of the post–Cold War cuts in rapid air defense. Then, at 8:37 a.m., three minutes after first seeking help through controllers on Cape Cod, a supervisor at Boston Center named Dan Bueno called the Otis Air National Guard base directly. At roughly the same time, a Boston Center air traffic controller named Joseph Cooper called NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS, in Rome, New York. That’s where Major Kevin Nasypany had arrived earlier that morning expecting to put his team through the training exercise called Vigilant Guardian.

      A few seconds before 8:38 a.m., Cooper made the first direct notification of a crisis on board American Flight 11 to the U.S. military: “[W]e have a problem here,” Cooper said. “We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there. Help us out.”

      “Is this real-world, or exercise?” asked NEADS Technical Sergeant Jeremy Powell. Powell’s question reflected the fact that he knew Vigilant Guardian was planned for later in the day, and he wondered if it had begun early.

      “No,” Cooper answered, “this is not an exercise, not a test.”

      The air traffic controllers’ calls to the military sent the nation’s air defense system into high gear. But it did so outside of normal operating procedures, with delayed or at times nonexistent communications with the FAA, and without anything remotely resembling a well-defined response plan. Nasypany and his team at NEADS would have to rely on training and instinct, reacting moment by moment and making it up as they went along.

      WHEN JOSEPH COOPER of the FAA’s Boston Center called for military help with Flight 11, Nasypany wasn’t on the NEADS Operations Floor among the radar scopes. When no one could find him, a voice boomed over the loudspeaker: “Major Nasypany, you’re needed in Ops, pronto!”

      The hijacking of Flight 11 surprised America’s airline, air traffic, airport security, political, intelligence, and military communities. But it literally caught Nasypany with his pants down. Roused by the public address announcement, he zippered his flight suit and rushed from the men’s room to the war room: the NEADS Operations Floor, or Ops, a dimly lit hall with four rows of radar and communications work stations that faced several fifteen-foot wall-mounted screens. A glassed-in command area called the Battle Cab watched over the men and women scanning the electronic sky for danger.

      When Nasypany reached the Ops floor, he felt annoyed by his team’s talk of a hijacking. Nasypany thought that someone had prematurely triggered the Vigilant Guardian exercise. He growled at no one in particular, “The hijack’s not supposed to be for another hour!”

      Nasypany quickly discovered that the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 was “real-world,” and that Cooper had skipped protocol and called NEADS directly for help. Hijackings were on Nasypany’s list of potential threats, but they weren’t a top priority in his normal routine. Later, when one of his subordinates seemed on the verge of falling apart under the stress of the day’s events, Nasypany tried to lighten the mood by publicly admitting that he’d been “on the shitter” when summoned by the loudspeaker. At a more reflective moment, Nasypany confessed that he’d remember that announcement for the rest of his life.

      IMMEDIATELY AFTER COOPER’S call for help, a young NEADS identification technician named Shelley Watson spoke with Boston Center’s military liaison, Colin Scoggins. Watson quizzed Scoggins for whatever information he possessed about Flight 11, a rushed conversation that revealed how little the air traffic controllers on the ground knew about what was happening in the air.

      Watson: “Type of aircraft?”

      Scoggins: “It’s a—American Eleven.”

      Watson: “American Eleven?”

      Scoggins: “Type aircraft is a 767 …”

      Watson: “And tail number, do you know that?”

      Scoggins: “I, I don’t know—hold on.”

      Scoggins turned to air traffic supervisor Dan Bueno to ask for more information, including the number of “souls on board.” But Bueno didn’t know either.

      Scoggins: “No, we—we don’t have any of that information.”

      Watson: “You don’t have any of that?”

      Scoggins explained that someone had turned off the cockpit transponder, so they didn’t have the usual tracking information. Boston Center could see Flight 11 only on what was called primary radar, which made it difficult to keep track of it among the constellations of radar dots representing the many planes in the sky.

      Watson: “And you don’t know where he’s coming from or destination?”

      Scoggins: “No idea. He took off out of Boston originally, heading for, ah, Los Angeles.”

      NASYPANY QUICKLY RECEIVED authorization from his boss, Colonel Robert Marr, to prepare to launch the two F-15 fighter jets on alert at Otis on Cape Cod, roughly one hundred