reported Flight 11’s failure to respond to an American Airlines dispatcher who oversaw transatlantic flights at the airline’s operations center in Fort Worth, Texas.
Then things literally took a turn for the worse.
Watching on radar, Zalewski saw Flight 11 turn abruptly to the northwest, deviating from its assigned route, heading toward Albany, New York. Again, Boston Center controllers moved away planes in its path, all the way from the ground up to 35,000 feet, just in case. This was strange and troubling, but sometimes technology failed, and still neither Zalewski nor anyone else at Boston Center considered it a reason to declare an emergency.
Then, at 8:21 a.m., twenty-two minutes after takeoff, someone in the cockpit switched off Flight 11’s transponder. Transponders were required for all planes that fly above 10,000 feet, and it would be hard to imagine any reason a pilot of Flight 11 would purposely turn it off.
Without a working transponder, controllers could still see Flight 11 as a dot on their primary radar scopes, but they could only guess at its speed. They also had no idea of its altitude, and it would be easy to “lose” the plane amid the constant ebb and flow of air traffic. Seven minutes had passed since the pilots’ last radio transmission, after which they failed to answer multiple calls from Zalewski in air traffic control and from other planes. The 767 had veered off course and failed to climb to its assigned altitude. Now it had no working transponder. All signs pointed to a crisis of electrical, mechanical, or human origin, but Zalewski still couldn’t be sure.
Zalewski turned to a Boston Center supervisor and said quietly: “Would you please come over here? I think something is seriously wrong with this plane.”
But he refused to think the worst without more evidence. When the supervisor asked if he thought the plane had been hijacked, Zalewski replied: “Absolutely not. No way.” Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it remained possible in Zalewski’s mind that an extraordinarily rare combination of mechanical and technical problems had unleashed havoc aboard Flight 11.
Zalewski’s mindset had roots in his training. FAA controllers were taught to anticipate a specific sign or communication from a plane before declaring a hijacking in progress. A pilot might surreptitiously key in the transponder code “7500,” a universal distress signal, which would automatically flash the word HIJACK on the flight controller’s green-tinted radar screen. If the problem was mechanical, a pilot could key in “7600” for a malfunctioning transponder, or “7700” for an emergency. Otherwise, a pilot under duress could speak the seemingly innocuous word “trip” during a radio call when describing a flight’s course. An air traffic controller would instantly understand from that code word that a hijacker was on board. Boston Center had heard or seen no verbal or electronic tipoffs of a hostile takeover of Flight 11.
But all that training revolved around certain narrow expectations about how hijackings transpired, based on decades of hard-earned experience. Above all, those expectations relied on an assumption that one or both of the pilots, John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness, would remain at the controls.
The idea that hijackers might incapacitate or eliminate the pilots and fly a Boeing 767 themselves didn’t register in the minds of Boston Center controllers. To them, the old rules still applied. Zalewski kept trying to hail the plane.
United Airlines Flight 175
LEE AND EUNICE HANSON SAT IN THE KITCHEN OF THEIR BARN-RED home in Easton, Connecticut, nestled on a winding country road past fruit farms and signs offering fresh eggs and fresh manure. As they ate breakfast, the Hansons talked about their bubbly two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Christine, who that morning was taking her first airplane flight. Christine would be flying from Boston to Los Angeles with her parents, Peter and Sue Kim, Lee and Eunice’s son and daughter-in-law, aboard United Flight 175. Lee and Eunice spent the morning watching the clock and imagining each step along the young family’s journey, turning routine stages of the trip into exciting milestones, as only loving grandparents could.
“Boy, have they got a beautiful day to fly!”
“They’re probably in the tunnel on the way to the airport!”
“I bet they’re boarding!”
Peter, Sue, and Christine were due home in five days, after which they planned to visit Eunice and Lee for a friend’s wedding. As soon as the trio walked through the door, Lee and Eunice intended to quiz them for a minute-by-minute account of their California adventure.
The Hansons didn’t know it, but that morning’s flight path for United Flight 175 crossed the sky directly northwest of their property. If they had stepped away from breakfast, walked outside to their wooden back deck, and looked above the trees on their three sylvan acres, they might have spotted a tiny dot in the morning sky that was their family’s plane. Lee and Eunice could have waved goodbye.
UNITED FLIGHT 175 was the fraternal twin of American Flight 11: a wide-bodied Boeing 767, bound for Los Angeles, fully loaded with fuel and partly filled with passengers. The two planes left the ground fifteen minutes apart.
Minutes after its 8:14 a.m. takeoff, United Flight 175 crossed the Massachusetts border and cruised smoothly in the thin air nearly six miles above northwestern Connecticut. The blue skies ahead were “severe clear,” with unlimited visibility, as Captain Victor Saracini gazed through the cockpit window.
Saracini, a former Navy pilot, had earned a reputation as the “Forrest Gump Captain” for entertaining delayed passengers with long passages of memorized movie dialogue. Alongside him sat First Officer Michael Horrocks, a former Marine Corps pilot who called home before the flight to urge his nine-year-old daughter to get up for school. “I love you up to the moon and back,” he told her. With that, she rose from bed.
The calm in the cockpit was broken when, more than twenty minutes after takeoff, a Boston Center air traffic controller working alongside Peter Zalewski asked the Flight 175 pilots to scour the skies for the unresponsive American Flight 11. Saracini and Horrocks’s initial hunt for the American plane failed, but after a second request from air traffic control, at 8:38 a.m., the United pilots spotted the silver 767 five to ten miles away, two to three thousand feet below them.
They reported their discovery, then followed the controller’s instructions to ease their jet 30 degrees to the right, to keep away from the American Airlines plane. Whatever was happening aboard Flight 11, Boston Center controllers continued to want other planes to give it wide berth.
Saracini and Horrocks acknowledged the controller’s orders and turned Flight 175 to veer away from Flight 11. As they did, something nagged at the United pilots. They didn’t mention it to their Boston Center air traffic controllers, but shortly after taking flight, Saracini and Horrocks had heard a strange and troubling transmission on a radio frequency they shared with nearby planes, including Flight 11.
LIKE AMERICAN FLIGHT 11, United Flight 175 had lots of empty seats, flying at about one-third capacity. The fifty-six passengers were in the hands of nine crew members: the two pilots plus seven flight attendants. Perhaps the biggest difference between the United and American flights to Los Angeles on the morning of September 11 was the sounds inside the cabins: only adults boarded Flight 11, while the high-pitched voices of young children rang through United 175.
Heading
