“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 fifty miles from New York City.
The call from NEADS triggered a piercing klaxon alarm at Otis, and a voice blared on the public address system: “Alpha kilo one and two, battle stations.” The on-alert fighter pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy and Major Daniel Nash, ran into a locker room to pull on their G-suits and grab their helmets. Then they sprinted to a Ford pickup and raced a half mile to the hangar housing their F-15s, strapped in, and waited for further orders.
At a top speed of more than twice the speed of sound, an F-15 Eagle fighter jet could reach New York from Cape Cod in ten minutes. But the F-15s from Otis were fourteen years old and loaded with extra fuel tanks, so it would take them perhaps twice as long. And they weren’t going anywhere until Duffy and Nash received orders to scramble, or launch.
If orders did come, based on expectations of a “traditional” hijacking, the fighter pilots would try to quickly locate the commandeered plane. Then they would act only as military escorts, with orders to “follow the flight, report anything unusual, and aid search and rescue in the event of an emergency.” While following the flight, Duffy and Nash would be expected to position their F-15s five miles directly behind the hijacked plane, to monitor its flight path until, presumably, the hijackers ordered the pilots to land. Under the most extreme circumstances envisioned, the fighter pilots might be ordered to fly close alongside, to force a hijacked plane to descend safely to the ground.
But with Flight 11’s transponder turned off, the F-15 pilots would have problems doing any of that. No one knew exactly where to send the fighter jets. Although military radar could track a plane with its transponder off, military air controllers needed to locate it first and mark its coordinates. As minutes ticked by, controllers working for Major Nasypany at NEADS searched their radar screens in a frustrating attempt to find the hijacked passenger jet.
Complicating matters, the FAA and NEADS used different radar setups to track planes. In key respects, they spoke what amounted to different controller languages. At one point during the search, a civilian air traffic controller from New York Center told a NEADS weapons controller that his radar showed Flight 11 “tracking coast.” To an FAA controller, the phrase described a computer projection of a flight path for a plane that didn’t appear on radar. But that wasn’t a term used by military controllers. NEADS controllers thought “tracking coast” meant that Flight 11 was flying along the East Coast.
“I don’t know where I’m scrambling these guys to,” complained Major James Fox, a NEADS weapons officer whose job was to direct the Otis fighters from the ground. “I need a direction, a destination.”
Nasypany gave Fox a general location, just north of New York City. That way, until someone located the hijacked plane, the fighter jets would be in the general vicinity of Flight 11.
Meanwhile, Colonel Marr called NORAD’s command center in Florida to speak with Major General Larry Arnold, the commanding general of the First Air Force. Marr asked permission to scramble the fighters without going through the usual complex Defense Department channels and without clear orders about how to engage the plane.
Arnold made a series of quick calculations. Hijackers had seized control of a passenger jet headed toward New York. They’d made the plane almost invisible to radar by turning off its transponder. They wouldn’t answer radio calls and showed no sign of landing safely or making demands. This didn’t seem like a traditional hijacking, though he couldn’t be sure. He wouldn’t wait to find out—they’d worry about getting permission later.
Arnold told Marr: “[G]o ahead and scramble the airplanes.”
UNDER THE HIJACKERS’ command, American Flight 11 adjusted its route again, turning more directly to the south. The plane slowed and began a sharp but controlled descent, dropping at a rate of 3,200 feet per minute.
With its transponder switched off, Flight 11 remained largely a mystery to air traffic controllers. If they could see it at all, it appeared as little more than a green blip on their screens. Trying to determine its speed and altitude, they sought help from other pilots. When Flight 11 turned to the south and began to descend, a controller from Boston Center named John Hartling called a nearby plane that had taken off from Boston minutes after Flight 11 and was headed in the same general direction. That plane was United Airlines Flight 175.
Hartling asked the United 175 pilots if they could see American Flight 11 through their cockpit windshield.
At first the sky looked empty, so Hartling asked again.
“Okay, United 175, do you have him at your twelve o’clock now, and five, ten miles [ahead]?”
“Affirmative,” answered Captain Victor Saracini. “We have him, uh, he looks, ah, about twenty, uh, yeah, about twenty-nine, twenty-eight thousand [feet].”
Hartling instructed United 175 to turn right: “I want to keep you away from this traffic.”
Saracini and his first officer, Michael Horrocks, banked the plane to the right, as told. They didn’t ask why, and Hartling didn’t tell them.
As far as anyone knew, the only action needed to keep United Flight 175 and every other plane safe would be separation—that is, steering them away from hijacked American Flight 11. No one had yet deciphered the first sentence of the hijackers’ first radio transmission from Flight 11: “We have some planes.” No one imagined that more than one flight might soon be in danger.
The concept of more than one hijacking simultaneously and in coordination wasn’t on anyone’s radar, literally or figuratively. Years had passed since the last hijacking of a U.S. air carrier, and coordinated multiple hijackings had never happened in the United States. Almost no one in the FAA, the airlines, or the military had dealt with such a scenario or considered it a likely threat. The last organized multiple hijackings anywhere in the world had occurred more than three decades earlier, in September 1970, when Palestinian militants demanding the release of prisoners in Israel seized five passenger jets bound from European cities to New York and London. They diverted three planes to a Jordanian desert and one to Cairo. The crew and passengers of the fifth jet, from the Israeli airline El Al, subdued the hijackers, killing one, and regained control of their plane. No passengers or crew members aboard those hijacked planes died.
AS FLIGHT 11 bore down on New York City, flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney sat side by side in the back of the plane. During separate, overlapping calls, they provided a chilling account of the crisis around them. The calls alone were acts of extraordinary bravery. Flight attendants were trained to anticipate that hijackers might have “sleeper” comrades embedded among the passengers, waiting to attack anyone who posed a threat or disobeyed commands.
Just as the military operated under certain expectations about how hijackings played out, aircrews were taught that they should refrain from trying to negotiate with or overpower hijackers, to avoid
