the dark, too.
Sometimes even Ballinger’s fellow United Airlines employees weren’t much help, either. When a flight attendant aboard Flight 175, believed to be Robert Fangman, reported the plane’s hijacking to the United maintenance center in San Francisco, roughly ten minutes passed before that information reached Ballinger in Chicago. Immediately, Ballinger sent a carefully worded, purposely vague ACARS message to the United Flight 175 cockpit: “How is the ride. Any thing [sic] dispatch can do for you.”
If Flight 175 pilots Victor Saracini and Michael Horrocks had been at the controls under duress from hijackers, they might have signaled trouble, perhaps by using the hijack code word “trip.” But based on the telephone calls from United 175’s passengers and crew, the pilots almost certainly were already dead. Either way, they would soon be. Ballinger sent that message at 9:03 a.m., at almost the precise moment that Flight 175 plowed into the South Tower.
Five minutes later, Ballinger learned about the ground stop around New York City, so he sent messages to a half dozen United planes at New York–area airports, telling them to stay put.
As information churned around United’s headquarters, Ballinger pieced together what he knew: two planes had hit the World Trade Center; Flight 175 had been hijacked; and the FAA had ordered a ground stop. The first priority on United’s Rule of Five rang clear in his mind: safety. He needed to spread the word, by alerting “his” pilots to the violent cockpit takeover tactics hijackers had used aboard Flight 175.
At 9:19 a.m., Ballinger hurriedly began to send ACARS messages to his flights, one after another, first to planes that hadn’t yet taken off, and then in order of departure time: “Beware any cockpit introusion [sic]. Two aircraft in NY, hit Trade C[e]nter Builds.” Ballinger sent the message in batches, to several flights at a time. One message went to Flight 175, which had crashed twenty minutes earlier. In the heat of the moment, Ballinger sent the message despite already knowing that Flight 175 had been hijacked; he didn’t yet know that it was the plane that had hit the South Tower.
Ballinger’s ACARS messages marked the first direct warnings of danger to planes by United Airlines or American Airlines, or from air traffic control, for that matter. To be certain that his warnings reached the pilots, Ballinger sent them as both digital messages, with a chime, and as printed-out text messages. He knew that every cockpit contained a fire ax, located behind the first officer’s seat. Ballinger expected pilots who received his message to move the hammer-sized weapon to the floor near their feet, for easy access, to defend their planes, their lives, and the innocents on board.
Shortly before he sent the warning to Flight 93, Ballinger received a happy-go-lucky ACARS message from Captain Jason Dahl: “Good morning … Nice clb [climb] outta EWR [Newark Airport].” Jason commented about the sights from the cockpit and the weather, then signed off with his initial, J.
After Ballinger began notifying his flights to guard their cockpits, United’s air traffic control coordinator sent his own message of warning to the airline’s dispatchers: “There may be [additional] hijackings in progress. You may want to advise your [flights] to stay on alert and shut down all cockpit access [inflight].” Ballinger didn’t notice the message; he was already too busy contacting his flights.
While Ballinger progressed through his list, Melodie Homer’s ACARS message reached the Flight 93 cockpit first. One minute later, at 9:23 a.m., Ballinger sent Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. his cautionary message to “beware.”
Less than a minute later, Ballinger and other dispatchers received word from United’s chief operating officer, Andy Studdert, that “Flt 175–11 [denoting the date] BOS/LAX has been involved in an accident at New York.”
Either before they received Ballinger’s warning or before they read it, Jason Dahl or LeRoy Homer Jr. checked in with a routine altitude and weather report to an air traffic controller at the FAA’s Cleveland Center: “Morning Cleveland, United Ninety-Three with you at three-five-oh [thirty-five thousand feet], intermittent light chop.” The controller didn’t reply; he was busy rerouting planes affected by the ground stop. At 9:25 a.m., Flight 93 checked in again with Cleveland Center. This time the controller answered, but still he didn’t warn them.
One minute later, at 9:26 a.m., Ed Ballinger’s intrusion warning registered with the pilots of Flight 93. Jason Dahl’s chatty messaging tone changed. He wrote a hasty, misspelled ACARS reply: “Ed cofirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”
In a stressful atmosphere, it wouldn’t have been hard to overlook the “plz” in Jason Dahl’s reply and focus instead on the misspelled word “confirm.” That was especially true for Ballinger, as he kept track of fifteen flights after having just learned from one of United’s top officials that the sixteenth plane on his roster, United Flight 175, had crashed in New York. Without the word “plz,” the response from Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl could easily read as a simple acknowledgment of a message received—“Ed cofirm latest mssg”—as opposed to a worried request for more information.
Ballinger didn’t immediately reply to Flight 93. In the meantime, at 9:27 a.m., the pilots responded to a routine radio call from a Cleveland air traffic controller, who told them to watch for another plane twelve miles away and two thousand feet above them.
“Negative contact,” Jason Dahl replied. “We’re looking.”
Seconds later, at 9:28 a.m., every missed opportunity, every minute of delay in the spread of information and warning, every bit of bad luck and timing, coalesced in the cockpit of United Flight 93. The terrorists’ element of surprise remained intact, and Melodie Homer’s and Ed Ballinger’s worst fears came true.
American Airlines Flight 77
EVEN AFTER TWO HIJACKED JETS STRUCK THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, even as concern mounted among Indianapolis Center controllers about strange behavior by American Airlines Flight 77, no one from the FAA informed the U.S. military that a plane that took off from Dulles Airport had stopped communicating by radio and had disappeared from radar screens after someone turned off its cockpit transponder.
Meanwhile, based on a combination of wrong and misleading information, Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS began to chase a different plane, a phantom jet that no longer existed, supposedly heading south from New York toward the nation’s capital: American Airlines Flight 11, which had crashed more than a half hour earlier.
The after-it-crashed search for American Flight 11 represented a striking illustration of the confusion and failed communication between the United States’ air traffic control system and the nation’s military during the chaotic first hour after al-Qaeda hijackers executed a plan of unanticipated complexity. Whether by design, chance, or a combination of both, the terrorists’ simultaneous multiple hijackings vividly and fatally exposed vulnerabilities of America’s national defense system on a scale unseen in the sixty years since Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
The boondoggle search for Flight 11 kicked into gear when NEADS Master Sergeant Maureen “Mo” Dooley fielded a call from the FAA’s Boston military liaison, Colin Scoggins. He’d just taken part in a frenzied conference call with FAA headquarters in Washington and several regional air traffic control centers about the hijackings.
During that FAA conference call, Scoggins heard someone—he
