Center in Herndon, Virginia, to FAA headquarters in Washington, or to anyone else. As minutes passed and commandeered Flight 11 flew west across Massachusetts and over New York, communications among the airline, the FAA, and U.S. military officials were sporadic at best, incomplete or nonexistent at worst.
Adding to the stress, Zalewski couldn’t devote his entire attention to the troubled American Airlines flight. Other planes continued to take off from Logan Airport and enter Zalewski’s assigned geographic sector. One of those flights was United Airlines Flight 175. For eleven minutes, an unusually long time, Zalewski had no contact with Flight 11.
Then, at 8:24 a.m., five minutes after the start of Betty Ong’s ongoing call to American Airlines’ reservations center, Zalewski heard three strange clicks on the radio frequency assigned to Flight 11 and numerous other flights in his sector.
“Is that American Eleven, trying to call?” Zalewski asked.
Five seconds passed. Then Zalewski heard an unknown male voice with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. Zalewski handled a great deal of international air traffic, so an Arab pilot’s voice wasn’t entirely unexpected. The unknown man’s radio message wasn’t clear, and Zalewski didn’t comprehend it.
Unknown at that point to anyone at Boston Center, the foreign-sounding man, almost spitting his words directly into the microphone, had said: “We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and we’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport.”
The comment apparently wasn’t intended for Zalewski or other FAA ground controllers. Rather, it sounded like a message from the cockpit intended to pacify Flight 11’s passengers and crew, none of whom heard it. The person in the pilot’s seat—almost certainly Mohamed Atta—keyed the mic in a way that transmitted the message to air traffic control on the ground, as well as to other planes using the same radio frequency, and not to passengers and crew in the cabin behind him. To have been heard inside the plane, the hijacker-pilot would have needed to flip a switch on the cockpit radio panel.
At a time when every piece of information counted, and every minute was crucial, the fact that Zalewski couldn’t quite hear that chilling message marked a major misfortune on a day filled with them. The first sentence of the hijackers’ first cockpit transmission at 8:24:38 a.m. not only announced the terror aboard American Flight 11, it included a seemingly unintentional warning about an unknown number of similar, related plots already in motion, but not yet activated, on other early-morning transcontinental flights. Whoever was flying Flight 11 didn’t simply say that he and his fellow hijackers had seized control of that plane. He said: “We have some planes.”
If the message had been caught immediately, the plural use of “planes” conceivably might have prompted Zalewski and other air traffic controllers to warn other pilots to enforce heightened cockpit security. Those pilots, in turn, might have told flight attendants to be on guard for trouble. But that’s a best-case scenario. It’s also possible that the comment would have been overlooked or dismissed as an empty boast or downplayed as a misstatement by a hijacker with limited English skills. There was no way to know, because Zalewski couldn’t catch it.
Zalewski answered: “And, uh, who’s trying to call me here? … American Eleven, are you trying to call?”
Seconds later, Zalewski heard another communication from the cockpit, also apparently intended for the passengers and crew of Flight 11: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourselves and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”
Zalewski heard that message loud and clear. He screamed for his supervisor, Jon Schippani: “Jon, get over here right now!”
Zalewski announced to the room of flight controllers that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Feeling ignored, as though not everyone at Boston Center appreciated the urgency, Zalewski flipped a switch to allow all the air traffic controllers around him to hear all radio communications with Flight 11. He handed off his other flights to fellow controllers. All the while, Zalewski wondered what essential information he might have missed in the first radio transmission. On the verge of panic, Zalewski turned to another Boston Center employee, a quality assurance supervisor named Bob Jones.
“Someone has to pull these fucking tapes—right now!” Zalewski told Jones.
Jones rushed to the basement to find the recording on the center’s old-fashioned reel-to-reel recording machines so he could decipher the hijacker’s first message.
Zalewski’s first thought was that the hijackers of Flight 11 might make a U-turn and return to Logan Airport, putting the plane dangerously in the path of departing westbound flights. But the radicals in the cockpit had another destination in mind.
The Boeing 767 turned sharply south over Albany, New York. Its flight path followed the Hudson River Valley in the general direction of New York City at a speed of perhaps 600 miles per hour. Even if the plane slowed somewhat, it could fly from Albany to Manhattan in as little as twenty minutes.
Between 8:25 and 8:32 a.m., Boston Center managers alerted their superiors within the FAA that American Flight 11 had been hijacked and was heading toward New York City. Zalewski felt what he could only describe as terror.
Yet just as American Airlines employees failed to immediately pass along information from Betty Ong’s call, more than twelve minutes passed before anyone at Boston Center or the FAA called the U.S. military for help.
One explanation for the delay was a hardwired belief among airline, government, and many military officials that hijackings followed a set pattern, in which military reaction time wasn’t the most important factor. The established playbook for hijackings went something like this: Driven by financial or political motives, such as seeking asylum, ransom, or the release of prisoners, hijackers took control of a passenger plane. Once in command, they used the radio to announce their intentions to government officials or media on the ground. They ordered the airline’s pilots to fly toward a new destination, using threats to passengers and crews as leverage. Eventually the hijackers ordered the pilots to land so they could refuel, escape, arrange for their demands to be met, or some combination. Under those circumstances, the appropriate, measured response from ground-based authorities was to clear other planes from the hijacked plane’s path and to seek a peaceful resolution that would protect innocent victims.
If the takeover of Flight 11 followed that “traditional” hijacking approach, a delay of a few minutes when sharing information shouldn’t have been a significant problem. There would have been plenty of time to seek military help or assistance from the FAA once the hijackers issued demands and announced a destination. But this hijacking didn’t follow “normal” rules. No demands were forthcoming, and no one in contact with Flight 11 anticipated that hijackers might kill or incapacitate the pilots and fly the plane.
Meanwhile, American Airlines employees at the airline’s control center in Texas tried multiple times, including at 8:23 a.m. and 8:25 a.m., to reach the original Flight 11 pilots. They used a dedicated messaging system that linked the ground and the cockpit, known as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS.
“Plz contact Boston Center ASAP,” one ACARS message read. “They have lost radio contact and your transponder signal.”
Flight 11 didn’t reply.
AS FLIGHT 11 flew erratically through the sky, flight attendant Amy Sweeney sat in a rear jump seat next to Betty Ong. Amy had called her husband an hour earlier, upset about missing their daughter’s sendoff to kindergarten. Now she tried to call the American Airlines flight services office in Boston with horrific news.
After two
