MItchell Zuckoff - Fall and Rise - The Story of 9/11

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 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.