Gail Sheehy has been writing some great pieces on what really happened on the morning of 9/11, and the response to it, in the New York Observor. From the latest one we get this sad timeline, a timeline that makes clear that at least some of the planes -- certainly Flight 93 -- should never have gotten into the air that morning.
But Flight 11 had missed its first mark at 8:13 a.m., when, shortly after controllers asked the pilot to climb to 35,000 feet, the transponder stopped transmitting the electronic signal that identifies exact location and altitude. Air traffic manager Glenn Michael later said, "We considered it at that time to be a possible hijacking."
At 8:14 a.m., F.A.A. flight controllers in Boston began hearing an extraordinary radio transmission from the cockpit of Flight 11 that should have set off alarm bells. Before their F.A.A. superiors forbade them to talk to anyone, two of the controllers told the Christian Science Monitor on Sept. 11 that the captain of Flight 11, John Ogonowski, was surreptitiously triggering a "push-to-talk" button on the aircraft’s yoke most of the way to New York. When controllers picked up the voices of men speaking in Arabic and heavily accented English, they knew something was terribly wrong. More than one F.A.A. controller heard an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes."
Apparently, none of this crucial information was transmitted to other American pilots already airborne—notably Flight 77 out of Dulles, which took off at 8:20 a.m. only to be redirected to its target, the Pentagon—or to other airlines with planes in harm’s way: United’s Flight 173, which took off at 8:14 a.m. from Boston, or United’s Flight 93, whose "wheels-up" was recorded at 8:42 a.m.
It's worth reading the whole thing if you want to begin to understand some of the preventable negligence that occurred that day.
Posted by armand at June 18, 2004 11:25 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics