Scrambling the jets
While the Air Force puts more fighters on alert, questions linger over the FAA's air-control delays
Among the many lessons learned from the September 11 terrorist attacks is one now etched plainly in the minds of the commanders of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. In the past, NORAD had considered its greatest threat an aircraft approaching from outside the United States. The terrorist attacks show the danger may also lie within. To that end, NORAD revealed last week that its senior officers now have authority to shoot down commercial or civilian aircraft posing an imminent danger to the nation--even without checking with the president first.
But if military jets are to be able to intercept--and shoot down, if necessary--terrorist-piloted airplanes, they will depend on quick and clear communications between the Federal Aviation Administration's air-traffic controllers and NORAD. And one of the few aviation security questions not yet publicly addressed is why, on September 11, it took so long for the FAA to alert NORAD to that morning's airline emergencies.
Timelines of the hijacked flights supplied by NORAD and reconstructed by U.S. News from other reports show long notification delays at key junctures. When the first aircraft was commandeered after it left Boston, for instance, reports indicate that it took the FAA about 20 minutes after it knew the plane was hijacked to notify NORAD. Fighter jets, scrambled within six minutes, arrived too late on the scene.
Red flag. The longest delay--24 minutes--occurred in the case of American Airlines Flight 77, which took off from Dulles International Airport. That flight, heading west, did two very unusual things. Over Kentucky, at about 8:55 a.m., it began a 180-degree turn. And at 9:00, the plane's transponder was turned off.
Turning off a transponder deprives controllers of critical information about a plane's flight number, speed, and altitude. The plane can be tracked on what's called primary radar--a cruder system. It appears that by 9:10, controllers had a track on Flight 77, now over West Virginia and headed back to Washington. By that time, the first two planes had hit the World Trade Center, the second at 9:03. Still, the FAA didn't notify NORAD about Flight 77 until 9:24. (The FAA had notified NORAD about the two Boston flights more than 40 minutes earlier.) By 9:30, two F-16 fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, 120 miles away, were airborne. But the airliner hit the Pentagon at 9:37. The two fighters were still 12 minutes away.
Neither the controllers who handled the airplane nor the FAA would comment on the day's events. "What we did or may not have done is all part of the investigation. It's not something that I can talk about," said FAA spokesman William Shumann. But experts say that an airliner making a 180-degree turn followed by a transponder turnoff should have been a red flag to controllers. "The fact that the transponder went off, they should have picked up on that immediately," said Robert Cauble, a 20-year veteran of Navy air-traffic control. "Everyone should have been on alert about what was going on."
Indeed, FAA Administrator Jane Garvey told Congress that the Air Traffic Control System Command Center had sent a verbal notice to all air-traffic-control facilities about the first suspected hijacking. By her account, however, that notice went out at 9:06 a.m., after both Boston planes had smashed into the twin trade towers.
Shortly after the crash, one person identifying himself as an air-traffic controller in the Washington, D.C., center posted a chilling postmortem on a controllers' group Web site. The person said controllers in the Washington center "knew that the B-757 was inbound, the transponder was off, and heading right for us." He added, "I will say I am a little shocked that we really didn't receive any urgent phone calls to start tracking EVERYONE and provide more of a profound tracking until after the Pentagon was attacked."
Finger-pointing aside, there are signs that NORAD is now tightening procedures. It has beefed up an air-control center in Colorado with extra crews to monitor commercial air traffic alongside the FAA and has speeded up its computer access to flight tracking. NORAD now has 100 jets at the ready at 26 bases, a big jump from the 14 fighters on alert at seven bases before the terror attacks. "The system was just not set up to do this," said one former NORAD commander.
With Richard J. Newman and Mark Madden
This story appears in the October 8, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.