Hayadan > "Is this a drill or for real?" asked an army officer

"Is this a drill or for real?" asked an army officer

At almost every stage of the 11/XNUMX attacks there were failures in communication and coordination in the chain of command. A report by the committee that investigated the events describes, moment by moment, how the air defense lagged behind the hijackers

Eric Schmitt and Eric Lichtblau, Haaretz, voila!

Bush at the school in Sarasota, Florida. Bush told the committee that "his instinct was to radiate calm, not to show the country an emotional reaction in a moment of crisis"

At 09:36 on September 11 - the most terrible morning in American history - military air defense officials learned that the American Airlines plane, which made its way on Flight 77, was only 9.6 km from the White House - a little more than a minute of flight. The air defense commander in upstate New York ordered three fighter jets to intercept the third airliner that had been hijacked that morning. But he soon discovered that the pilots who had taken off from Virginia were not flying north towards Baltimore, as they had been ordered to do, but east over the Atlantic Ocean. "I don't care how many windows are broken," barked the commander and ordered the fighter jets to turn around and "increase speed" in the direction of the White House.

At that moment in Washington, Secret Service agents rushed Vice President Dick Cheney to a secure underground bunker in the White House. In Sarasota, Florida, Bush's motorcade quickly moved away from a public school where the president was visiting - first it took a wrong turn and went in the wrong direction - to bring the president to an airport and from there to take him into the air, for safety.

Since September 11, 2001, the American nation has gone back and experienced this morning countless times, but never in such searing detail, unfolding the drama minute by minute, as in the report that was allowed to be published on June 17 by the independent commission that investigated terrorist attacks. The report, which holds 29 pages, describes 149 minutes of chaos unlike anything ever experienced by civil aviation and US military defense systems. he describes

Moments of resourcefulness and composure, as demonstrated by civilian air traffic controllers who managed to organize the landings of all 4,500 planes that were in the air at the time, and also moments of communication failure, lack of coordination and a disconnection in the chains of command.

During that morning, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) actually had no contact at the national command level with the "North American Aerospace Defense Command" (Norad) which is responsible for protecting the airspace of the USA. "There were a lot of people who needed to get an update on what was going on and didn't get it," said Thomas Kaine, chairman of the committee and the former Republican governor of New Jersey. "Many things that should have been done were not done."

"Another plane is coming"

At Boston's Logan Airport, that late summer day began like any other day, when American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles with 81 passengers, rolled onto the runway at eight o'clock in the morning. The last normal moment was 08:13 in the morning, when flight controllers ordered the plane to turn right, as stated in the committee's report. 16 seconds later, when an inspector ordered the plane to take off, contact was lost. After failing to make contact using emergency frequencies, the inspector told his supervisors that "he thought a serious malfunction had occurred," the report said.

The confirmation for this came at 08:24. The plane had already changed its course when a blood-curdling voice emanated from the walkie-talkie, which, according to information, was the voice of Mohammed Atta, who was in charge of the operation: "We have several planes. Just sit still and you won't get hurt. We are going back to the airport." Aviation officials in Boston began to announce that the plane of Flight 11 had been hijacked and that it was making its way to New York, but it was not until 08:37 that news of this was given to Norad officials in Rome (Rome) in the state of New York, who are responsible for the air defense of the northeastern USA.

"Is this a drill or for real?" asked an army officer.

"No, this is neither an exercise nor an experiment", came the answer.

Two F-15s at Otis Air Force Base, a distance of about 240 km from New York, were launched at 08:53. But the plane on Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center 6 minutes earlier.

Meanwhile, United Airlines flight 175 departing at 08:14 with 65 passengers from Boston to Los Angeles had already begun to behave strangely, but no one on the ground noticed this because the controller responsible for this flight was also handling the hijacked flight 11. Around nine in the morning, aviation officials realized that a second hijacked plane was making its way to New York. "Be alert, it looks like another plane is coming," the FAA reported. A few minutes later, the plane of Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the Twin Towers. At that point, air defense officials only knew that a second plane had been hijacked. In an alarming pattern that repeated itself throughout that morning, the air defense system was always several steps behind the hijackers and unable to catch up.

Meanwhile, in Sarasota, at 09:05, during President Bush's visit to the second grade, his chief of staff, Andrew Kerd, approached him and whispered in his ears that a plane had hit the second tower. The president was informed a few minutes earlier about the crash of the first plane, but Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, who joined the visit, initially said that the plane that crashed was a twin-engine plane. When the second plane crashed into the towers, White House aides said they knew it was no accident.

In the classroom, the summons and phones of the reporters began to ring. President Bush was not particularly thrilled. He told the committee, as the report notes, that "his instinct was to radiate calmness, not to show the country an emotional reaction in a moment of crisis." He stayed in the classroom for a few more minutes. Shortly before 09:15 a.m., he returned to a temporary situation room, where he was briefed by staff, watched television coverage, and called Cheney and others. Bush prepared to return to Washington. This decision worried assistants, who convinced him to cancel it.

No one among his companions from the White House knew about the hijacking of other planes at the time, the report said. But close to 09:21, aviation officials noticed that a third plane was missing - American Airlines flight 77, which took off from Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, at 08:20. Inspectors lost contact with him near Indianapolis and were unaware that he had turned back and headed toward Washington. A few minutes later, just as the president was getting ready to leave school, the FAA cleared the airspace over Manhattan and fighter jets flew over New York.

Cheney ordered the interception

But the threat was not at that time in New York, where the Twin Towers were burning, but in the Pentagon, where the plane of Flight 77 flew. For 36 minutes it flew towards Washington without being detected, the report reveals. At 09:32, aviation officials in Washington finally found what turned out to be the missing plane. An unarmed National Guard transport plane was launched to follow him, but again it was too late. At 9.38:XNUMX a.m. the National Guard pilot reported to the control tower in Washington that "it appears that this plane has collided with the Pentagon, sir."

According to the report, military officers did not even know about the frantic search for the plane of Flight 77. Instead, the military was looking for a ghost plane on its way to Washington. The FAA mistakenly reported that American Airlines Flight 11 — the plane that crashed into the north tower of the trade center more than half an hour earlier — was still in the air and flying toward Washington, the report said.

At 09:37 the Pentagon opened a senior-level conference call that was called the Air Threat Conference call and lasted more than eight hours. It was attended by Bush, Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and senior officials from various government bodies. Conspicuous by his absence in the crucial 40 minutes of the conference call was a representative of the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees all civil air traffic. The official who finally joined the conversation, at 10:17, did not have access to senior decision makers in the administration and did not have at his disposal the information that was available to senior officials in the administration at that time, the report said.

As senior officials met in Washington to deal with the situation, three F-16s rushed from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to Washington, and the final hijacking, of United Airlines Flight 93, reached its final stages. Minutes before crashing into the Pentagon, the plane flying from Newark to San Francisco deviated from its course near Cleveland. The air traffic controller there, and pilots of other planes flying nearby, heard on the radio what sounded like screams and the sounds of a struggle. At 09:38, inspectors in Cleveland cleared several planes from the path of the hijacked plane, and shortly after it changed its flight path over Ohio and began flying towards Washington. Four minutes later, the FAA's senior director of operations, Ben Slaney, ordered all planes in the air to land at the nearest airport - an order unprecedented in US history, which was carried out quickly and without incident. Meanwhile, on Flight 93 the passengers heard on their cell phones about the other hijackings and some of them stormed the cockpit. At 10:03 the plane in flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville in Pennsylvania, a distance of about 202 km from Washington.

Despite the many conversations FAA officials had regarding Flight 93, none of them at any point asked for the military's help. Around ten in the morning, Steven Headley, Bush's deputy national security adviser, asked the Pentagon to provide an escort of fighter jets for the president's plane that had just left Florida. He also asked for fighter jets to patrol over Washington, as well as help in implementing the "doomsday" regulations, under which cabinet members and congressional leaders are rushed to undisclosed locations during a national emergency.

At 10:10 the H-16s that were over the Atlantic Ocean arrived at Wellington, but according to Norad Commander Broome, no order was given to open fire on any hijacked civilian airliner. At the time, Cheney, still in the White House bunker, ordered the interception of any civilian airliner perceived as a threat. Joshua Bolton, Bush's deputy chief of staff, suggested Cheney call Bush again to get approval for the order. But Bolton, Cheney's chief of staff, Louis Libby, and Cheney's wife, Lynn, who were all in the bunker, had no recollection of such a conversation. Be that as it may, at 10:20 Bush's authorization for the shoot and intercept order was confirmed from Air Force 1.

At 10:31 the order was passed on to the air defense commanders, but lower ranking military officers in the chain of command were unsure about the order and did not pass it on to the pilots flying over Washington and New York. While the pilots awaited instructions, the commander of the 113th Air National Guard Wing in the District of Columbia, Brigadier General David Worley, who had heard secondhand reports that the Secret Service wanted pilots to circle over the capital, suggested the fighter jets at Andrews Air Force Base, the report said. . By virtue of Cheney's permission, the first pilots were already in the air at 10:38. Four minutes later, General Worley issued instructions that the decision to shoot down hijacked aircraft would be in the hands of the lead pilot.