September 12, 2021 • 22 mins
On the morning of 9/11, air traffic controller Bart Avery was headed to work in Palmdale, California. His control center was in charge of air traffic for the Southwestern United States. Prior to his arrival, he wasn't aware of the attacks back East. It wasn't until the security guard at the control center, whom he had known for years, asked him for his security identification. Avery said he knew something wasn't right that day.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
On the morning of nine eleven, there were more than
four thousand aircraft in our nation's airspace, with hundreds more
inbound from other countries. After initial hijack attacks, the Federal
Aviation Administration's National Operations Manager in Virginia began to systematically
close the country's airspace, beginning with a Tier one ground stop,
which covered New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Washington, d C.
(00:27):
In the airplanes. Now, we're not letting anyone go right now.
Can't a good move. Uh, we're waiting to any When
I brought up on everything, Uh, there's the second planet
that hit the world paid center stop all the parts
that were a m Eastern time. All commercial aircraft were grounded,
(00:47):
and those flights already airborne were ordered to land. Military
jets were given permission to shoot down any aircraft whose
pilot did not acknowledge contact. It was the first time
in history a complete airspace closure had been ordered. I
foresee that we probably need to do. We need to
talk to f a A A. We need to tell them
if this stuff is gonna keep on going, we need
to take those fighters. Put him over Manhattan. Okay, that's
(01:11):
the best thing, that's best play, right, here, so corner
with the f A. Tell him. If there's more out
there but which we don't know, tell Boxy Scramble, Langley
sent him in the same location. Battles battle stations are
Scramble battle stations only. Langley. Okay, this is who's up there. Langley. Okay,
you're listening. Well. I told the FD so far we
(01:32):
need to get those fighters lang because we don't know
how many guys are out of black couldstity too, could
be more. This is nine eleven, two decades later. I'm
Steve Gregory in Los Angeles. On the morning of nine eleven,
air traffic controller part Avery was headed into work. It's
in Palmville, California. UM. It's about a ten minute drive
from my house that particular morning. UM. For whatever reason,
(01:56):
I didn't listen to the news in the morning. I
didn't listen to the radio on the on the way in. UM.
So the first thing I noticed that was a little
unusual was the security guard who I had known for
fifteen years, made me stop my car and actually look
at my ID badge, which normally she she would have
just waved me in. I didn't think a whole lot
of it until I walked in the building, and uh,
(02:18):
I just saw the shock of people running around screaming.
The only thing I could think of was that it
must have we must have had a horrific accident somewhere
in our space. When did you know the scope of
what was going on? So I walked up to my
friend Dave and asked him what was going on, and
he just gave me this crazy look, like you don't
know what happened? And I said, well, no, I just
(02:41):
got in here a few minutes ago. This was just
before six o'clock, so the first plane had already hit
at that point. We just started speculating it had to
have been a small aircraft. There's no way an airliner
would have crashed into the World Trade Center. There's you know,
a pilot is not going to do that, and hijacker
is not going to do that. So we just assumed
that it was one plane. But apparently back East, what
(03:03):
I've gathered over the last twenty four hours kind of
re listening to some of the tapes was that they
did know that American eleven was hijacked, and they did
know that American eleven was the aircraft that hit the
World Trade Center, but nobody else knew it out on
the West coast for sure. So once you were made
aware of the sort of the gravity of the situation,
what were next steps. Well, shortly after six is when
(03:25):
the second plane hit. And then once we saw that
or heard about that, we knew that it was a
terrorist attack. It just was too much of a coincidence
that two airplanes would do that, and uh, we started
to um on our own talk about stop ground stopping
all the aircraft in l A Center's airspace, and the
big airports would be l A X of course, Las Vegas,
San Diego, Burbank, and Ontario. Within about thirty minutes, we
(03:49):
got a call from the what's called the command center
back in Herndon, Virginia, and they basically said, every airplane
has to land, every airplane is going to stop. And
that's when I would say all hell broke loose because
it was just something we had never anticipated. It was craziness,
and the pilots were a lot of them did not
(04:11):
know what was going on, and there were some very
interesting conversations with these pilots, like, for example, an airplane
that had taken off from l a X twenty minutes
prior to this shut down. Probably halfway to Las Vegas
was now being let's say, going to London was now
being told to land in Las Vegas, and the pilots
that didn't know what was going on were arguing basically
(04:32):
like why why am I landing in Las Vegas. But
then probably five or ten minutes, everybody got the word
through their their company that can communicate to the flight deck,
and uh, everybody was cooperative. Everybody was just going along
with the plan. What kind of complicates things that a
lot of people don't realize is that if you're on
a flight of more than four or five hours, you've
(04:53):
got a dump fuel before you can just go land
and aircraft, so we had hundreds of aircraft that had
to dump fuel and u The coordination on that was
very complex because we had to vector airplanes away from
populated areas to make that happen. How many planes are
we talking about, bart So there were four thousand aircraft
roughly in the United States, and yeah, we had we
(05:15):
had a lot of aircraft that were either that had
just taken off or that we're coming from let's say,
across the Pacific Ocean from Europe up through Mexico, what
we had to do with all the airplanes in the
air that were coming towards US is not allow any
aircraft coming from Canada or from Mexico. We we just
stopped all those aircraft from coming into US airspace. The
(05:36):
only airport planes that we couldn't divert were the ones
coming from say, Hawaii, because there's no place for them
to land other than you know, the West coast somewhere.
Although some of those airplanes I know were diverted up
into Alaska, which we thought at the time made more
sense than trying to not knowing you know, which airplane
could have a terrorist and which one doesn't. But within
an hour, um, we have a we have a in
(05:59):
traffic manage when we have a huge television screen that
shows every airplane in the United States, and like I said,
I believe they are about four thousand, within an hour
or so, almost every single one of those planes had
just disappeared. It was they were all on the ground.
Just shocking to see that the only airplanes that were
left was air Force one, and all over the country
(06:20):
there were f sixteens that were orbiting around the big
major cities. The other thing that was very spooky was.
We have these things called ghost targets, and a ghost
target is when an aircraft loses its transponder, the computer
projects based on its you know, it's route, that it has,
its aut tune, and it's and its last known ground
(06:42):
speed and and it and it keeps this data block
kind of floating. And so I believe it was the
aircraft that hit the Pentagon. They I don't think they
realized for a while that that aircraft had been lost.
And so here in the out in the Midwest, we
see this ghost target just ominously coming towards the West coast,
and uh that that gave us a big chill for
(07:04):
quite a while, until later on they figured out that
that was just a ghost target. Obviously we know now
twin towers were hit, Pentagon was hit, and then the
plane that went down in Pennsylvania. It had its target.
I've always known here on the West coast that Los
Angeles is always a very vulnerable target. That had to
be going through your mind too, because you had l A,
You've got San Francisco along the western seaboard, You've got
(07:27):
a lot of potential there. Absolutely. The other thing too,
is that twenty years later we looked back. We know
all the facts pretty much of what happened, but you know,
within thirty minutes to an hour after that that those
first planes hit, nobody knew what was going on. For
all we knew there was a hundred planes that had
terrorists on them and and they may have been coming
from you know, Japan, coming into l A. And we
(07:49):
had to take those airplanes. And it was scary until
every airplane was on the ground and we had resolved
that ghost target issue, it was it was very scary
to look at that. You were talking about all of
the planes that had to dump fuel and you had to,
as you say, vector them away from populated areas. How
does one go about dumping that much fuel from the sky?
(08:09):
Where do they dump it at? They actually dump it
over land. My understanding is that if you're up high enough,
it just dissipates before it actually hits the ground. But
some of those aircraft were down, you know, relatively low,
and so we had to take them out kind of
out in the middle, maybe out in the middle of
nowhere so speak, and throughout just away from populated areas. Obviously,
(08:31):
that's not a good thing to have fuel dumping down
on over downtown l A, etcetera. Sure, so they knew
they were having to dump it for the purpose of landing.
So it would have been a very last minute thing,
you know, in their part too. But it's also a
very standard thing. When when an airplane declares an emergency,
which happens all the time, you know, they lose an
engine or whatnot. The first thing that pilot tells the
(08:53):
air traffic controllers says, hey, we have to dump fuel
right now. And you know, if they're out over the ocean,
that's just taking off from l A X, No big deal.
I just dumped out over the ocean. And it doesn't
take that long, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes too, and
they know how much fuel the dump where they're okay
to land the aircraft. The reason they do it is
because of the weight of the aircraft. They can't safely
land an aircraft that's got you know, half a million
(09:15):
pounds of fuel on board or I'm not sure how much.
That's probably an exaggeration, but a lot of weight is
in that fuel. How many airports were in your jurisdiction,
Las Vegas, all the all the so Cal airports um
Bakersfield to the to the kind of the Northwest. I
mean that includes like the major airports in the smaller
the municipal reports as well CORECT. Every every airport was
(09:37):
how many runways do you think you were overseeing over
a hundred? And then did you have situations where you
had like some fifty sevens and other large commercial carriers
having to land in on runways they were not accustomed
to know. We are well aware of which airports can
you know, because we are trained in emergency procedures where
an aircraft is in distress and has to land at
(09:59):
the new orst airport and we're obviously not gonna let
at seven try to land at Whiteman Airport. I think
Las Vegas actually bore most of the brunt because a
lot of our traffic flow goes up towards Las Vegas area.
Any flight that's going to Europe to the most of
the East Coast airports are going to go right over
Las Vegas. And looking back on it, the guys and
(10:23):
gals on the ground in Las Vegas must have just
had a nightmare on their hands because not only could
no airplanes depart Las Vegas, all these airplanes were landing
in Las Vegas, and God knows where they were parking
all those airplanes, but we my guess is we put
fifty a hundred airplanes down in Las Vegas and you
did all that in an hour. In an hour, so
(10:43):
then what we, like probably every American, were in just shock.
We were just speechless. We I remember looking at my
radar scope and thinking, I am never seen a blank
radar scope in my life. I mean, I'm talking about
hundreds of thousands square miles that control just a fighter
jet or two and just no airplanes. And I think
(11:06):
we just tried to talk it out and make try
to make sense of it. At that point, probably every
controller in our facility, and there's about on shift that morning,
they were well over a hundred controllers and we were
popping in and out of the TV room just try
to try to pick up snippets of what was going on,
and um, you just couldn't make sense of it. It
was just something that just did not compute in our minds.
(11:28):
As is there traffic controllers, You're never trained for something
like that. It's just it's absolute craziness what we saw
that morning. Interesting though, you are trained to handle the
worst case scenarios though, because you're dealing with people's lives
all the time, but on something on this kind of scale,
I'm sure it's like many others in the role, get
(11:49):
the job done first, process it later, correct. It's it's
something that's ingrained in us. You know, we're you know,
we all act like we're macho, and you know, we
we we see people unfortunately dying aircraft accidents. UM. For example,
about a year and a half before nine eleven, I
was working the day that Alaska to sixty one crash
in the Pacific Ocean. I wasn't controlling the plane, but
(12:12):
I was at a scope nearby, and I was watching
the data black and I watched how fast that aircraft
is senator at the end, and I just I was
shaking when I got off the sector. You know. But
but you're cool and you're calm if you listen to
the controllers voices that we're dealing with nine eleven. UM,
so proud of those folks, you know, just the way
they did their job. But I guarantee they were shaking
and probably sobbing, you know, within an hour of what
(12:35):
and and a lot of us were just trying to
deal with it. And you know, there's no grief counselors
to come around, and you're just you're just on your
own looking back on it. Um, boy, it was just
terrific what we saw. How do you balance with what
you were looking at on the scope, what you were
seeing on the television, and kind of what you were
discussing amongst yourselves. Well, air traffic controllers always want to
(12:58):
try to know everything that's going on, and so we
were just you know, digging out pieces of information we
could find on on the news or hearing, hearing what
other controllers, you know, theories were, and um, I don't know,
I don't I don't even know how to answer that question.
It was just it was tough. It's hard for me
(13:20):
to even talk about this. It's just all coming back
into just a horrible situation. Well even twenty years later,
but you're doing it was a very visual job and
a very visceral job. So even twenty years later, does
it feel like it was yesterday? It does? It does,
especially you know, going back and listening to some of
the tapes, it just brought back bad memories and it
(13:44):
seemed like it was not twenty years ago. It seemed
like it was very recent. So you were talking about
when the scopes were clear, you said other than military
you were listening. Did you get to hear the orders
coming from your headquarters about the permission to shoot down
martial aircraft? They didn't acknowledge. No, I don't recall ever
(14:04):
hearing that, And I think it's because we were scrambling
so hard to get all these aircraft on the ground
and in our particular airspace l A Center, we had
no aircraft in the air, so there was that was
kind of a mood point for as far as we're concerned.
I know that, I know that happened, but and they
never got down to our level. That must have been
(14:25):
pretty disturbing to see the only dots on your scope
were military. Do you remember about how many um? I
remember that they were all F sixteen's um. They were
all scrambled from some of the so cal military bases,
and at any given time they were they were always
in the air. They were in the aven probably four
(14:47):
or five in the Southern California area. That's got to
be pretty spooky, very spooky. It's I mean, it felt
like the end of the world. To be honest with you,
we didn't know. I didn't know if I was gonna
have a job. I didn't know. It just seemed like
the world was coming to an end. It was that horrific.
Were there any specific challenges on getting a plane to
the ground where there was just not enough room or
a pilot didn't know what they were doing, or yes, um,
(15:09):
all the planes got to the ground safely. Um. Some
of the foreign air carriers, for example, English is not
their first language, and even in a normal situation sometimes
there's a communication problem there. So those would have been
the flights that probably would have been the most difficult
to handle. I can't think of any specific things that
I saw, but it just seemed like once everybody was
(15:33):
on board with what was going on, it was handled
very well, and there weren't really any difficult situations that
I'm aware of. That there had to be a lot
of disbelief, And then I remember hearing some chatter saying
is this a drill? And then or is this real? Right?
That that did happen too, and getting pilots to sign
on that's true, that's I didn't thought of that, but
(15:53):
I'm sure some of those pilots were wondering if somebody
came into our place and stole the mics. But I
think pilots know when they're talking to an a real
air traffic controller. Um, there's just a way we speak,
a way we communicate, And I think they would have
been suspicious if if something weird like that had happened.
(16:14):
So I I really don't think for very long they
believe that this was any sort of a hoax or drill.
You don't. You don't tell a guy going to London
that you're going to land in Las Vegas right now,
because just trust me, you have to land in Las Vegas.
You're just gonna do it. And the other thing, too,
is pilots are just trained to listen to us. I mean,
it's it's it's a little bit of an ego trip
(16:35):
being in air traffic control because you're telling these guys
what exactly what to do. So now the planes are
on the ground, you're kind of making sense of all
of this, what happens next? I mean, how long was
it like this so that that whole first day we
were just all in the days we're sitting there. I
don't know why we were sitting at our sectors, but
(16:55):
I just remember to describe what a sector is. Sure,
a sector is um a specific speed piece of airspace
that a particular controller controls. And at ELI Center, I
believe there were about your air cubicle. It's like an
air cubicle and it's literally like this geographic area. And
once once that airplane crosses this line, he's now in
the next sector, and we do what's called shipping the aircraft.
(17:18):
We change the frequency and tell him, Okay, now you're
gonna talk to Sector three over here. I'm Sector four,
see you later. So just silence, staring at scopes, wondering
what's what's what's going to happen next. The next day
when we all came in for some odd reason, they
didn't really cut the staffing down. They just everybody just
came back into work the next day and once again
(17:39):
we just sat in front of blank raid our scopes
and um So. One of the things that happened to
me that really to this day twenty years later, um
um just really affected me bad. Um So. I was
in traffic management. I think it was day three and
the ground stop was still in effect. It's just the
(18:00):
f sixteens in the year, and I get a call
from a pilot on the ground in Lake Havasu and
he's a lifeguard flight and UM. He told me that, UM,
look he's got a very sick passenger on board. He
needs to get this passenger to Las Vegas immediately, and um,
lifeguard flights are top priority. The only one above him
(18:22):
really is an emergency or air force one. It's it's
just like an ambulance going down the street and everybody
moves out of the way. So this guy probably could
have been in Las Vegas within twenty minutes. I believe
it was a lear jet. And UM, I told him.
I said, look, I'm gonna call Virginia and ask, but
I'm almost positive that the answers for you. Unfortunately it's
(18:43):
gonna be no, but I'll call you back. So I
called Virginia. UM, and the guy said, you know, I
don't think so, but let me let me see what
we're doing with these lifeguard flights. And I waited. I
called the guy back and have us to the pilot.
I told him, like, I'm still waiting. I'm so sorry,
UM hanging hanging there for me. And about a half
(19:05):
hour went by, and I remember, this guy calls me back,
and it's chilling what he said to me. He just says, um, hey,
um art just disregard that we lost our passenger, and
looking back on it, there's nothing we could have done. UM. Also,
at any given time in l A Center air space,
for example, there's probably one or two lifeguard flights an
hour there there, you know, going from place to place,
(19:28):
most in most cases, I believe, taking critically injured people
to hospitals. And so for those few days that the
airspace was shut down, god knows how many people probably
lost their lives. It's just another casualty of nine eleven.
I didn't even think about that, so that the ground
stop impacted medical transport. Absolutely nobody was in the air
(19:48):
except for those six When did it finally start to
open up? You know it? As I recall, it was
about four day four or five that they slowly started
to kind of open it up. And one of the
things that struck me as kind of odd was that
one of the early restrictions that was lifted UM was
on UM crop dusters, and I thought, okay, crop dusters,
(20:13):
how about lifeguard flights too. I believe lifeguard flights were
also released pretty early on. But apparently crop crop dusters
are pretty vital to our countries crops, and they weren't
allowed to fly for three or four days, and I
found that interesting. But I think I think probably on
day five we were kind of back to normal. But
of course there were not a lot of airplanes in
(20:33):
the air for a long time after nine eleven. It's
just took a long time to kind of get back
to normal. How many years after that did you continue
to work. I retired in two thousand seven, so about
six say so, looking back on it now, and as
someone who travels still travels today, when you go through
t S A and you go through all of the
new security measures as a result of nine eleven, do
(20:55):
you feel safer traveling? Um? Yes, I I do. I
always thank those t S agents. I I look him
in the eye and I say thank you for your service,
because I think they have a really tough job. And
but I think that's kind of the only way to
do this anymore. I mean, we have to really kind
of check every single person that's getting on an aircraft
so it never happens again. So I think definitely think
(21:18):
things are a lot safer since nine eleven. How about
is a country? Do you think the country is a
lot safer. Well, Um, that's a whole discussion. Um, I
I'm starting I'm starting to wonder if we're safer or
not now some of the things that are going on.
It doesn't make sense that people seem to just be
(21:38):
able to willy nearly come into the country. Um, unchecked.
I don't know how safe that is. I don't think
that's safe. But um, that's the way about my pay
grade coming up in episode three. Our goal was to
be unpredictable. We didn't want the bad guys to be
able to gain the system. The t s A is
(22:00):
born nine eleven, two decades later, is produced by Steve
Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez, and is a production of the
CAFI News department for iHeartMedia Los Angeles and the iHeart
Podcast Network. The views expressed are strictly those of the
guests and not necessarily the hosts or employees of iHeartMedia.
On the morning of nine eleven, there were more than
four thousand aircraft in our nation's airspace, with hundreds more
inbound from other countries. After initial hijack attacks, the Federal
Aviation Administration's National Operations Manager in Virginia began to systematically
close the country's airspace, beginning with a Tier one ground stop,
which covered New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Washington, d C.
(00:27):
In the airplanes. Now, we're not letting anyone go right now.
Can't a good move. Uh, we're waiting to any When
I brought up on everything, Uh, there's the second planet
that hit the world paid center stop all the parts
that were a m Eastern time. All commercial aircraft were grounded,
(00:47):
and those flights already airborne were ordered to land. Military
jets were given permission to shoot down any aircraft whose
pilot did not acknowledge contact. It was the first time
in history a complete airspace closure had been ordered. I
foresee that we probably need to do. We need to
talk to f a A A. We need to tell them
if this stuff is gonna keep on going, we need
to take those fighters. Put him over Manhattan. Okay, that's
(01:11):
the best thing, that's best play, right, here, so corner
with the f A. Tell him. If there's more out
there but which we don't know, tell Boxy Scramble, Langley
sent him in the same location. Battles battle stations are
Scramble battle stations only. Langley. Okay, this is who's up there. Langley. Okay,
you're listening. Well. I told the FD so far we
(01:32):
need to get those fighters lang because we don't know
how many guys are out of black couldstity too, could
be more. This is nine eleven, two decades later. I'm
Steve Gregory in Los Angeles. On the morning of nine eleven,
air traffic controller part Avery was headed into work. It's
in Palmville, California. UM. It's about a ten minute drive
from my house that particular morning. UM. For whatever reason,
(01:56):
I didn't listen to the news in the morning. I
didn't listen to the radio on the on the way in. UM.
So the first thing I noticed that was a little
unusual was the security guard who I had known for
fifteen years, made me stop my car and actually look
at my ID badge, which normally she she would have
just waved me in. I didn't think a whole lot
of it until I walked in the building, and uh,
(02:18):
I just saw the shock of people running around screaming.
The only thing I could think of was that it
must have we must have had a horrific accident somewhere
in our space. When did you know the scope of
what was going on? So I walked up to my
friend Dave and asked him what was going on, and
he just gave me this crazy look, like you don't
know what happened? And I said, well, no, I just
(02:41):
got in here a few minutes ago. This was just
before six o'clock, so the first plane had already hit
at that point. We just started speculating it had to
have been a small aircraft. There's no way an airliner
would have crashed into the World Trade Center. There's you know,
a pilot is not going to do that, and hijacker
is not going to do that. So we just assumed
that it was one plane. But apparently back East, what
(03:03):
I've gathered over the last twenty four hours kind of
re listening to some of the tapes was that they
did know that American eleven was hijacked, and they did
know that American eleven was the aircraft that hit the
World Trade Center, but nobody else knew it out on
the West coast for sure. So once you were made
aware of the sort of the gravity of the situation,
what were next steps. Well, shortly after six is when
(03:25):
the second plane hit. And then once we saw that
or heard about that, we knew that it was a
terrorist attack. It just was too much of a coincidence
that two airplanes would do that, and uh, we started
to um on our own talk about stop ground stopping
all the aircraft in l A Center's airspace, and the
big airports would be l A X of course, Las Vegas,
San Diego, Burbank, and Ontario. Within about thirty minutes, we
(03:49):
got a call from the what's called the command center
back in Herndon, Virginia, and they basically said, every airplane
has to land, every airplane is going to stop. And
that's when I would say all hell broke loose because
it was just something we had never anticipated. It was craziness,
and the pilots were a lot of them did not
(04:11):
know what was going on, and there were some very
interesting conversations with these pilots, like, for example, an airplane
that had taken off from l a X twenty minutes
prior to this shut down. Probably halfway to Las Vegas
was now being let's say, going to London was now
being told to land in Las Vegas, and the pilots
that didn't know what was going on were arguing basically
(04:32):
like why why am I landing in Las Vegas. But
then probably five or ten minutes, everybody got the word
through their their company that can communicate to the flight deck,
and uh, everybody was cooperative. Everybody was just going along
with the plan. What kind of complicates things that a
lot of people don't realize is that if you're on
a flight of more than four or five hours, you've
(04:53):
got a dump fuel before you can just go land
and aircraft, so we had hundreds of aircraft that had
to dump fuel and u The coordination on that was
very complex because we had to vector airplanes away from
populated areas to make that happen. How many planes are
we talking about, bart So there were four thousand aircraft
roughly in the United States, and yeah, we had we
(05:15):
had a lot of aircraft that were either that had
just taken off or that we're coming from let's say,
across the Pacific Ocean from Europe up through Mexico, what
we had to do with all the airplanes in the
air that were coming towards US is not allow any
aircraft coming from Canada or from Mexico. We we just
stopped all those aircraft from coming into US airspace. The
(05:36):
only airport planes that we couldn't divert were the ones
coming from say, Hawaii, because there's no place for them
to land other than you know, the West coast somewhere.
Although some of those airplanes I know were diverted up
into Alaska, which we thought at the time made more
sense than trying to not knowing you know, which airplane
could have a terrorist and which one doesn't. But within
an hour, um, we have a we have a in
(05:59):
traffic manage when we have a huge television screen that
shows every airplane in the United States, and like I said,
I believe they are about four thousand, within an hour
or so, almost every single one of those planes had
just disappeared. It was they were all on the ground.
Just shocking to see that the only airplanes that were
left was air Force one, and all over the country
(06:20):
there were f sixteens that were orbiting around the big
major cities. The other thing that was very spooky was.
We have these things called ghost targets, and a ghost
target is when an aircraft loses its transponder, the computer
projects based on its you know, it's route, that it has,
its aut tune, and it's and its last known ground
(06:42):
speed and and it and it keeps this data block
kind of floating. And so I believe it was the
aircraft that hit the Pentagon. They I don't think they
realized for a while that that aircraft had been lost.
And so here in the out in the Midwest, we
see this ghost target just ominously coming towards the West coast,
and uh that that gave us a big chill for
(07:04):
quite a while, until later on they figured out that
that was just a ghost target. Obviously we know now
twin towers were hit, Pentagon was hit, and then the
plane that went down in Pennsylvania. It had its target.
I've always known here on the West coast that Los
Angeles is always a very vulnerable target. That had to
be going through your mind too, because you had l A,
You've got San Francisco along the western seaboard, You've got
(07:27):
a lot of potential there. Absolutely. The other thing too,
is that twenty years later we looked back. We know
all the facts pretty much of what happened, but you know,
within thirty minutes to an hour after that that those
first planes hit, nobody knew what was going on. For
all we knew there was a hundred planes that had
terrorists on them and and they may have been coming
from you know, Japan, coming into l A. And we
(07:49):
had to take those airplanes. And it was scary until
every airplane was on the ground and we had resolved
that ghost target issue, it was it was very scary
to look at that. You were talking about all of
the planes that had to dump fuel and you had to,
as you say, vector them away from populated areas. How
does one go about dumping that much fuel from the sky?
(08:09):
Where do they dump it at? They actually dump it
over land. My understanding is that if you're up high enough,
it just dissipates before it actually hits the ground. But
some of those aircraft were down, you know, relatively low,
and so we had to take them out kind of
out in the middle, maybe out in the middle of
nowhere so speak, and throughout just away from populated areas. Obviously,
(08:31):
that's not a good thing to have fuel dumping down
on over downtown l A, etcetera. Sure, so they knew
they were having to dump it for the purpose of landing.
So it would have been a very last minute thing,
you know, in their part too. But it's also a
very standard thing. When when an airplane declares an emergency,
which happens all the time, you know, they lose an
engine or whatnot. The first thing that pilot tells the
(08:53):
air traffic controllers says, hey, we have to dump fuel
right now. And you know, if they're out over the ocean,
that's just taking off from l A X, No big deal.
I just dumped out over the ocean. And it doesn't
take that long, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes too, and
they know how much fuel the dump where they're okay
to land the aircraft. The reason they do it is
because of the weight of the aircraft. They can't safely
land an aircraft that's got you know, half a million
(09:15):
pounds of fuel on board or I'm not sure how much.
That's probably an exaggeration, but a lot of weight is
in that fuel. How many airports were in your jurisdiction,
Las Vegas, all the all the so Cal airports um
Bakersfield to the to the kind of the Northwest. I
mean that includes like the major airports in the smaller
the municipal reports as well CORECT. Every every airport was
(09:37):
how many runways do you think you were overseeing over
a hundred? And then did you have situations where you
had like some fifty sevens and other large commercial carriers
having to land in on runways they were not accustomed
to know. We are well aware of which airports can
you know, because we are trained in emergency procedures where
an aircraft is in distress and has to land at
(09:59):
the new orst airport and we're obviously not gonna let
at seven try to land at Whiteman Airport. I think
Las Vegas actually bore most of the brunt because a
lot of our traffic flow goes up towards Las Vegas area.
Any flight that's going to Europe to the most of
the East Coast airports are going to go right over
Las Vegas. And looking back on it, the guys and
(10:23):
gals on the ground in Las Vegas must have just
had a nightmare on their hands because not only could
no airplanes depart Las Vegas, all these airplanes were landing
in Las Vegas, and God knows where they were parking
all those airplanes, but we my guess is we put
fifty a hundred airplanes down in Las Vegas and you
did all that in an hour. In an hour, so
(10:43):
then what we, like probably every American, were in just shock.
We were just speechless. We I remember looking at my
radar scope and thinking, I am never seen a blank
radar scope in my life. I mean, I'm talking about
hundreds of thousands square miles that control just a fighter
jet or two and just no airplanes. And I think
(11:06):
we just tried to talk it out and make try
to make sense of it. At that point, probably every
controller in our facility, and there's about on shift that morning,
they were well over a hundred controllers and we were
popping in and out of the TV room just try
to try to pick up snippets of what was going on,
and um, you just couldn't make sense of it. It
was just something that just did not compute in our minds.
(11:28):
As is there traffic controllers, You're never trained for something
like that. It's just it's absolute craziness what we saw
that morning. Interesting though, you are trained to handle the
worst case scenarios though, because you're dealing with people's lives
all the time, but on something on this kind of scale,
I'm sure it's like many others in the role, get
(11:49):
the job done first, process it later, correct. It's it's
something that's ingrained in us. You know, we're you know,
we all act like we're macho, and you know, we
we we see people unfortunately dying aircraft accidents. UM. For example,
about a year and a half before nine eleven, I
was working the day that Alaska to sixty one crash
in the Pacific Ocean. I wasn't controlling the plane, but
(12:12):
I was at a scope nearby, and I was watching
the data black and I watched how fast that aircraft
is senator at the end, and I just I was
shaking when I got off the sector. You know. But
but you're cool and you're calm if you listen to
the controllers voices that we're dealing with nine eleven. UM,
so proud of those folks, you know, just the way
they did their job. But I guarantee they were shaking
and probably sobbing, you know, within an hour of what
(12:35):
and and a lot of us were just trying to
deal with it. And you know, there's no grief counselors
to come around, and you're just you're just on your
own looking back on it. Um, boy, it was just
terrific what we saw. How do you balance with what
you were looking at on the scope, what you were
seeing on the television, and kind of what you were
discussing amongst yourselves. Well, air traffic controllers always want to
(12:58):
try to know everything that's going on, and so we
were just you know, digging out pieces of information we
could find on on the news or hearing, hearing what
other controllers, you know, theories were, and um, I don't know,
I don't I don't even know how to answer that question.
It was just it was tough. It's hard for me
(13:20):
to even talk about this. It's just all coming back
into just a horrible situation. Well even twenty years later,
but you're doing it was a very visual job and
a very visceral job. So even twenty years later, does
it feel like it was yesterday? It does? It does,
especially you know, going back and listening to some of
the tapes, it just brought back bad memories and it
(13:44):
seemed like it was not twenty years ago. It seemed
like it was very recent. So you were talking about
when the scopes were clear, you said other than military
you were listening. Did you get to hear the orders
coming from your headquarters about the permission to shoot down
martial aircraft? They didn't acknowledge. No, I don't recall ever
(14:04):
hearing that, And I think it's because we were scrambling
so hard to get all these aircraft on the ground
and in our particular airspace l A Center, we had
no aircraft in the air, so there was that was
kind of a mood point for as far as we're concerned.
I know that, I know that happened, but and they
never got down to our level. That must have been
(14:25):
pretty disturbing to see the only dots on your scope
were military. Do you remember about how many um? I
remember that they were all F sixteen's um. They were
all scrambled from some of the so cal military bases,
and at any given time they were they were always
in the air. They were in the aven probably four
(14:47):
or five in the Southern California area. That's got to
be pretty spooky, very spooky. It's I mean, it felt
like the end of the world. To be honest with you,
we didn't know. I didn't know if I was gonna
have a job. I didn't know. It just seemed like
the world was coming to an end. It was that horrific.
Were there any specific challenges on getting a plane to
the ground where there was just not enough room or
a pilot didn't know what they were doing, or yes, um,
(15:09):
all the planes got to the ground safely. Um. Some
of the foreign air carriers, for example, English is not
their first language, and even in a normal situation sometimes
there's a communication problem there. So those would have been
the flights that probably would have been the most difficult
to handle. I can't think of any specific things that
I saw, but it just seemed like once everybody was
(15:33):
on board with what was going on, it was handled
very well, and there weren't really any difficult situations that
I'm aware of. That there had to be a lot
of disbelief, And then I remember hearing some chatter saying
is this a drill? And then or is this real? Right?
That that did happen too, and getting pilots to sign
on that's true, that's I didn't thought of that, but
(15:53):
I'm sure some of those pilots were wondering if somebody
came into our place and stole the mics. But I
think pilots know when they're talking to an a real
air traffic controller. Um, there's just a way we speak,
a way we communicate, And I think they would have
been suspicious if if something weird like that had happened.
(16:14):
So I I really don't think for very long they
believe that this was any sort of a hoax or drill.
You don't. You don't tell a guy going to London
that you're going to land in Las Vegas right now,
because just trust me, you have to land in Las Vegas.
You're just gonna do it. And the other thing, too,
is pilots are just trained to listen to us. I mean,
it's it's it's a little bit of an ego trip
(16:35):
being in air traffic control because you're telling these guys
what exactly what to do. So now the planes are
on the ground, you're kind of making sense of all
of this, what happens next? I mean, how long was
it like this so that that whole first day we
were just all in the days we're sitting there. I
don't know why we were sitting at our sectors, but
(16:55):
I just remember to describe what a sector is. Sure,
a sector is um a specific speed piece of airspace
that a particular controller controls. And at ELI Center, I
believe there were about your air cubicle. It's like an
air cubicle and it's literally like this geographic area. And
once once that airplane crosses this line, he's now in
the next sector, and we do what's called shipping the aircraft.
(17:18):
We change the frequency and tell him, Okay, now you're
gonna talk to Sector three over here. I'm Sector four,
see you later. So just silence, staring at scopes, wondering
what's what's what's going to happen next. The next day
when we all came in for some odd reason, they
didn't really cut the staffing down. They just everybody just
came back into work the next day and once again
(17:39):
we just sat in front of blank raid our scopes
and um So. One of the things that happened to
me that really to this day twenty years later, um
um just really affected me bad. Um So. I was
in traffic management. I think it was day three and
the ground stop was still in effect. It's just the
(18:00):
f sixteens in the year, and I get a call
from a pilot on the ground in Lake Havasu and
he's a lifeguard flight and UM. He told me that, UM,
look he's got a very sick passenger on board. He
needs to get this passenger to Las Vegas immediately, and um,
lifeguard flights are top priority. The only one above him
(18:22):
really is an emergency or air force one. It's it's
just like an ambulance going down the street and everybody
moves out of the way. So this guy probably could
have been in Las Vegas within twenty minutes. I believe
it was a lear jet. And UM, I told him.
I said, look, I'm gonna call Virginia and ask, but
I'm almost positive that the answers for you. Unfortunately it's
(18:43):
gonna be no, but I'll call you back. So I
called Virginia. UM, and the guy said, you know, I
don't think so, but let me let me see what
we're doing with these lifeguard flights. And I waited. I
called the guy back and have us to the pilot.
I told him, like, I'm still waiting. I'm so sorry,
UM hanging hanging there for me. And about a half
(19:05):
hour went by, and I remember, this guy calls me back,
and it's chilling what he said to me. He just says, um, hey,
um art just disregard that we lost our passenger, and
looking back on it, there's nothing we could have done. UM. Also,
at any given time in l A Center air space,
for example, there's probably one or two lifeguard flights an
hour there there, you know, going from place to place,
(19:28):
most in most cases, I believe, taking critically injured people
to hospitals. And so for those few days that the
airspace was shut down, god knows how many people probably
lost their lives. It's just another casualty of nine eleven.
I didn't even think about that, so that the ground
stop impacted medical transport. Absolutely nobody was in the air
(19:48):
except for those six When did it finally start to
open up? You know it? As I recall, it was
about four day four or five that they slowly started
to kind of open it up. And one of the
things that struck me as kind of odd was that
one of the early restrictions that was lifted UM was
on UM crop dusters, and I thought, okay, crop dusters,
(20:13):
how about lifeguard flights too. I believe lifeguard flights were
also released pretty early on. But apparently crop crop dusters
are pretty vital to our countries crops, and they weren't
allowed to fly for three or four days, and I
found that interesting. But I think I think probably on
day five we were kind of back to normal. But
of course there were not a lot of airplanes in
(20:33):
the air for a long time after nine eleven. It's
just took a long time to kind of get back
to normal. How many years after that did you continue
to work. I retired in two thousand seven, so about
six say so, looking back on it now, and as
someone who travels still travels today, when you go through
t S A and you go through all of the
new security measures as a result of nine eleven, do
(20:55):
you feel safer traveling? Um? Yes, I I do. I
always thank those t S agents. I I look him
in the eye and I say thank you for your service,
because I think they have a really tough job. And
but I think that's kind of the only way to
do this anymore. I mean, we have to really kind
of check every single person that's getting on an aircraft
so it never happens again. So I think definitely think
(21:18):
things are a lot safer since nine eleven. How about
is a country? Do you think the country is a
lot safer. Well, Um, that's a whole discussion. Um, I
I'm starting I'm starting to wonder if we're safer or
not now some of the things that are going on.
It doesn't make sense that people seem to just be
(21:38):
able to willy nearly come into the country. Um, unchecked.
I don't know how safe that is. I don't think
that's safe. But um, that's the way about my pay
grade coming up in episode three. Our goal was to
be unpredictable. We didn't want the bad guys to be
able to gain the system. The t s A is
(22:00):
born nine eleven, two decades later, is produced by Steve
Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez, and is a production of the
CAFI News department for iHeartMedia Los Angeles and the iHeart
Podcast Network. The views expressed are strictly those of the
guests and not necessarily the hosts or employees of iHeartMedia.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.