R. Doug Wicker — Author

Part 1 of this incredible narrative from former NATCA President John Carr ran Monday.  Today, we continue with what happened on “That Day” from a perspective you’ve probably not seen before:

We tracked Bill Peacock (FAA Head of Air Traffic) down as he was getting packed.  Bill was getting swamped with calls and data.  We were very collaborative with the FAA at the time and when Bill opened his door he did not hesitate for a moment, but rather said, “The airspace is shut down.  The agency is sending the jet down to take me back to Washington, do you want to go with me?”

I had a brief discussion with Ruth; I had Jill with me, our next NEB meeting had already been booked for the following week in Cleveland which was my hometown, Pat Forrey was also at the meeting and could travel with me, and I had a rental car which was becoming more precious by the minute.  I also felt responsible for the five region’s worth of people we had stranded in New Orleans, some from the Pacific Northwest and thought I owed it to them to try and work with their leadership to not only get them home but keep them on excused absence while they traveled.  Ruth immediately volunteered to travel back to DC with Peacock.  Bill said, “Get your stuff, when they get here we got to go.  When we get up there us and the President will be the only things moving besides medivacs and fighter jets.”

The rest of the day was a blur of briefings to the facreps as news came in; attempts to get cars, trains, buses, anything that would move going north, west, or east, and calls from facilities involved in the terrorist attacks regarding tactical situations they were facing.  I had a sense of foreboding the entire day, sure that I knew someone in one of the buildings, sure that a friend of mine was dead or dying.

I did not, but late in the morning I received word that Doug McKay, a controller at Boston Center, had lost his wife on American 11.  She had left the house early that morning, stuffing mailboxes along her street with thank you cards to her neighbors for a great summer, and then boarded her flight for the West Coast.  Doug got up later and drove in to work, only to be met at the gate by his co-workers who already knew the horror facing their co-worker and his two young children.

As a union we resolved that Doug would never return to work airplanes in the building that had handled his wife’s final flight, and together we donated enough sick leave to see him to his rightful retirement a year and a half later.  I carried a handwritten scrap of paper with the sick leave hours Doug needed in my wallet for almost two years.

I never called the national office on 9-11 to check up on them; I never once worried that they were anything but safe and doing whatever needed to be done.  I never checked in with the Center facreps or any of the facilities to see how the shutdown was progressing; there was no need.  It was going perfectly because it had to, and because perfection is the minimum that you will accept from yourselves and from each other.

When the order went out to land everything at the nearest airport 700 aircraft were landed in the first four minutes, 2800 in the first hour and over 4500 were put down in first three hours with over a million passengers on board without a single incident.

I said then and I maintain now that the landing of those aircraft stands as the single greatest feat in all of air traffic control history, and it stands in the top ten on any greatest-in-aviation history list unrestricted.  The combined efforts of air traffic controllers, engineers, airways facilities specialists and other aviation safety related professionals who contributed to that magic trick were then and are now completely unfathomable.  You might as well have pulled a bunny out of your scope.

Many in the aviation community, myself included, stand convinced that your grounding of the system that day prevented further attacks.  In the rush to disembark passengers in far away places all evidence of the box cutters and Mace they may have carried on was carried off of the airplanes with them.  I suspect that attacks were set to continue on a very rigid clockwork basis throughout the day; I don’t believe that the terrorists ever contemplated that the capitalist Yankee scum would simply shut down the money pipe and put all the airplanes on the ground.

I think the terrorists believed they were going to be able to have free reign, knowing that we would not shoot down every airliner over populated America and thinking we could not, in all their created chaos, safely bring down the rest.  If you think like a terrorist for a moment a day of rolling thunder from sea to shining sea is not outside the realm of possibility when you begin your morning by murdering almost 3,000 innocent people and reducing two hundred and twenty stories to rubble in twenty six seconds.

In New Orleans it took a day or two but slowly small gaggles of rental cars banded together and headed out towards facilities in New York, Charlotte, Seattle, anywhere in the five regions where a family member could come out to the interstate and get their family member as the convoy drove by.  By car, bus, rail…the reps found a way to get out of town and get back to their families and their facilities.

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11 Joel Brown, Martin Cole, Mike Hull, Dennis McGee, Dan Ossinger, Wade Stanfield, Jerry Whitaker, Ruth Marlin and Dale Wright manned the Emergency Operations Center at the FAA on the 10^th Floor, rotating through 24 hour shifts much of the time.  These men and women saw and heard things normal people shouldn’t see and hear.

Missing crop dusters full of anthrax.  Cargo ships in the Baltimore Harbor with suspected WMD on the top containers, aimed up the Potomac at the Capitol.  Student pilots from foreign countries enrolling for more flying lessons.  The FAA needed these men and women to make immediate and binding decisions on behalf of the entire union.  No phone call, no get-back-to-you, no lemme check.  This was FBI/CIA/NSA/FAA type stuff that I and the rest of the NEB would need to stand behind then and forevermore.  These professionals were so damn good it is scary now to remember, they really were.  They pitched a no-hitter for us, for the system, and for their country.

I remember one evening Mike Hull calling me about ten o’clock one evening, sounding like he was ninety years old.  These folks were pulling 24 hour shifts and sticking around afterwards to help because the work was top secret, it was interesting and the adrenalin in the room was like drinking five cases of 5 Hour Energy Shots.  “Johnny, they just rolled the bomb squad for a device they found outside the front door here at Headquarters.  While I’m evac’d I’m gonna grab a smoke and something to eat.  We’re going to get XYZ signed so they can resume sightseeing flights over the Grand Canyon first thing tomorrow.  Hey, they found that missing glider.  Do you want me to get you a sandwich?”  I thought I was talking to freaking James Bond or something.  “Yeah, Mike, get me a shoe phone.”

I’ve known John Carr for many years, and I’m proud to call him “friend.”  John Carr was president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) from 2000 until 2006.  John led that organization during both the brightest and the darkest days of its existence, working with FAA Administrator Jane Garvey and valiantly trying to hold off the onslaught brought against NATCA when her successor, FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, all but declared war on her own controller workforce—a topic we’ve covered here several times before.

John has sent to me at my request the full version of a piece he wrote for the summer 2011 edition of NATCA’s newsletter, The Air Traffic Controller (thank you, John), and has graciously granted to me permission to reprint that material here.  As the original, unedited piece runs some 3,000 words, I’ve decided to devote all three of this week’s scheduled blogs to run this fascinating piece in its entirety.  It’s a truly harrowing and inspiring account of what transpired that day, told from a viewpoint you’ve probably not seen.

So, without further ado, Part 1 of A John Carr Retrospective on 9/11:

I had finally found a cup of coffee.  I bought my drink, grabbed my briefcase and settled into a comfortable spot in the lobby of the Doubletree Hotel in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana.  It was just after seven-thirty on the morning on September 11, 2001 and I was waiting for Ray Gibbons, Facrep of the Chicago TRACON.  Together we would be having a telcon concerning his facility.

The lobby had a TV droning CNN in the background and I was focusing on my notes; as Ray crossed the lobby to greet me the announcer intoned something about switching to New York where there had been some sort of explosion or plane crash at the World Trade Center.

I looked up just in time to see the switch to the “network TV chopper shot.”  You know the picture—it’s the one through the bubble with the background rotor noise and the high whine and some announcer shouting to be heard over the din of it all.

But the picture.  Oh my God, the picture.  Smoke was roiling out of the tower and the building looked like it had been whacked with a samurai sword.  The anchor was saying that a small plane had hit the World Trade Center but you could plainly see that the damage was nearly ten stories high and almost as wide as the tower itself.  My mind was racing to make sense of what my eyes were seeing when my cell phone rang.

“John?  Mike Blake. (Mike was the New England RVP at the time and that day he was working the boards at Boston Center.)

“Are you watching TV?” Mike asked.  Odd question, I thought, but I told him that I was.  “Well, that’s American Eleven.”

I said, “Mike, what channel are you watching?  I’m watching CNN!  Something just hit the World Trade Center!”

And then the hammer dropped.  “John, that’s American Eleven that hit the World Trade Center.  We were working him and they hijacked him and he turned around, flew straight south and drove straight into the building.”  I said something unprintable that started with, “You’ve got to be…” and then there was a pause.

“And John?”

I was furiously writing notes at this point, Ray reading upside down and me pointing at the notes and the television.  Ray was giving me his one-eyebrow-up death stare when Mike said, “John, there’s another one on the way to New York.  We lost a second one just like the first one and he’s headed right for New York.”  Then Mike mentioned that the sector working the aircraft had heard the hijackers voices, and they had mentioned having “some planes.”  “Planes, John.  Plural.  Planes.  We’re pulling the tapes now to check it out.”  I mumbled something to Mike about keeping me posted and hung up.

By this point a small crowd had gathered to watch the madness.  I felt utterly helpless.  I think I told Ray something like, “There’s another one.”  Ray said, “What?”  And I explained what Mike had mentioned….that the building we were watching was intentionally hit and that a second aircraft was more or less on it’s way as well.

Moment’s later, as we sat staring at the scene unfolding, the second tower exploded in a fifty story fireball.  One hour later that very same tower fell straight to the ground.  As it began it’s collapse I blurted, “It’s gone.  The whole damn building is going to fall down.”  I don’t know why I said it, but the minute it began I knew it was gone.

It was nine o’clock in the morning in New Orleans, and time for the second day of our union’s very first five-region Combined Regional Meeting to begin.

I contacted my wife, upstairs and pregnant with our first child to make sure she was secure.  I quickly made contact with Ruth Marlin, NATCA’s EVP and the rest of the NEB and we promptly cancelled the remainder of the regional meeting and started making emergency contingency plans.  One of the regions present was the Eastern Region and their home towns were under attack.

Information was now pouring in like staccato machine gun bursts.  Fifteen missing airliners.  A confirmed hijacked Delta jumbo jet being forced down in Cleveland.  East Coast heavy departures streaming towards tall towers in Chicago, Denver and all over the West Coast.  The Pentagon hit.  A jumbo jet missing in Tennessee.  A 757 flying inverted, then crashing in Pennsylvania.  I asked the hotel to put the CNN feed on the giant overhead screen and we convened the meeting on time, announcing that the meeting would not take place but that we would use the space and time to update everyone on information from the FAA as quickly as it became available.

New York Center closed to arrivals.  New York Center closed.  Nationwide ground stop.  Land All Planes.  Jane Garvey, then the FAA Administrator, had departed just the night before on a commercial flight, leaving Bill Peacock, head of Air Traffic, to meet with our representatives on the second day of our meeting.  Ruth and I ran through the streets and alleys of New Orleans to his hotel.

Wednesday:  Part 2