3/2/2024 0 Comments Boston atc towerOther off-duty controllers began to arrive at the facility to help out. But as he waited and watched, word of multiple hijackings began to emerge, he says. Then things began to get worse.”Ībout then, as required, he handed over his air space to the next controller as his shift ended. “We were trying to follow protocol and get communications reestablished – to see if someone was listening to our commands. “It filtered over to me that there was a hijack,” he recalls. But the flight did not show up, and he soon realized a major crisis was emerging. Roberts was at his screen working a nearby sector of air space that Flight 11 was supposed to traverse over Albany, N.Y. “It was a proud moment, but at same time bittersweet because of the loss of life. “I was very proud, intensely proud of my coworkers and the entire aviation community, the pilots, what they had done to secure the nation’s airspace so quickly,” says Tom Roberts. RECOMMENDED: How 9/11 has shaped a generation of Americans And there is sadness that their efforts were not enough. There is pride at having overcome tremendous logistical hurdles to get other airliners out of the air and at having done all they could to foil the hijackers. There is anger at the persistent conspiracy theories about why military jets weren't scrambled sooner. Gradually, the anguish occasioned by the memories of that day has subsided, but the mark remains. Today, the controller who personally handled Flight 11 and tried in vain to contact it until it hit the North Tower, declines to speak about the experience, still burdened a decade later by the weight of the day’s events.īut his colleagues, who also worked that day, and who were part of the team that responded by notifying US military authorities and closing US air space, bringing hundreds of passenger jets to a quick, safe landing, also remember vividly what happened. Less than 12 hours after the attacks, two controllers at Boston Center spoke anonymously to the Monitor – the first verified report of events and transmissions from the Flight 11 cockpit.
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