Some comments about 911

I was on duty for a day shift at the Indianapolis Center on that day in history as the NAS Operations Manager.  I can assure everyone reading this that I was part of the event on a very personal level.  I want to spend some time considering what I may relate here about what I experienced that day, what I observed that day.  It may be some time before I write about my experiences.  I will eventually do just that.  Until then I have some advise.  There have been a number of conspiracy books and articles written about the event, I have seen many of them.  I have watched a few interviews of so-called conspiracy experts.  So far everything I have seen and read by many of those authors is laughable.  Almost all of it is pure fiction and fabrication.  My suggestion is don't waste your time and money on it unless you enjoy pure fiction and are willing to quantify it as nothing more than entertainment.  I was there and the authors of that trash were not. 

At times I could be very angry and critical of my former employer but on that day, under those conditions, the response of the Federal Government was excellent.  It was swift and decisive and managed the risk to the many air passengers still in the air during the attack and the risk to the population on the ground in an amazingly effective way.  The Monday morning quarterbacks that have all kinds of theories about what happened have demonstrated no real knowledge of the event as far as I can tell.  Nothing in the public record is in conflict with anything I experienced personally.  Those who would presume that more should have been done need to understand this was a sneak attack, not unlike Pearl Harbor.  It was a new method of warfare, it was well planned, it had the important advantage of total surprise.  Nothing like that had ever been attempted before.  I would like some of the self proclaimed genius talent that think they knew all the time what was going to happen and knew all the time what to do would tell us all right now what to do in the NEXT terror attack that has not happened yet.  Where it will be would be nice to  know now.  What we need to do right now ahead of time for planning purposes would be helpful information.  I would be very impressed and write all about it here.  I have no interest in what those clowns have to say after the next terror event.  With my feeble talents I can figure what should have been done after such an event.

September 11 started as a typical day shift.....

This is a long story and full of techno-babble.  What I will do is tell it in small sections with references and definitions to make it readable by those without an extensive aviation background.  My work environment at that time was dominated by many acronyms and I will try to explain those and make them understandable.  On September 11, 2001 I reported to work about 7 am at ZID.  ZID is the designation of the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center (the acronym is ARTCC - this can be found on an internet search for more detail on what the facility is).  ZID is the air traffic control facility for high altitude cross country traffic over the southern half of Indiana, most of Kentucky, parts of Ohio and other states.  Keep in mind state boundaries have little meaning in aviation but are mentioned for general reference.   My job at ZID at that time was referred to as the duty NOM.  NOM is the NAS Operations Manager.  NAS stands for National Airspace Systems.  To define it in simpler terms the job was to manage all the technical aspects of the airspace.  Some simple examples would be to deal with a RADAR failure, a radio communications issue, a computer processing problem or a ARTCC to ARTCC data communication difficulty.  My task was to advise my counterpart across the aisle, the Air Traffic Manager in Charge what the penalty in performance was for various failures, estimated times to restore full performance, mitigation if possible, and of course to deal with the problem itself or notify the appropriate field units to do repair and restoration.  The operations work area consisted of many computers and displays for control and status of the systems used to facilitate smooth, safe and efficient movement of high altitude jet traffic.  At the operations desk there were also several computers for written logs of activity and telephone paging.  I still have my written logs for that 10 hour day shift on September 11.  As the event unfolded our main task was notification of higher management of the events and the building physical security which became a concern when it was apparent this was an attack on the air transportation infrastructure.  Early in the event we were not concerned for several reasons.  There were no equipment problems, basically everything was working, there was nothing to fix.  In the initial part of the attack we were not yet aware we were involved in any way, the obvious part of the attack was in New York airspace.  Over the span of the day the bulk of our workload was paging out information to higher management, documenting our actions, and confirming various backup emergency communications facilities.  There were some concerns about the possibility of "cyber attack" but that never occurred.  In the operations area we had a small TV set in the corner for watching newsworthy events.  It was turned on and showing live news just after the first World Trade Center building was hit.  That is where I was and what my job was that day.  I am not concerned about conspiracy idiots stealing information from my writing efforts, they have little interest in facts and no interest in facts that might conflict with their fabrications and misinformation.  The rest of this story will be presented in stages over the next few weeks.

One factor that creates misunderstanding is too much focus on the main players in the attack itself.  To get a better understanding it is important to know the environment the attack was executed in.  To start with there were other aircraft in the sky.  A lot of other aircraft none of which were involved in the attack but still needed to be safely controlled.  Typically ZID would have been actively controlling about 350 or so aircraft in our airspace.  They are all going different directions at different altitudes and at very high speeds.  When it becomes apparent something unusual is going on with one airplane of an unknown nature you can't just key up all the communications frequencies and say "everyone stop right where you are, something unusual is going on!".  All those airplanes have to be safely separated from each other and directed to their proposed destinations, tens of thousands of lives depend on that being done properly.  It all happens in real time, there is no time out command to figure out an unusual situation. The first half of the day on a week day is a very busy time and there are between 5000 and 7000 aircraft nation wide in the sky.  They are all in motion and in the air going somewhere.  The illusion that you can look up and see that the sky is relatively empty is truly an illusion.  Trust me, the sky is full of aircraft during the day.  It can be so full that some flights get delayed because there is not enough sky left to put them safely into.  In an emergency, like an engine failure or smoke in the cockpit, air traffic will react immediately.  The usual mitigation is to quickly assign one controller and position to deal with the problem and respond to the pilots needs and requests as fast as possible.  The idea is to get him on an airport quickly and safely and not compromise the safety of the 300 to 400 other aircraft in the airspace.  The airspace in the New York and D.C. area is even more congested during the work week.  It all works very well as evidenced by the unbelievably good safety record of American aviation.  It is very important to understand that during the attack there was a huge amount of unrelated legitimate routine activity in the national airspace.

A few years ago a contractor installed a very sophisticated fire alarm system in the building.  I was talking to some of them as they completed the final testing to finish their job.  I told the guy as soon at it tested good we would disconnect all the sound alarms and all the flashers in the control room floor.  He thought I was kidding.  I informed him the distraction of those alarms endangered more lives than letting us burn up.  We could not evacuate anyway, until all the air traffic was transferred to some other control facility.  If this makes sense you understand the above paragraph.

RADAR is simple.  The transmitter sends out a short very powerful radio frequency pulse.  If the pulse hits metal, a small signal bounces back.  The round trip time it takes allows us to determine how far away the metal object is, referred to as a target.  In fact 12.36 uS is a RADAR mile.  That is the round trip time for an object one mile away.  It gets complicated, very complicated, at the application level.  The system just described is passive or search RADAR, sometimes referred to as primary RADAR.  In the air traffic world a system of active RADAR is also used.  For more information on that use ATCBI or IFF as an internet search and read about it.  This is referred to as BEACON or secondary RADAR.  Active BEACON RADAR depends on equipment installed in the aircraft that receives the pulse from the ground stations and generates a RF response signal that is sent back to the ground station.  In the aviation business this is referred to as a transponder.  This pulse contains information that identifies the aircraft and reports the altitude.  In the ARTCC high altitude world both RADAR types are in use and have been since the 1950's.  They are used to track commercial and military traffic in the airspace.  The RADAR of both types is processed by computers and routed to the air traffic displays for use by the controllers.  The search RADAR will report the aircraft target and the BEACON return at the same range will mark the specific aircraft and report the altitude in real time.  That is the very short executive summary of RADAR.  The details would fill a large book.  What to remember for discussions about September 11 is the concept of search and beacon RADAR tracking each aircraft and that beacon RADAR is active and powered by equipment in the aircraft.  Search RADAR is passive and tracks all large reflective objects like aircraft, black helicopters, UFO's, storms full of moving weather, etc. 

Many years ago I was talking to the approach controller one night when there were thunderstorms in the area.  He commented that you can see lightning on the RADAR, cloud to cloud bolts that cross the sky.  I had never heard that before.  A huge lightning bolt will ionize the air and that creates a large reflective surface.  Back in the 80's the airport RADAR was "real", it was not digitized and computer pre-processed.  The term analog RADAR might be used.  He put his finger on the display glass and pointed one out.  It was a faint jagged line across the screen and was gone on the next sweep.  He remarked that in the tower the line would be there as the flash was seen out the tower window.  After many years of experience he had shown me something new.  I watched for a while and then realized something amazing.  It was the range setting.  The RADAR display was showing about 40 miles range, the screen edge to edge was 80 miles.  Some of the lightning bolts went across virtually the entire screen, they were 60 or 70 miles long.  Imagine a lightning bolt that long.  The actual length was beyond that, they sometimes went off the edge of the RADAR display.  I thought that was very interesting and I don't know if it has ever been researched or documented.  It is going on in the sky above your head during any large thunderstorm.

In these modern times RADAR returns from aircraft are heavily processed by powerful computers.  The information the computer  processes yields the location the aircraft, projects where it will be and reports aircraft altitude and correlates other flight plan information.  The computer projects flight paths and reports potential collision hazards.  This function is nicknamed the snitch.  It is a tattle tale program that reports a potential reduced separation or collision, which is a real bad thing.  The computer also has an automatic search routine it will initiate if a aircraft return is lost for some unknown reason.  The search routine is well thought out and designed for emergency situations.  If for some reason the aircraft vanishes from RADAR the computer will notice the missing target and start looking for the missing RADAR return.  Extra processing time is devoted to the search and it looks ahead first and on each successive scan ahead and to the left and right in case the aircraft turned from the expected flight path.  The purpose of this search routine is to look for an aircraft in trouble, having an emergency, possibly descending looking for a landing location.  Until September 11 this program was excellent and well designed for the purpose of directing normal air traffic flow.  The lost aircraft program was not designed (at that time) for the deliberate actions of a terrorist in control of an aircraft.  Search RADAR depends on a reflection from the metal on the aircraft.  If a well trained terrorist is smart enough to turn the aircraft completely around and dive the aircraft to a low altitude below enroute RADAR coverage the lost aircraft search by the computer is defeated.  The computer is smart enough to look over the entire airspace for a active RADAR return from a specific aircraft it has been tracking unless that equipment has lost power on the aircraft or a well trained terrorist has turned it off, along with most of the other non-essential electrical equipment on the aircraft. 

to be continued unless the black helicopters get me........or the aliens get me.....again........