VECTOR

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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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? 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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.