(AFP) Recordings of the full exchanges between ground control, pilots and military authorities during the terrifying chaos of the 9/11 hijackings were made public for the first time Thursday.
While portions of the audio recordings have circulated before, the document published by the Rutgers Law Review allows an unprecedented blow-by-blow recreation of the brief period on September 11, 2001, when four airliners were hijacked and slammed into New York, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
The raw recordings, released in the run-up to the 10-year anniversary of the tragedy, illustrate just how unprepared the United States was for the audacious terrorist plot, with controllers desperately trying to understand what had happened to the planes, where they were, and where they were going.
In one exchange, a controller at New York Center says, apparently incredulous, that there are reports of a fire at the World Trade Center. “And that’s, ah, that’s the area where we lost the airplane,” the controller says.
At the same time, an unidentified pilot is asking over the airwaves: “Anybody know what that smoke is in lower Manhattan?”
At Boston Center control, a worker says: “We have, ah, a problem here, we have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New, New York and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there to help us out.”
The answer, revealing the astonishment at what was happening, is: “Is, is this real world or exercise?”
The recordings, which also include tragic exchanges with flight attendants on doomed American Airlines Flight 11 about how two of their colleagues had been knifed and hijackers were in the cockpit, were first reported by The New York Times on Thursday.