Controller joked about barbecuing cat before crash

TWO minutes after he cleared a private plane for takeoff and a fateful flight over the Hudson River, an air traffic controller at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport was on the phone with a woman in the airport operations office, joking about barbecuing a dead cat.

“We got plenty of gas in the grill?” the controller asked. “Fire up the cat.”

“Ooh, disgusting, augh, that thing was disgusting,” the woman responded.

According to a draft government transcript obtained by The Associated Press, the two continued to banter until seconds before the private plane collided with a tour helicopter over the Hudson.

Nine people – three members of a Pennsylvania family in the plane and five Italian tourists and a pilot in the helicopter – died in the August 8 accident.

The transcripts conform with a sequence of events laid out last week by the National Transportation Safety Board although they differ slightly on the exact time events occurred.

The transcripts don’t identify by name either the controller or the other person on the phone.

Officials for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said last week the phone call, made on a landline that controllers use to contact other parts of the airport, was to an employee of AvPORTS, a contractor at Teterboro. They didn’t identify the employee.

The bantering began in an earlier phone call, during which the woman discussed how she had picked up the cat from airport property.

That call ended 12 minutes before the Piper’s pilot, Steven Altman told the tower he was ready for takeoff. The controller directed the Piper toward the Hudson, handed off responsibility for the plane to nearby Newark Liberty International Airport and gave the pilot the radio frequency to contact Newark.

The controller then called the woman back and resumed joking about the cat, keeping it up until the Teterboro controller was contacted by radio by a Newark controller who was concerned about aircraft in the path of the Piper.

The Newark controller tried unsuccessfully to raise the Piper: “One mike charlie, Newark.”

Shortly after that the controller explained to the woman on the phone that the Piper pilot probably had the wrong radio frequency.

Eight seconds later, the controller said, “Damn... Let me straighten stuff out,” and ended the call.

The NTSB said the phone call ended one second before the collision.