Hijackers were targeting White House - controller

The air traffic controller who watched the last minutes of the hijacked flight which crashed into the Pentagon told today how she believed it was heading for the White House.

Danielle O’Brien said the last words heard by the pilots of American Flight 77 as they left Washington Dulles Airport on the morning of September 11, were hers, telling them: ‘‘Good luck.’’

Within minutes she was watching in horror as the plane headed for protected airspace over the White House and she began counting down the minutes until it would have reached the President’s mansion - only to turn away and head for the Pentagon.

‘‘It was a very normal day. It was a very beautiful day in the Washington DC area, crystal clear, a very nice temperature,’’ the controller said.

At 8.25am, she handled the take-off of the plane from Dulles, watching as it left her assigned airspace.

‘‘It’s chilling. I usually say ‘Good day’ as I ask an aircraft to switch to another frequency. Or ‘Have a nice flight’. But never ‘Good Luck’,’’ she said.

Twenty minutes later, the first hijacked plane smashed into the World Trade Centre and within minutes, orders came through for all planes to be grounded immediately.

‘‘We started moving the planes as quickly as we could,’’ she said. ‘‘Then I noticed the aircraft. It was an unidentified plane to the southwest of Dulles, moving at a very high rate of speed - I had literally a blip and nothing more.’’

She turned to the controller sitting next to her, Tom Howell, and asked if he saw it.

Mr Howell said: ‘‘I said, ‘Oh my God, it looks like he’s headed to the White House’. I was yelling, ‘We’ve got a target headed right for the White House’.’’

But because the plane was flying at 500 miles per hour, Ms O’Brien thought it might be a military jet.

‘‘The speed, the manoeuvrability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe,’’ she said.

By the time the plane was 14 miles from the White House, a countdown began in the tense control room.

‘‘Ten miles west. Nine miles west. Our supervisor picked up our line to the White House and started relaying to them the information, we have an unidentified very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west,’’ Ms O’Brien said.

‘‘And it went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three, and all of a sudden the plane turned away.

‘‘In the room, it was almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to protect our President, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second.’’

The plane kept turning, but within seconds it was clear it had turned 360 degrees and was back on the same course.

‘‘We lost radar contact with that aircraft. And we waited. And we waited. And your heart is just beating out of your chest waiting to hear what’s happened,’’ Ms O’Brien said.

‘‘And then the Washington National controllers came over our speakers in our room and said, ‘Dulles, hold all of our inbound traffic. The Pentagon’s been hit’. ‘‘I remember some folks gasping. I think I remember a couple of expletives.

‘‘No tears. Not a single tear among us. No one broke down. No one strayed from their duties.’’

It was only after the controllers were sent home that the impact of what they saw sank in.

Mr Howell said: ‘‘You could sense something was happening when it was all going on, but when it actually did, it’s just like a big pit in your stomach because you weren’t able to do anything about it to stop it.

‘‘That’s what I think hurt the most.’’

Ms O’Brien said she believed the terrorists were trying to attack the White House but had been unable to locate it and instead headed for the Pentagon.

‘‘I’ve been down to the Pentagon and stood on the hillside and imagined where, according to what I saw on the radar, that flight would have come from,’’ she said.

‘‘And I think that they came eastbound and because the sun was in their eyes that morning, and because the White House was beyond a grove of trees, I think they couldn’t see it.

‘‘It was too fast. They came over that Pentagon or saw it just in front of them.

You can’t miss the Pentagon.

‘‘It’s so telltale by its shape and its size, and they said, ‘Look, there it is. Take that. Get that’. They certainly could have had the White House if they had seen it.’’