Pilot Secretly Alerted Controllers of Hijacking

The pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into New York’s World Trade Center on Tuesday, secretly sent messages to controllers on the ground during much of the flight, the Christian Science Monitor reported in its editions today.

The paper, citing interviews with two unnamed air traffic controllers, said the pilot was apparently triggering a “push to talk” switch in the cockpit, probably on the plane’s steering wheel, known as a yoke.

“The button was being pushed intermittently most of the way to New York,” one of the controllers told the newspaper. “He wanted us to know something was wrong. When he pushed the button and the terrorist spoke, we knew. There was this voice that was threatening the pilot, and it was clearly threatening.”

During the transmissions, the pilot’s voice and the heavily accented voice of a hijacker were clearly audible, the controllers told the paper.

The transmissions were all recorded, and the paper said the tapes were turned over to federal law enforcement officials.

The paper said controllers were tipped off that something was wrong on Flight 11 when the aircraft failed to follow an instruction to climb to its cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.

“He was cleared to continue his climb and he did not,” the paper quoted one of the controllers as saying. “He was given permission to turn to go around [other airplane] traffic at 29,000 [feet]. So the controller issued a further climb, and [the plane] does not respond. That was the first indication we had of a problem,” the controller told the newspaper.

The controller handling the plane then tried repeatedly to raise the aircraft on the radio but got no response. He then switched to an emergency frequency but again failed to establish contact.

About the same time, about 20 minutes into Flight 11’s trip, the aircraft’s transponder stopped working.

The plane’s altitude, the paper reported, became a matter of guesswork for controllers, though the Boeing 767 was still visible on radar. Still, the controllers hoped that the plane just had an electrical problem, the paper said.

“Then the plane turned [south toward New York], and then they heard the transmission with the terrorist in the background,” the controller told the paper.

”. . . The voice upset [the controller] because he knew right then that he was working a hijack. Several other people heard the voice and they could tell by the sound of it, intuitively, that this was a bad situation,” the controller said.

The controllers also reported hearing a hijacker refer to having other planes, although the statement’s import was not understood.

Another controller in the Federal Aviation Administration Control Center in Nashua, N.H., one of 20 FAA centers that handle long-distance traffic once aircraft have left airport airspace, confirmed the events for the newspaper.

“The person in the cockpit was speaking in English. He was saying something like, ‘Don’t do anything foolish. You’re not going to get hurt,’ ” the second controller told the paper.

The last minutes of Flight 11 have taken a big emotional toll on the controllers in the Nashua facility, according to the report in the paper. “The guys who handled that flight were traumatized,” one says. “You have a special relationship with everyone, every plane you work. They heard what was happening in the cockpit and then they lost contact.”