Would you speak out if you had 44 years as a controller, were close to retirement and in poor health? Was it worth chasing the questions that nagged at you, when you just weren’t sure that there wasn’t some reasonable explanation? Making waves would, you might think, only keep you stuck in it more; keep you from moving on
Ed Ballinger was the ATC handling both Flight 93, departing from Newark, and Flight 175 from Boston. So he was obviously aware of multiple hijackings occurring in real time. His story also shows that he was well aware of Flight 11’s fate in close to real time. It was he who would have first detected a missed radio transmission, a transponder being turned off, or a sudden and unauthorized course change.
As the “hijackings” were in progress, and on his own initiative, Ed Ballinger gave his “best-possible” warnings to scores of United pilots. He did it on his own initiative and without any direction: as we shall see, even the National Command Authority remained deadly silent for almost 77 minutes after the second hijack and first impact (when everyone knew it was a synchronized attack), until Flight 93 had become the fourth confirmed hijacking.
A story in Chicago’s Daily Herald about Ballinger’s ordeal didn’t mention the wargames.9 Ballinger didn’t mention them either. He must have known about them. The whole Northeast Sector where he worked knew about them, and was in one way or another participating in them. No one would ever take the chance of having a wargame exercise and then not brief the affected controllers. Otherwise they would have begun initiating emergency responses and setting off alarms that would have produced unpredictable results that might have spread throughout the system.
Suburban Flight Dispatcher to Recount Worst Day
Today, Ed Ballinger will speak to a roomful of strangers about the one subject he doesn’t care to discuss: The first two hours of his shift as a flight dispatcher for United Airlines on the morning of September 11, 2001.
The Arlington Heights resident and former United Airlines employee will meet with a sub-committee of the 9/11 commission in Washington, DC, so panel members can decide whether his testimony warrants his appearance before the full commission.
Ballinger is there because he was in charge of United Flights 175 and 93 when they crashed into the World Trade Center and a field near Shanksville, PA.10
Because perhaps, just perhaps, offering his story will calm the whispering thought that troubles him still: If he’d been told the full extent of what was unfolding sooner that morning, he might have saved Flight 93.
“I don’t know what [the panel appearance] is going to be,” he said Tuesday after arriving in the capital. “They want to know what I did and why. I’ve been told it’s not finger pointing. It’s just finding out what happened.”
Part of what happened was his 44-year career at United crumbled after September 11. He found it too hard emotionally to go on with his job as before…. “In my judgment, he is a vital part of the story because Ed Ballinger is the last human being to talk to [Flight 93’s cockpit],” said the Wilmette Republican, whose district includes much of Arlington Heights.
“And when all is said and done, he was responsible for preventing multiple hijackings,” Kirk added. “I think he probably foiled [another] hijacking….”
“When September 11 came along, that morning, I had 16 flights taking off from the East Coast of the US to the West Coast,” he said. “When I sat down, these 16 flights were taking off or just getting ready to take off.”
Then the first American Airlines planes struck New York and the Pentagon.
[Note: if this is correct, then NORAD and the White House and the Pentagon all knew that three hijackings had occurred by this time. Yet they issued no warnings. Ballinger had to do it by himself.]
Ballinger contacted all his flights to warn them. But United Flight 175 “was not acting appropriately.”
He asked Flight 175 to respond. The pilot didn’t reply and Ballinger was forced to conclude he’d been compromised and that he was rogue.
[This is exactly what long-standing FAA procedure told him to assume. See Chapter 17.]
By now, the situation was terribly different from previous hijackings Ballinger had handled. In two hours, he sent 122 messages.
“I was like screaming on the keyboard. I think I talked to two flights visually. The rest was all banging out short messages,” he said.
Realizing what was going on, he sent all his airplanes one message: “Beware of cockpit intrusion.”
“93 called me back and says, ‘Hi, Ed. Confirmed.’”
Ballinger said he didn’t wait for orders from his supervisors, or for Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta’s decision to ground all flights. He immediately tried to get his pilots down on the nearest Tarmac.
“As soon as I had a grasp of what was going on... I sent it out immediately. It was before Mineta, and even before the airlines told us to alert the crews,” he said.
Dispatchers were told by superiors: Don’t tell the pilots why we want them to land.
[Question: Why not? To avoid confirming the attacks were in progress to any airline pilot who didn’t yet know, thereby risking an uncontrollable and possibly successful intervention? At least one hijack had already struck the WTC, so the dispatchers’ superiors need not have worried about terrorists blowing up the planes in mid air; bombs were not the mode of attack this time. Had the pilots been told about the multiple hijackings and the WTC impact of Flight 175, any struggle for control of the plane could only diminish the eventual death toll, not increase it. All over the country, brave “real” Americans were rising to the challenge, doing whatever they could without waiting for anyone to tell them what to do. They knew damn well what to do.]
“One of the things that upset me was that they knew 45 minutes before that American Airlines had a problem. I put the story together myself (from news accounts),” Ballinger said….
“Perhaps if I had the information sooner, I might have gotten the message to 93 to bar the door.”
Perhaps, but [Illinois Congressman Mark] Kirk is adamant that Ballinger did save the passengers and crew of United Flight 23, which on September 11 was about to depart from Newark, NJ, to Los Angeles. Kirk believes Flight 23 was going to be commandeered.
Thanks to Ballinger’s quick call, the flight crew told passengers it had a mechanical problem and immediately returned to the gate.
Later, Ballinger was told six men initially wouldn’t get off the plane. Later, when they did, they disappeared into the crowd, never to return. Later, authorities checked their luggage and found copies of the Qu’ran and al-Qaida instruction sheets.
“I felt good about that one,” Ballinger said
Kirk admits it’s speculation, but said he believes “there are 200 people walking around today because of Ed Ballinger.”
The suspect passengers were never found, and are probably still at large, Kirk said….
Ballinger said he was never the same after September 11, and was reluctant to return to work.
“That first day, I’m lucky I didn’t hit anyone,” he said. “I drove through every red light getting home as quickly as possible. I wanted to get home and medicate myself.”
At work, he started second-guessing his own decisions and became, in his words, “ultra-ultra conservative.”
“I came to a point where nothing was safe enough,” he recalled. “[I] couldn’t even make a decision. It put you in jeopardy in every respect.”
At age 63, he was told to take a medical leave and long-term disability. He said he couldn’t do that. He was then asked if he could retire in six hours.
A Social Security Administration psychiatrist put him on total disability.11
What if Ed Ballinger had heard the anguished commentary of his brother and sister ATCs on the destroyed FAA tape? What would have happened if they compared notes? They still can.
Most of the ATCs who testified did so behind closed doors or, when in public, were circumspect and not asked any important questions. The testimony we know about never once mentioned details of wargames other than what had already been published (and left equally unexamined) in the press.
As pieces came together I continued the investigation.
NOTES
[10] The Kean Commission actually stated in its final staff report that another ATC had handled both flights 11 and 175. Presumably both airlines and the FAA have ATC contact with pilots or else control was handed off shortly after take-off. Ballinger’s role as a flight dispatcher does not conflict with an FAA controller handling the flight.
[11] Jon Davis, “Suburban Flight Dispatcher to recount worst day,” (Illinois) Daily Herald, April 14, 2004.