Month: August 2009

9-11: Air Defense Response; first things first, the Scott trilogy, (part 1)

In an introductory article we established three barriers to analyzing events of 9-11; time compression, event conflation, and the application of post facto awareness and understanding to facto and post-facto events.  William Scott’s work must be considered with due regard to the latter barrier. In his first article, “Exercise Jump-Starts Response to Attacks,” he reported what he was told  by participants and what he learned from the public record of the day.  The fact that his narrative compressed time and conflated events is not his doing.    It was his sources who compressed  and conflated, and Scott did not have the primary and secondary source information available for validation.

Two different Scotts

William B. Scott (not the same Scott who briefed the Commission on May 23, 2003) wrote a series of three articles in 2002 for Aviation Week & Space Technology. That trilogy was one of the early detailed accounts of the events of the day and it served as a starting point for Staff work concerning FAA and NORAD. The Staff began with a LexisNexis literature search, a portion of which is available at NARA. The Scott trilogy immediately came to light as did the NORAD September 18, 2001, time-line, replicated in Scott’s first article published June 3, 2002.

The Commission Staff knew what the public knew but had reason to believe that the account of the day was flawed.  That belief was confirmed when the other Scott, Lieutenant Colonel Alan Scott,–who had been researching events of the day for several months–briefed the Commission.

Documents of the day told a different story

One of the first primary source documents the Staff received was the set of radar files from the 84th RADES,followed in short order by the first document delivery from NEADS which included a partial transcript and a copy of the MCC/T log.  None of that information–one primary source file and two secondary source documents–supported the public story as related by William Scott.  Simply put, the actual tracks of the air defense fighters did not correspond to what Scott reported.  Further, the primary and secondary source records of the day supported neither the September 18, 2001, NORAD time-line nor Lieutenant Colonel Alan Scott’s revision as briefed to the Commission.

Some Things William Scott got right

Scott’s title for his first article is consistent with what the Commission Staff found.  Scott elaborated: “In retrospect, the exercise would prove to be a serendipitous enabler of a rapid military response….Senior officers involved in Vigilant Guardian were manning Norad [sic] command centers…and [were] available to make immediate decisions.”  The problem was there were few immediate decisions to be made.  As the Commission determined and reported there was no timely notification concerning any of the hijacked airplanes.

Scott’s account of General Arnold telling Marr to “scramble; we’ll get clearances later,” is also accurate.  As the Commission Staff briefed at the June 2004 hearing, the formal hijack notification procedures were unsuited in every respect for the events of 9-11.  Boston Center abandoned the procedures; NEADS/CONR followed suit.

His  account remains reasonable as the Otis pilots are introduced.  They heard the word even before NEADS because of their working relationship with Cape TRACON.  The pilots were in action before they were scrambled; they literally put themselves on battle stations.

The Account Starts to Drift

Then Scott’s account starts to deviate from what actually happened.  The Otis pilots did not do what they told Scott they did. “Consequently he [the lead pilot] jammed the F-15’s throttles into afterburner and the two-ship formation devoured the 153 mi.. to New York City at supersonic speeds.  It just seemed wrong.  I just wanted to get there.  I was in full-blower all the way.”

Except they didn’t go to New York City and they did not proceed supersonic.  The “NORAD RESPONSE TIMELINE,” which Scott discussed, states: “Flight times calculated at 9 mi./min. (Mach 0.9).”  It is reasonable to infer that the Otis pilots, by the time Scott interviewed them, had internalized the events of the day in a way differently than they occurred and that is the story they told Scott and others.

Concerning the Langley scramble, Scott did not address the fact that the actual path of the fighters after takeoff was orthogonal to their intended direction.  Scott stated, simply, that the “alert F-16s were scrambled and airborne in 6 min., headed for Washington.”  That remained the official story until the Commission staff learned the actual path from the 84th RADES radar files.  Lieutenant Colonel Alan Scott, was supposed to put that straight at the May 23, 2003, hearing; he did not.  Instead, he blurred the paths of both the Langley and the Otis fighters in his briefing charts.  I told that story in a separate article.

Conflation and Compression, two  examples

Scott reported that the alert was being passed simultaneously to NORAD/Cheyenne Mountain and to the DoD Air Traffic Services Cell (ATSC) at the FAA Herdon Command Center. Indeed, Colonel Marr was immediately able to talk to General Arnold. The Battle Cabs at all echelons in NORAD were fully manned because of the scheduled exercise.That was not the case for the ATSC. Scott’s reference is to a December 17, 2001, Aviation Week & Space Technology article: “Crisis at Herndon: 11 Airplanes Astray.” That article gives the erroneous impression that the ATSC was immediately represented on the Herndon operational floor.

In another example, at NORAD, according to Scott’s interviews, “A bunch of things started happening at once…We initiated an Air Threat Conference [call].”  It didn’t go quite as Scott told it, but the lead was particularly helpful; this was the Commission staff’s first awareness that there was such a call and a request for any tapes of that call was among our first document requests.  Because of its importance that call will be discussed in a separate article.

Scott’s narrative thereafter is a conflation of events on multiple levels; participants told him what they remembered or what they had internalized.

Some more examples

Delta 1989.  Scott discussed a fifth hijacked aircraft–although no airplane is mentioned the implication is that it is Delta 1989–before he talks about the discovery and immediate loss of AA 11 at 8:46.

Search for additional fighter support.  Scott introduced this activity before he mentions the Langley fighters on battle station at 9:09.

FAA reports 11 aircraft amiss. Scott interjected this fact while discussing  the Langley battle station/scramble sequence.  That was the time frame for the erroneous report that AA 11 was still in the air.

AA 77 impact 9:41. This is interesting since Colonel Scott, with great stress that all his times were log times, briefed the Commission that the time was 9:43.

Scatana/Mineta. Scott perpetuated Mineta’s contention that he gave the order to bring all the planes down and conflates it with a discussion that occurred later in the day about implementing Scatana.  General Eberhart was in his office at NORAD Headquarters and did not arrive at the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center until later in the morning.

Prepared to shoot down UA 93.  Scott reported that, “F-16s…were prepared to shoot down United 93.”  They were in position but had no authority to shoot and were never vectored to intercept the airplane.

Escorting Air Force One. Scott quoted General Arnold as saying, “We scrambled available airplanes from Tyndall and then from Ellington…We maintained AWACS overhead the whole route.”  What we now know from the radar files is that only the Ellington fighters caught up with Air Force One and only briefly before it landed at Barksdale AFB.  In the Mystery Plane article I show that the mystery plane, Venus 77, was in position to monitor the flight of Air Force One.

The Staff picks up the pieces and moves on
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Prior to the May 23, 2003 hearing the Staff sensed that the official story of the day was at odds with primary source information.  We anticipated that NORAD’s testimony would help clarify matters; it turned out just the opposite.  Thereafter, we set aside existing time lines of the day and built our own.  We used that time line and the primary and secondary sources [e.g. transcripts, logs} as an aid during interviews.  We found that participant recall was like eye witness accounts, subject to event conflation and time compression.  There is no better example than Scott’s first article.

9-11: The Scott Trilogy; an introduction, cutting to the chase

After four attempts to address William B. Scott’s three 2002 articles written for Aviation Week & Space Technology let me cut to the chase and get some things off my mind. Scott wrote at a time when accurate information was not available, the emerging story was incomplete, and the voices of the day had internalized events in their own way. His was an honest effort and is particularly useful to address three barriers, pitfalls if you will, to accurately understanding the events of September 11, 2001.

The barriers are: time compression; event conflation; and the imposition of post-facto understanding and conditions on both facto and pre-facto events.  The Staff of both the 9-11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry that preceded it grappled constantly with these barriers to understanding.   Most people writing objectively about the events of the day, the work of the 9-11 Commission Staff, or the work of authors, such as Scott, will remember to ‘walk in their shoes.’ And that especially means not looking through a post-facto lens.  Setting aside the post-facto lens barrier lets look a bit further at the other two barriers.

Time Compression

A good example of time compression is the difficulty the well-researched author, Lynn Spencer, encountered. Hers was another honest effort. In Touching History she established a reader’s road map by time-stamping each section; a chronological approach. That worked well until she attempted to tell the Andrews fighter story.  Spencer struggled to get the Andrews fighters back from the skies over North Carolina to Washington D.C. in time and space to deal with UA 93. The compression of time problem was such that Spencer had to abandon her reader’s road map and did not time-stamp that section of her book

In another example, Richard Clarke’s compression of time in “Against All Enemies” is not helpful in understanding the sequence of events that morning.  Clarke’s is also an honest effort, one which highlights the fact that participant recall is much like an eye witness account, helpful but not definitive.  And Clarke’s problems with time compression lead to the second barrier, event conflation.

Event Conflation

Clarke established a time hack for his readers, “It was now 9:28.”  That time was in reference to establishing an air defense “CAP over D.C.”  That meant that by that time, according to Clarke,  General Myers was in the Pentagon, the Air Threat Conference Call was underway, and “eleven aircraft [were] off course or out of communications.” [attributed to Garvey] Actually, Clarke conflated events as he compressed them in time, leaping nimbly over both barriers at once.  He also established that Norman Mineta was not in the loop by 9:28, despite Mineta’s own account.

Mineta, then Secretary of Transportation established in multiple accounts, including testimony before the 9-11 Commission, that he was there before 9:28 and that an aircraft “50 miles out” was AA 77.  Mineta’s story is the definitive example of event conflation.  The plane in question was UA 93.  Mineta and Clarke cannot both be right at the same time in terms of Mineta’s location in space and time.

Even the events of the day were conflated in at least two instances as they occurred; Delta 1989 was conflated with UA 93, and AA 77 was conflated with AA 11.  NEADS perpetuated the first conflation in its own story of the day. The plane that ‘meandered’ that day was not UA 93, it was Delta 1989.  We may never know the details of the second conflation other than the fact that it occurred and that it did prompt the Langley scramble.

Looking ahead to the Scott Trilogy

Researchers, writers, analysts, and investigators have the capability to overcome time compression and event conflation by using primary and secondary source information as an aid to recall during interviews. Spencer and Scott, especially, did not have the primary source information they needed to deal with either barrier. And as we will discover in the first Scott article some conflated events were also time compressed by Scott’s sources.

Okay, with that off my mind we can move on to Scott’s trilogy. And as we do, let me mention that is was from Scott that the Commission Staff obtained the lead about the Air Threat Conference Call. The tape of that conference is the single most important primary source of the day. For now, Commission Report footnotes stand as the best available secondary source of the day concerning that conference call.


Chaos Theory: NEADS and ZBW; strange attractors, indeed

In an initial article we established that the words ‘chaos’ and ‘chaotic’ were often used to describe events on 9-11. In a second article we began an inquiry into whether or not chaos theory could even be used to analyze events of the day. The answer for now is yes, metaphorically, and perhaps, theoretically. In this article we will continue on the metaphorical track and use the language of chaos theory, specifically strange attractors, to begin exploring the nation’s response.

Sensitivity to Initial Conditions and Strange Attractors

Chaos theory tells us we can never know in advance the initial conditions to which events are sensitive. However, in the case at hand we can, retrospectively, describe the conditions that led to NEADS and ZBW being the two focal points—strange attractors–around which key information of the morning flowed. Two organizations and four people—Colin Scoggins, Maureen Dooley, Shelly Watson and Stacia Rountree–became the self-organizing loci for action.

At all higher echelons–all the way to the White House–entities charged with the national level response failed to manage the flow of information.

More linear processes that did not work

In a previous article I listed four linear processes that were ineffective on 9-11.  We can now add four more processes used that day that were also ineffective.  The four are: the Air Threat Conference Call; the FAA’s Primary Net; the NOIWON conference; and Clarke’s own SVTS conference.  Commission Staff notes from an interview with an NMCC staff officer show that Clarke’s SVTS (Secure Video Teleconference System) conference and the Air Threat Conference Call were actually counterproductive.

Richard Clarke’s instinct was to try and command the attention of the highest level person he could find in each relevant organization. It is hard to fault that approach, even in retrospect, but, in hindsight,  it was exactly the wrong way to proceed when managing chaotic events.  The better approach and perhaps an important lesson learned was to find the highest echelon at which real time information was flowing between FAA and DoD; to identify the strange attractors. Enter, stage center, ZBW and NEADS.

ZBW and Colin Scoggins

ZBW had a problem. It knew where AA 11 was geographically, it did not know where it was spatially. When Mohammed Atta turned the transponder off at 8:20 ZBW lost all technical capability to determine the altitude of an aircraft gone astray. From that moment forward the last known altitude, 29,000 feet, would be a given.

Despite air traffic control observations that the aircraft was descending and despite very real information held at American Airlines that the plane was way too low, the much higher altitude would prevail as people sought to understand what happened in the immediate aftermath of the 8:46 collision of AA 11 with the World Trade Center north tower. Both the Otis and Langley scramble orders, nearly 45 minutes apart, specified an altitude of 29,000 feet.

One person at ZBW knew that NEADS could determine altitude from primary only radar returns, Colin Scoggins. Colin was on break off the operations floor (edited Nov 4, 2009) when events first unfolded but as soon as he learned that altitude was an unknown he went immediately to the operations floor; he had important information. Despite Colin’s best efforts and the effort of other personnel at ZBW and at New York Center (ZNY) NEADS was unable to identify and track AA 11.

NEADS and the Identification Technicians

The professional life of identification technicians–in this case Maureen Dooley, Shelly Watson, and Stacia Rountree–is measured in minutes that can be counted on one hand. That is the time they have to identify unknowns when tasked. The NEADS tapes capture them as a non-stop whirlwind as they worked to get a grip on the facts of the day. No one came closer to managing chaos that day. Right or wrong, they shared information they had in near real time with those who they believed needed to know. During a single hour they made or received at least 26 calls to four different air traffic control centers and one to their Canadian counterparts. Not one of those calls was to a third strange attractor, the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC or, simply, Herndon Center).

Herndon Center, a Strange Attractor with no partner

The Herndon Center was buried so deep in the FAA organization chart that it was well nigh invisible.  The Center’s job was to manage air traffic flow; it had no role or place in the ossified FAA Region/Headquarter structure to manage everything else, including crises.  Yet most relevant real-time FAA information was held at or flowed to the Herndon Center.   Even when Herndon communicated accurate information concerning UA 93 to FAA Headquarters as it  was receiving a blow-by-blow account from Cleveland Center it made no difference at the national level.  Herndon may as well have been talking to itself.  So what was different here as opposed to ZBW?

Herndon, including the embedded military Air Traffic Services Cell,  had no operational DoD partner to talk to, no one to partner with to fight the battle that morning.  It wasn’t going to make any difference for the northern attack against New York City.  The element of surprise achieved by Mohammed Atta simply overwhelmed NEADS, ZBW and ZNY.  But soon after UA 175 struck the south tower Herndon knew a criticial piece of information:  “he said planes, as in plural.”  Yet the nation’s response to the southern attack against the nation’s capital never organized around the Herndon Center.

Linearity gave way to non-linearity as the southern attack developed and the nation’s response its self  became chaotic.  No extant linear structure was capabable of dealing with the situation.  In the absence of any effective government structure or process the response self-organized and NEADS and ZBW for a short time became  the strange attractors.  No one at any higher echelon had personal, organizational, or situational awareness to capitalize.  Ultimately, the NEADS/ZBW nexus was transient and the nation’s response rapidly devolved and self-organized around the only people that could make a difference, the passengers and crew aboard United Airlines flight 93.

9-11: NORAD briefings prior to May 23, 2003 hearing, some comments

I mentioned two briefings in the article “9-11: NORAD’s Sudoku Puzzle; a briefing askew, an addendum” that NORAD knew about before the May 23, 2003 hearing.  Thanks to some out of cycle work at NARA by paxvector and History Commons those two briefings are now available on the web.  Here is Cheri Gott’s 2002 briefing to the Satellite Toolkit (STK) Conference.  Here is her briefing to CONR to help prepare them for the hearing.

It is clear from both briefings, based on 84th RADES radar data, that NORAD knew the true story of the Otis and Langley scrambles.  They failed to tell that story at the first air defense hearing on May 23, 2003.  We also learn from these briefings that a “scramble” does not mean aircraft were launched.

A scramble defined

NORAD (Gott), on one sllide,  provides researchers and historians the definition of a scramble:  “Scramble = an order to get aircraft airborne as soon as possible.”  The important point here is that a scramble does not mean that planes were necessarily ever launched.

In my own work for the DoD Inspector General we examined the history of SEADS-directed scrambles concerning air activity over the Florida Straits concerning flight activity by the Brothers To The Rescue and Cuban response to that activity.  We determined the universe of scrambles over a several-month period and then further refined the data to focus only on those cases in which air defense fighters actually launched.  The number was quite small in comparsion to the number of “scrambles.”  My recall is that many of the scramble orders were cancelled because the information was determined to be spurious before the air defense pilots could get airborne.

A scramble order was and is a precautionary step, one in a sequence that can be stopped.  In the case of the Mission Crew Commanders at SEADS their task was to issue the scramble order and then quickly seek authority to actually launch.  The sequence of events on the morning of 9-11 was much the same.  The Mission Crew Commander and Colonel Marr scrambled Otis and immediately sought approval to launch.  General Arnold granted approval.

9-11: Delta 1989; an intervening variable, not a hijack

Aug 31, 2009 Addendum. Here is a BTS link to the official record of Delta flights that departed Boston Logan on September 11, 2001.  There is no listing for a Delta flight 89 and no indication that any Delta flight was scheduled Boston to Las Vegas.

Delta 1989 became a plane of interest briefly on 9-11 concurrent with the information that United 93 was hijacked and was presumed to have a bomb on board.  Delta 1989 became confused and conflated with United 93 in real time. and again in NORAD’s attempt after the fact to piece together the facts of the day.  It is worth noting that Delta 1989 was the only plane that NORAD at all echelons knew much about that morning and the only one that they were able to track.   The problem was they were out of air defense fighters.  Their effort to find anyone who could respond is clearly told on the NEADS tapes.  The effort was intense.

There is just one plane

Notations in Commission files, in contemporary documents of the day, and in testimony before the Commission that refer to flight “89” are simply shorthand notations for Delta 1989.  Lynn Spencer in Touching History acknowledges this; her notation style is ‘[19]89.’  To speculate otherwise ignores a simple truth; there is one and only one plane  in the radar files, both FAA and RADES, and in the air traffic control communications.  The primary source documents are definitive and conclusive.

The 9-11 Commission Staff sorted this out in the primary source information–tapes, transcripts, logs and radar.  Concerning the latter, we tailored a radar video, isolating just the two tracks, Delta 1989 and United 93, so that we could demonstrate to NORAD officials at every echelon that their story that the observed United 93 ‘meandering’ in the skies was, in fact, their watching the flight path of Delta 1989.  No one at any NORAD echelon disagreed with our findings.

How did this all come about?

The story starts at Boston Center.  Given the uncertainly that morning and the stark reality broadcast by Mohammend Atta, “we have some planes,” Boston Center saw a pattern of transcontinental flights originating at Boston.  In reviewing what it knew it determined that Delta 1989 was one such flight.  By that time Colin Scoggins had established a constant information flow to the Identification Technicians at NEADS. and by 9:27 NEADS knew that there were three unaccounted for aircraft.  The MCC/T log shows an entry at that time: “Boston FAA says another a/c is missing.”  A subsequent entry at 9:41 shows: “Delta 89 possible hijack Bos/Vegas.”

The NEADS Identification Technicians, whose story is well told by Michael Bronner, made and received multiple calls to five different FAA Centers that morning.  Among them were one to Indianapolis Center and one to Cleveland Center informing them of the hijack status of Delta 1989.  Cleveland Center, in direct communication with the Delta 1989 pilot, confirmed that he was not a hijack and that information was fed back to NEADS.   NEADS, meanwhile, established a track, B-89, on the aircraft which it forward told to NORAD, the only such track forwarded that morning.

Delta 1989, the only plane the NMCC will hear about from NORAD

To “forward tell” is to link a known track to a specific radar in such a manner that the track can be seen by NORAD echelons above NEADS.  NEADS established only two tracks of interest that morning, B-32 for the unknown that was AA 77 and B-89 for the known that was Delta 1989.  Track B-32 faded before it could be forward told.

The Air Threat Conference Call is conclusive concerning what was forward told.  When asked for an update NORAD informed the Conference at 9:44 that the only other hijacked plane it knew about was Delta 1989.  There was no mention of United 93 or any other aircraft.

The Tracking Story

A technician was assigned to track Delta 1989 and her conversation with another technician was recorded; a transcript is available.  The supposition that she was concerned about an airplane squawking mode 3 7112 has no foundation in fact.  Code 7112 is not an emergency code and was used by at least one airplane that morning, according to the 84th RADES radar files.  Here is what happened as revealed by the radar, the transcript, and the tape, examined concurrently.

Spatial Relationship of D1989, UA93 and Code 7112

delta-1989-slide2

Delta 1989 and Code 7112 both took off at 8:30.  Code 7112 departed from eastern Pennsylvania near the New Jersey border and flew northeasterly, as depicted on the linked slide.  The plane had no correlation to events of the day other than it became, briefly, a plane of interest to NEADS tracking technicians.  This slide also depicts the “meandering” path of Delta 1989 as it is vectored away from United 93 by air traffic control.

The technician who tracked Delta 1989 was first assigned to work a target in the Boston area.    At 9:42 her supervisor assigned her a target off of radar site 53, azimuth 288 and range 92 miles.  She picked it up at azimuth 287 and range 97 miles.  The tape  is clear, the transcript standing alone is not. Here is the audio information in graphic form. 

M3 7112

The radar shows two VFR aircraft and a transponding aircraft, Mode 3 7112, in close proximity at the bearing and range assigned to the technician.  She clearly describes this confluence of potential targets in her comments.  Thereafter, there is a gap in the recorded conversations that is not apparent in the transcript.  During that gap the comment Bravo 089 is heard in the background at 9:43:25. It is clear from the tape and the radar that the technician worked a target in the Northeast—-not 7112 by the way—-before she was assigned to track Delta 1989.

Delta 1989, not a hijack

By 9:58 the Identification Technicians understood that Delta 1989 was not a hijack, although the Surveillance Technicians continued the track.  By 10:09, after NEADS found out about United 93, efforts to scramble fighters from the Midwest in response to Delta 1989 were changed to focus on United 93.  An FAA chronology confirms the 9:58 time.  According to the log of the Air Traffic situation room at FAA Headquarters (separate from the WOC): “9:58, DAL1989 not a hijack.”

Nevertheless, Cleveland Center was uncertain and that uncertainty led Cleveland Tower, Cleveland Airport, and the FBI to treat Delta 1989 with suspicion after it landed as documented in a timeline compiled by Cleveland Air Traffic Control Tower.  It is clear from this document that Cleveland, Tower and Center, attributed  the suspicious information concerning Delta 1989 to NEADS.

The story according to Cleveland

“The OM [Cleveland Center] told the ATM [Cleveland Tower] that they had confirmation that the DAL flight could be a hijack and might have a bomb on board.  The OM stated that the pilot and company [Delta] both said it was a precautionary landing and there was no hijack.  The OM then said that the “Hunters” said it was a hijack. The ATM asked who the hunters were.  There was a lot of confusion at the center and the impression the ATM got was the ‘Hunters’ were in receipt of some intelligence that indicated the aircraft was a hijack.”

After all is said and done

NEADS is “HUNTRESS.”  They had no intelligence.  They knew what they knew from the FAA Centers, in this case Boston and Cleveland.  Such is the cloth from which myths are made in real time; proactive thinking, conflated information, and, ultimately, circular reporting. Such is the cloth from which myths are perpetuated; incomplete analysis based on partial information misinterpreted.