I listened to the audio book of “The Only Plane in the Sky” (do recommend), and they played real recordings of ATCs on 9/11 as the planes were hitting buildings.
It was surreal listening to them talk about the catastrophe but all while maintaining a total sense of calm.
During my Interaction Design master I had to read a paper about the interface design for tools aiding people in these kinds of jobs. The designers spent a lot of time observing them at work and concluded that one specific feature of this work environment was that it doesn't have a "normal" situation and "emergency" situation, it's a non-stop juggling of emergencies all the time. Which I guess is part of why they stayed calm: you can't switch to panic mode if you're already constantly in that kind of stress situation, and anyone who can't handle that will be filtered out of those kinds of jobs very quickly.
Glassdoor says they earn $30k - $64k yet lots of us earn more in our comfy office jobs typing code into a text editor, kinda puts things into perspective.
It's amazing how much leverage an employer has when they have the legal right to simply fire everyone, and there is no recourse for the employees because the employer is the federal government itself.
We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190; firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291 every year. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including $315,896 in overtime
As a Canadian, I'm horrified—HORRIFIED!—by the legal theft called "taxation."
Those pampered government employees up here with their unions and pensions and benefits. It's awful. All they do is make our country work. If only we could get rid of them all and let private enterprise take over.
Think of how much better our country would be if we scrapped public transit and let Uber and Lyft take over everything.
Likewise, we could get rid of our ridiculously terrible public health care and adopt a sane model where the market provides. After all, markets mean efficiencies, that's why Americans pay less for healthcare, and get better outcomes than socialist hell-holes like Canada and Germany and the Nordics.
If taxation is theft, we should not only be able to fire people who are paid with our taxes, we should be able to jail them as accessories to the crime, and make them stay there until they pay back every ill-gotten cent.
To be really blunt, I reckon it's just supply and demand: there's not that many jobs (relatively few airports in the world compared to other entire industries) and a relative lot of people who love it, and would rather do it than earn a bit more at a lower stress higher paid similarly skilled desk job & hobby listen-in/plane-spot.
I don't think that quite holds up. Sure, lots of people want to do it, but lots of people want to be professional athletes or surgeons or [insert prestigious job here] as well. Similarly, this kind of work is extremely demanding, and very critical - the consequences of incompetent traffic controllers would be disastrous - so there's still a low supply of people who actually are a right fit for the job. In a sane job market that should still give these traffic controllers some bargaining power.
Then again, I guess braythwayt's comment[0] is real-world proof that we're not really dealing with a sane job market, so I'm clearly missing something crucial in my line of thought here.
Thank you, his air traffic control paper was definitely one of the papers involved, but I couldn't quite remember the right name of the design field - "computer-supported cooperative work"[0] - so I failed to find it again. I also read few other ones, including one about the London underground that described a situation where these traffic controllers were both looking at their screens, but also constantly listening to their colleagues in their periphery. This let them adjust their strategies for handling emergencies on-the-fly as new information became known[1].
Wow, thanks for the link. Morbidly fascinating to hear it happen in real time. Looks like there was a huge lack of clarity during the whole thing - I bet this spurred big changes in the way ATC, towers and military interact.
Speaking of, and coming up on the anniversary in September, here is a description of what a passenger experienced in a plane on that day:
"On 9/11, I was listening to Ch. 9. I was on a flight out of ORD to AZ (757) seated in 5F. We had just taken off and where climbing to cruise. A flight out of Rockford, IL was squeezing between us and the UA in front of us. I watched as he lined up to get on the highway westbound. Then, abruptly, the Rockford flight called ATC and requested immediate clearance to return to home. ATC responded with some quick direction and asked if they were experiencing trouble. No, just directed to return home by company pronto. Hmmm, strange I thought.
Then the UA in front of us requested emergency clearance back to ORD. Loooong pause from ATC. Now, this is Chicago Center air space. There are no pauses. Certainly not 30-40 seconds of dead air. Hmm, man that is weird, I thought. Then like a starters pistol went off, the comm light up. Another plane req. clearance, then another, another.... boom, boom, boom. Nothing from ATC. I nudged the guy next to me and said put on Ch. 9. He could see by the expression on my face, I was serious.
ATC got on the air and started by saying this was going to go quick and pilots needed to listen up. "Protocol responses are not required, just do exactly as I say quickly". Then it began. "UA ###, turn right heading blah, blah expect Springfield airport. SWA ###, turn left heading blah, blah expect Rockford. Delta ###...." This went on for about 3 solid minutes before I rang the bell for the FA who was passing out breakfast. Our number had not yet been called. The FA came by and I said "We are all going back to O'Hare, they are landing every plane in the sky. What is going on?!?" She looked at me in disbelief and kind of leaned down to look out the window. I could see that she was about to start to tell me not to worry about it when we pitched right at about 45*s. It was so quick it nearly dumped the FA in my lap.
Her expression changed quickly. I could see she knew that was no turn you make in a 757 under normal conditions. She said, I will be right back and picked up the comm. She went flush. Not saying a word, not "ok", not "goodbye", not "I understand"... nothing, she hung up the phone. I don't know why I remember that she did not respond so vividly in my mind but it took the whole thing up a notch for me. I knew she thought this was very serious and was scared. She walked right back to me, scooped up my tray and said in a voice full of authority, "Pull up your chair, put away your tray table and buckle up, now. We are landing in a few minutes. The pilot will be on with more instructions in a few minutes." I was frozen. In the ten steps it took her to get from the phone to me, her whole demeanor changed from shocked to pissed.
By this time, ATC comm on ch. 9 had been cut off. We were pitching left and right, then right and left and descending fast. It was about 5 minutes before the pilot came on and said "Ladies and gentlemen, please listen very carefully, We have been instructed by the FAA to land immediately. There has been a security breach in the system and we will be on the ground in Chicago in a few minutes. Listen carefully to the FAs instructions and do as they as say please." click. Huh!?! Instructed by the FAA? Not ATC... FAA!! Whaaa?!? Security breach in "the system"? What does that mean? Did some guy run through the check point at the airport? Now, I was scared.
A couple more minutes of quick turns and fast drops go by. The pilot (a woman, I don't know why I mention that but I remember it clearly) comes back on the comm. "This is the captain. We will be landing quickly in Des Moines, IA. Flight attendants, please prepare the cabin." click. Hard turn right, hard turn left... the FAs are barking out instructions on the comm. Now I can see planes everywhere around us. There had to be a dozen so close I could tell the company clearly. I could discern the 7-5s from the 7-3s, the AB320s from the 319s.
We were at about 8 thousand by now. It was less than 3 minutes since we last heard from the pilot and she was on again. "This is the captain. We will be landing at the Quad Cities airport in 4 minutes. When we land we have been instructed not to approach the terminal. Please remain calm and we will back with instructions as soon as possible." click. Now I could hear a woman crying a few rows behind me.
Our last turn to hit the glide path was so sharp I could see the corn rows in the fields below. There was a SWA 7-3 easily within a mile and a half behind us as we fish tailed, it seemed, into runway alignment. Gears go down way late. We are going much faster than a normal approach. 2k now.... 1500, 1... touchdown... hard. Heavy brakes for a good bit then they release and we roll all the way down to the end and turn right toward the terminal. I look back down the runway and the SWA 7-3 is about 500yrds off the end of the runway. This would have been a "go around" under normal circumstances. Behind Southwest, they are stacked up on a string. 8-10 planes maybe... boom, boom, boom. Big ones too.
"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" I hear a voice behind me. I turn, it's a man on his cell. 'Two planes hit the WTC. They are on fire...both buildings." We are in the terminal in a flash it seemed. I made a few calls and went to the rental counter and secured a car (a fire engine red, Dodge minivan) before I sat in this tiny airport and watch TV for about 4 hours. By the time I decided to go back to Chicago, the rental counters were chaos. I slowly made my way through the crowd announcing rides were available back to ORD for any takers, follow me out. Outside I turned around to see I had five takers, 2 men, 3 women. One was a UA FA. We barely spoke a word the whole way back. I don't even remember any of their names. ORD was closed and I dropped ‘em off one by one at various places around the city. Then home for me. I'll never forget where I was or that Ch. 9 was a part of it. I still have the stub from the flight. UA 1969, ORD to Phoenix, seat 5F.
Thank you for posting this. Everyone has their "where were you" story from that horrific day, but I never get tired of hearing them for some reason. Hard to believe it's nearly been two decades - I can still almost feel the chill in the air of that morning, it was an absolutely perfect fall day on the East Coast.
There was a window cleaner trapped in an elevator between floors who used a squeegee to stab the plaster and escape.
When I last worked it out - he had about 7 minutes to escape the area of collapse. Intense when you're half way up a skyscraper with no working elevators.
Yeah it is impossible to forget. My wife at the time and I got a call waking us from a friend telling us to turn on the news. It was all surreal from that moment on. The second plane may have just hit the second tower by the time we turned on the TV and they didn't know quite what happened yet.
I am not even from the United States and I got a call to turn on the TV.
That was before the second plane. I couldn't believe it. We did have access to US channels and the reporters appeared to be confused when the second plane hit and thought it was a replay.
I've never lived in the US either, but I got a phone call from my partner who was panicking about George Bush starting WW3. I said that wasn't really a concern, it was just a terrorist attack and you can't really nuke terrorists.
To be fair, we never really know what some of the more loopy US presidents may do, though.
Great post. I was confused by "channel 9" since I thought there may be rules or regulations against receiving ATC on a plane, but for anyone else who didn't know exactly what it referred to, it is (was?) an inflight entertainment feature of United Airlines.
Yes. One of the greatest perks of United that they eventually phased out.
You'd tune your headset to Channel 9 on most aircraft and list to ATC just between the tower and your plane. I'd listen to it many times just to understand when we'd get a delay, maintenance issue, airport slowness..etc.
It got me over my fear of flying because I got to learn what the pilots (and the Center) thought about the turbulence we were experiencing and how they were responding to it.
It also inspired me to write the original version of this Wikipedia article
It was just a channel on the UA entertainment system (audio) where the pilots could choose to make the ATC transmissions audible to the passengers (if desired). It was highly spotty because enough pilots had bad experiences (or believed they would) based on passengers asking them annoying questions or reporting things that didn't need to be reported, or generally causing more trouble than it was worth.
I don't have a 9/11 flying story but exactly the week before 9/11 my family and I flew United 93 from Newark to SFO. I was woken up at 6 AM by my family in New Jersey calling me to tell me they were all safe which confused me until I booted up my computer and saw the headlines on Yahoo! News. I didn't save my boarding pass stub.
A friend of mine had just been married in Europe, and was in the air over the Atlantic on the way to his honeymoon in Hawaii when this happened. His plane was diverted to somewhere in Canada (New Foundland?), and he got to spend his honeymoon in a school gym on cots.
US closed the border and airspace, and all sorts of international flights had to find somewhere to touch down. The huge Cold-War-era airport at Gander is now mostly one of the two major ATC zones for the North Atlantic flyways, and usually gets a few diverted flights a day. That morning, they got 38 planes, including a lot of widebodies. 7,000 passengers and crew, with an indefinite stay (ended up being like 3 days) in a town with 10,000 residents. The town of Gander (and surrounding hamlets) put everyone up. It's a sweet story from a tragic time. Gander's the only place outside of the US with a monument from WTC steel. There's a catchy Broadway soundtrack (haven't seen the play) about story called 'Come From Away'.
I recommend listening to the flight director loops from the Apollo missions. There are thousands of recorded hours available (various places, but try lunarmodule5’s playlists on Youtube, or https://apolloinrealtime.org/ for a museum exhibit style) - including practically the entirety of missions 8 to 13, and most especially try the notorious manual burn of 13 during which everyone sounds like they’re discussing where to have lunch, not undertaking an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous manoeuvre in a crippled spacecraft.
Sometimes I put them on as working background audio, it’s tremendously soothing.
I've always loved Kranz'(?) comment even more than the moment of first contact itself. As if to say "Stop cashing out on one historic achievement and work with us to make many more".
It was surreal listening to them talk about the catastrophe but all while maintaining a total sense of calm.