U.S. Military Response During The September 11 Attacks - Flight 77

Flight 77

American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Dulles International Airport outside Washington D.C. at 8:20 AM. The flight proceeded normally until 8:55 AM, when the aircraft deviated from its assigned course by initiating a turn to the south. The transponder of Flight 77 was switched off at 8:56 AM, and its primary radar track was lost. Later, after hearing about the hijacked planes hitting the World Trade Center, Indianapolis Center suspected that Flight 77 may also have been hijacked, and shared this information with FAA Command Center at Herndon, where staff contacted FAA Headquarters in Washington at 9:25AM.

NEADS learned that the flight was lost at 9:34 during a phone call with the FAA Headquarters.

9:34:01 “Washington Center: Now let me tell you this. I – I’ll – we’ve been looking. We’re – also lost American 77 ... They lost contact with him. They lost everything. And they don’t have any idea where he is or what happened.”

The FAA did not contact NEADS to make this report. This phone call was initiated by NEADS in an attempt to locate Phantom Flight 11 (see previous).

At 9:35, Colin Scoggins from the FAA's Boston Center again called NEADS to inform them that they had located an aircraft, which later turned out to be American Airlines flight 77, heading toward Washington DC at a high rate of speed. Two minutes later, a NEADS radar technician spotted a target he believed to be flight 77. This radar target was in fact flight 77 near Washington, DC, but the target vanished as soon as it was discovered. NEADS officials urgently ordered the fighters from Langley to be sent to Washington immediately, but flight 77 had already struck the Pentagon at 9:37:45. The Langley fighters were still 150 miles away.