Phantom Flight 11
At 9:21, NEADS received another call from Colin Scoggins, who reported erroneously that Flight 11 was not, in fact, the aircraft that hit the North Tower at 8:46, as had been previously believed, but that it was still in the air and heading towards Washington. NEADS responded to this report by giving a scramble order to three fighters from the 1st Fighter Wing on alert at Langley Air Force Base at 9:24, and by 9:30 they were in the air. According to the 9/11 commission, the Langley pilots were never briefed by anyone at their base about why they were being scrambled, so, despite Langley officials' having been given the order from NEADS to fly to Washington, the unbriefed pilots ended up following their normal training flight plan, due east, out to sea. The fighters then flew north-west towards Washington, arriving around 10:00.
Read more about this topic: U.S. Military Response During The September 11 Attacks
Famous quotes containing the words phantom and/or flight:
“Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)