‘Possible hijack in progress’: Air traffic controller remembers 9/11

Published

4 years ago

September 11, 2021

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It was a “beautiful late summer morning in New York”, remembers Mike McCormick, an air traffic manager at the New York air traffic control centre.

“I’d spent a long weekend with my young son,” he recalled, including his son’s first visit to the World Trade Center, and had celebrated his birthday with his wife in Manhattan.

“I was getting caught up on all my office work,” he told Sky News, when at 8.45am the call came in that “there was a possible hijack in progress 39,000 feet over Albany, New York, and heading southbound”.

“I immediately went out to the air traffic control room floor, and we were able to confirm with American Airlines that it was an actual hijacking,” as the airline had spoken to a staff member onboard the plane.

“One flight attendant had already died from stab wounds, and several passengers had been injured and hijackers had knives and bombs,” according to the information the flight attendant had shared with American Airlines, and the airline shared with Mike.

He then went to the air traffic control position and with his team tracked American Airlines Flight 11 southbound along the Hudson River which runs from the Adirondack Mountains upstate through Albany and almost directly south into the Atlantic Ocean on the border of New York and New Jersey.

“I quickly got on the phone with the New York approach control and the Newark air traffic control tower which overlooks the Hudson River in New York City.

“I asked the controller to look up the Hudson River to look for American [Airlines’] Boeing 767 that may attempt to land at Newark Airport, thinking that there was perhaps an emergency on board, and the aircraft may be partially disabled.

“Unfortunately [the controller] reported that the aircraft had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex,” Mr McCormick said.

“Immediately after reporting that, a controller behind me hollered out: ‘I have another one’,” he remembered.

The second plane was United Airlines Flight 175 and the air traffic control team watched as it made a sharp turn and again flew towards the World Trade Center.

“During those 11 minutes when I was watching [Flight] 175 on the radar display, I attempted several times to notify authorities that another hijack was in fact in progress, the first aircraft was in fact an actual hijack, and our country was now under attack,” Mr McCormick said.

His attempts to notify the authorities were unsuccessful.

Just after 9am, United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center complex.

Fighter jets had been scrambled, but weren’t able to intercept the hijacked planes, Mr McCormick told Sky News.

“Myself and the manager at Boston centre had our military specialists contact Northeast Air Defence. Unfortunately, when the military specialists came out to tell me that the fighter jets were airborne – they requested the location, identification and transponder codes for the hijacked aircraft – the second aircraft had already hit the World Trade Center.”

A minute after the second plane had hit the second tower, Mr McCormick made the decision to shut down all New York airspace.

The impact was enormous. Many planes were force to turn around and go back to Europe while others were forced to land at alternate destinations in Canada due to the complete shutdown on aircraft entering New York airspace.

Closing down the skies over New York effectively meant closing down air travel over the “northeastern United States, and the North Atlantic, western Atlantic, and Caribbean portions of Atlantic Ocean, where we butt right up against the air traffic control services provided by NATS UK [formerly National Air Traffic Services],” Mr McCormick told Sky News.

As the reality of what was happening became clear to Mr McCormick, he became angry: “I was very angry that someone would choose an industry that I love, and that’s aviation, to attack our country. I had never thought that aircraft would be used as weapons.”

But by the end of the day, he thought back to “how the men and women, the air traffic controllers across the entire United States rose to the occasion and cleared the skies of all the other aircraft, because that was in fact the only way that we could disarm the terrorists, was to remove their access to their weapons of choice”.

Shortly after closing down the airspace, the team was made aware of another potentially in-progress hijacking, this time of United Airlines Flight 93, which had departed from Newark Airport in New Jersey and was heading eastbound over western Pennsylvania.

“I got on a national teleconference with FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) headquarters in Washington DC, and a controller joined our teleconference from Washington Dulles Airport and was counting down miles from the White House for a fast moving jet aircraft.

“Ten miles from White House, nine miles from White House, all the way down to one mile from White House when the aircraft made a sweeping right turn. I thought perhaps the target was changed to the Capitol, but the aircraft was too high and too fast. It continued its right turn around and came back and hit the Pentagon.”

“Fighter jets were also scrambled to perform an intercept at Washington DC. Unfortunately, they got over Washington DC, just as the aircraft hit the Pentagon,” he said.

“Shortly thereafter is when United 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, due to the heroic efforts of the passengers and crew onboard that aircraft.

“We were not aware of the struggles that actually occurring onboard,” Mr McCormick told Sky News, adding: “However, we were closely tracking the aircraft, so we could see that the aircraft was descending.

“And we knew there were not any likely targets in that area, so I made the assumption that there was a struggle in a cockpit and somehow they were able to force the aircraft into the ground, and it was at a high rate of speed too. The crater form by their heroic activities was over 30 feet deep.”

Nobody knows what the actual target selected by the terrorists onboard that flight was.

“The assumption, and the working assumption that we had that day, was that it was headed toward Washington. So more than likely, it would have been a visible target, a high-profile target similar to World Trade Center,” Mr McCormick told Sky News.

That most likely would have been the Capitol Building, according to Mr McCormick, as a very large and prominent building on top of a hill with “easy access to it from the air if you were to a plan attack vectors.

“The White House is very difficult to hit, because it is a much smaller building, and has high rise buildings around it [which makes] it difficult to actually fly an aircraft into the White House.”

US

Donald Trump says he wants to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un again – as soon as ‘this year’

Published

22 hours ago

August 26, 2025

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Donald Trump says he wants to meet North Korea's Kim Jong Un again - as soon as 'this year'

Donald Trump has said he wants to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un again.

Speaking at the White House as he held talks with the new South Korean president Lee Jae Myung, Mr Trump told reporters: “I’d like to meet him this year… I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong Un in the appropriate future.”

“I’d like to have a meeting. I got along great with him,” President Trump said, adding they “became very friendly” during his first term in office.

“We think we can do something in that regard,” he said, adding that he would like to help the relationship between the two Koreas.

Mr Trump and Mr Kim held three meetings between 2018 and 2019 during Mr Trump’s first term and exchanged a number of, what the president called, “beautiful” letters.

In June 2019, Mr Trump briefly stepped into North Korea from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) with South Korea.

The US president on Monday responded to a question about whether he would return to the DMZ by fondly recalling the last time he did so.

“Remember when I walked across the line and everyone went crazy?” especially the Secret Service, Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

But “I loved it”, Mr Trump said. He added he felt safe because he had a good relationship with Mr Kim.

Mr Trump became the first sitting American president to set foot on North Korean soil six years ago.

However, little progress was made in curbing North Korea’s nuclear programme, and Mr Trump acknowledged in March this year that Pyongyang is a “nuclear power”.

Kim possible: Is Trump seeking another ‘Hermit Kingdom’ handshake?

It was Donald Trump’s first meeting with the new president of South Korea.

A highly unconventional platform for glowing words about the North Korean one.

He said he got along “great” with Kim Jong Un and would like to meet him again “this year”.

The US president’s renewed interest in North Korea appears less about policy and more about theatrics.

The historic image of President Trump stepping on to North Korean soil in 2018 gave him global headlines.

The timing is curious – North Korea has been busy polishing its nuclear credentials and vowing not to disarm without serious concessions.

In other words, Pyongyang is holding the same cards it held four years ago, only now they’re shinier.

But Trump seems eager to revive his image as the only US president bold, or brash, enough to break bread with the ruler of the “Hermit Kingdom”.

Supporters call it visionary diplomacy; critics call it reality TV masquerading as foreign policy.

Either way, President Trump clearly sees value in the spectacle.

Whether Kim Jong Un does is another story.

Since Mr Trump’s first-term meetings with Mr Kim ended, North Korea has shown no interest in returning to talks.

The White House said in June that Mr Trump would welcome communications with Mr Kim.

The attempts at rapprochement come after the election in South Korea of Mr Lee, who has pledged to reopen dialogue with North Korea.

As a gesture of engagement in June, Mr Lee suspended South Korean loudspeakers blasting music and messages into the North at the DMZ along their shared border.

Analysts say, however, that engaging North Korea will likely be more difficult for both Mr Lee and Mr Trump than it was in the president’s first term.

Since then, North Korea has significantly expanded its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.

And it has developed close ties with Russia through direct support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, with Pyongyang providing both troops and weaponry.

Mr Kim told Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will always stand with Moscow, state media reported in June.

US

Lil Nas X pleads not guilty after being charged with assaulting police officer

Published

22 hours ago

August 26, 2025

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Lil Nas X pleads not guilty after being charged with assaulting police officer

US rapper Lil Nas X has pleaded not guilty after being charged with assaulting a police officer while walking in downtown Los Angeles in his underwear.

The musician, real name Montero Lamar Hill, was taken to hospital and arrested after police responded to reports of a naked man shortly before 6am on Thursday.

The district attorney’s office said on Monday that Lil Nas X faces three counts of battery with injury on a police officer and one count of resisting an executive officer.

He was being held on a $75,000 (£55,457) bail, conditional on attending drug treatment. It is not immediately clear whether he had posted it and been released yet.

He is set to return to court on 15 September for his next pre-trial hearing.

During the hearing on Monday, Hill’s lawyer Christy O’Connor told the judge he had led a “remarkable” life, adding: “Assuming the allegations here are true, this is an absolute aberration in this person’s life.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to him.”

A law enforcement source told Sky’s US partner network, NBC News, on Thursday that the Old Town Road and Industry Baby hitmaker punched an officer twice in the face during the encounter.

The source added officers were unsure whether he was on any substances or in mental distress.

NBC News cited TMZ footage where Hill was seen walking down the middle of Ventura Boulevard at 4am on Thursday in a pair of white briefs and cowboy boots.

In the videos, Hill tells a driver to “come to the party” in one clip and in another tells the person: “Didn’t I tell you to put the phone down?”

“Uh oh, someone’s going to have to pay for that,” Hill says as he continues to walk away.

In some clips, Hill struts as if he’s on a catwalk, posing for onlookers, and at one point he places an orange traffic cone on his head.

US

Kilmar Abrego Garcia: Man wrongly deported from US to El Salvador detained by ICE again

Published

22 hours ago

August 26, 2025

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Kilmar Abrego Garcia: Man wrongly deported from US to El Salvador detained by ICE again

A man who was wrongly deported from the US to El Salvador has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) again.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 30-year-old originally from El Salvador, handed himself into the ICE field office in Baltimore, Maryland, for a check-in on Monday.

The visit was a mandatory condition of his release from federal custody earlier this weekend. However, in a court filing on Saturday, his lawyers said they expected Garcia would be detained again upon attending.

Garcia is charged in an indictment, filed in federal court in Tennessee, with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants into the US.

According to a court filing by his lawyers, immigration officials made an offer to Garcia to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to the charges.

Otherwise, they would seek to deport him to Uganda.

Speaking at a news conference outside the ICE office on Monday morning, Garcia said via a translator: “This administration has hit us hard, but I want to tell you guys something: God is with us, and God will never leave us.

“God will bring justice to all the injustice we are suffering.”

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Garcia’s lawyers, also said: “There was no need to take him into ICE detention… the only reason they took him into detention was to punish him.”

A judge later ruled Garcia could not be deported after he filed a challenge asking to be allowed due process to fight any removal attempt.

Judge Paula Xinis ruled the 30-year-old must remain detained in the US until she can hold an evidentiary hearing – set for Wednesday.

She added there appeared to be “several grounds” for her to have jurisdiction to exercise relief, including that Uganda has not agreed to offer Garcia protections, such as being able to walk freely, being given refugee status, and not being re-deported to El Salvador.

After initially being detained in Maryland – where he lived with his American wife and children – by ICE in March, Garcia was sent to El Salvador, where he was then imprisoned in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).

This was despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection from deportation after finding he was likely to be persecuted by local gangs if he was returned to his native country.

The Trump administration admitted deporting Garcia was an “administrative error”, but said at the time they could not bring him back as they do not have jurisdiction over El Salvador.

After eventually returning him to the US in June, the Trump administration detained Garcia on criminal charges that were filed in May.

The criminal indictment alleges Garcia worked with at least five co-conspirators to bring immigrants to the US illegally and transport them from the border to other destinations in the country.

Minutes after his release on Friday, officials notified Garcia they intended to deport him to Uganda.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, US President Donald Trump, vice president JD Vance and other officials claim Garcia was a member of MS-13 – an international criminal gang formed by immigrants who had fled El Salvador‘s civil war to protect Salvadoran immigrants from rival gangs.

Garcia’s lawyers strongly deny the claims.