Between 8:51 a.m. and 8:59 a.m. September 11, 2001: Airline President Wonders if American Airlines Plane Hit the WTC after Seeing TV Coverage of Crash

Don Carty, the president of American Airlines, calls his airline’s System Operations Command Center (SOCC) in Fort Worth, Texas, and asks if the plane that is reported to have hit the World Trade Center belonged to American Airlines. [Wall Street Journal, 10/15/2001; 9/11 Commission, 1/8/2004 ; 9/11 Commission, 1/27/2004] According to author Lynn Spencer, Carty, who is still at home, learned that an American Airlines plane had been hijacked when he received a message from the airline on his pager, which stated, “Confirmed hijacking Flight 11” (see 8:49 a.m. September 11, 2001). [Spencer, 2008, pp. 52] But Carty will tell CNN that he learned of the hijacking in “a call from our operations people.” He will say he’d told the caller that he “would be out immediately,” but then, he will say, “it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I should check whether the press had the story, and I turned on the TV, and almost at the moment I turned on the TV, I saw them talking about something that struck the World Trade Center.” Carty will say that upon seeing the report, “[J]ust in my gut, I knew it was our airplane” that had hit the WTC. [CNN, 11/19/2001] Carty phones Gerard Arpey, American Airlines’ executive vice president of operations, who is at the SOCC. He says, “The press is reporting an airplane hit the World Trade Center,” and asks, “Is that our plane?” [Wall Street Journal, 10/15/2001; 9/11 Commission, 1/27/2004] Arpey replies that the airline’s personnel do not know. He tells Carty only that they “had confirmed the hijacking of Flight 11, and knew it was flying toward New York City and descending.” [9/11 Commission, 1/8/2004 ]