8:42 a.m. September 11, 2001: American Airlines Manager Asks Dispatcher to Determine How Far Flight 11 Can Travel with Its Remaining Fuel

Craig Marquis, the manager on duty at the American Airlines System Operations Control (SOC) center in Fort Worth, Texas, instructs Peggy Houck, a dispatcher at the SOC, to calculate how far Flight 11 could travel with the fuel it has left. [American Airlines, 9/11/2001, pp. 20-22; 9/11 Commission, 11/19/2003 ; 9/11 Commission, 1/8/2004 ] Marquis was recently told by a colleague at the SOC that FAA air traffic controllers are treating Flight 11 as a hijacking (see 8:40 a.m. September 11, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 11/19/2003 ; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 6] He now talks to Houck and tells her that Flight 11 has “turned off his transponder.” He says controllers have the plane “on primary radar and they see him descending.” Marquis then asks Houck to calculate how far the plane could go with its current amount of fuel. He says: “Could you run me a model? [Flight 11] is currently 66,000 pounds of gas back from the time I got the call. Just give me some sort of endurance for 25,000 feet, if you would.” [American Airlines, 9/11/2001, pp. 20-22] Marquis is also on the phone with Nydia Gonzalez, a supervisor at the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in North Carolina who is simultaneously participating in a call with Betty Ong, a flight attendant on Flight 11. [9/11 Commission, 11/19/2003 ; 9/11 Commission, 8/26/2004, pp. 8-9] Marquis updates Gonzalez on what is happening. He tells her, “I have the dispatcher currently taking the current fuel on board, and we’re gonna run some profiles to see exactly what [Flight 11’s] endurance is.” [American Airlines, 9/11/2001, pp. 20-22] Houck will perform an analysis of the fuel capacity of Flight 11 and determine that the plane has “an approximate range of six hours.” [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/11/2001, pp. 5-7] She will tell the 9/11 Commission that, around this time, she thinks the situation with Flight 11 is “looking like a typical hijacking.… She was thinking they might be headed to Cuba or Colombia.” [9/11 Commission, 1/8/2004 ]