8:45 a.m. September 11, 2001: American Airlines Managers Told about Flight 11 Problems during Conference Call

American Airlines managers are informed of what their airline has learned about the trouble on Flight 11 during a regular conference call. [Wall Street Journal, 10/15/2001; 9/11 Commission, 11/19/2003 ] In their daily morning conference call, senior American Airlines personnel usually discuss what happened on the previous day at the airline and what they are expecting in the day ahead. [9/11 Commission, 1/7/2004 ] But shortly after today’s conference call begins, Joseph Bertapelle, a manager at the airline’s System Operations Control (SOC) center in Fort Worth, Texas, announces, “Gentlemen, I have some information here I need to relay.” [Wall Street Journal, 10/15/2001] Bertapelle then passes on to the senior managers much of the information about the hijacking of Flight 11 that has been received by SOC employees Craig Marquis and Bill Halleck. Marquis, the manager on duty at the SOC, has been on the phone with a supervisor at the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in North Carolina, who has been relaying to him information she received in a simultaneous phone call with Betty Ong, a flight attendant on Flight 11 (see (8:21 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 11/19/2003 ; 9/11 Commission, 8/26/2004, pp. 8-9] And Halleck, an air traffic control specialist at the SOC, has been in contact with the FAA’s Boston Center, which gave him details of the problems with Flight 11 (see 8:29 a.m. September 11, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 3/25/2004, pp. 15] The conference call apparently only lasts a short time. Craig Parfitt, American Airlines’ managing director of dispatch operations, will later recall that at around 8:55 a.m.—10 minutes after the conference call begins—senior managers are arriving at the System Operations Command Center, located on the floor above the SOC (see (Between 8:40 a.m. and 8:55 a.m.) September 11, 2001). Presumably, some of these managers will have previously been participating in the conference call. [9/11 Commission, 11/19/2003 ]