When Lt. Col. Tim Duffy reported to work Sept. 11, 2001, he was disappointed he wasn’t scheduled to fly on the picture-perfect, New England fall morning.
However, within hours of arriving at Otis Air National Guard Base, Mass., he was flying with his wingman, Maj. Dan Nash. Not as expected, into a training mission, but instead in a combat patrol over the nation’s most populated city, and later above the World Trade Center’s north tower as it collapsed. The pilots with the calls signs “Duff” and “Nasty” patrolled the New York City skies to lock down the airspace above Manhattan in the wake of the terror attacks.
“You kind of just go into combat mode,” said Duffy, now a colonel and regional reserve director for 1st Air Force at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., and a liaison officer for Federal Emergency Management Agency, Region 1. “No emotions, no anything, but you’ve got a job to do. You realize people are dying right now, and we have to be able to stop whatever we can.”
Otis ANGB, located in Cape Cod, was one of North American Aerospace Defense Command’s seven alert sites in the United States at the time and is 153 miles from New York. Duffy, a United Airlines pilot, had just returned Sunday night from a flight to Tokyo when he reported for his three-day alert with the 102nd Fighter Wing.
“Colonel, you’ve got a phone call,” Master Sgt. Mark Rose said to Duffy from the sign-out desk. “Something about a hijacking.”
Nash, who had arrived at Otis a year earlier from an active-duty assignment at Lakenheath Air Base, England, was scheduled to be the No. 1 pilot that day, but deferred to Duffy because of his previous experience with a hijacked airliner. Duffy worked the Feb. 11, 1993 hijacking of a Lufthansa Airbus that was forced to land at Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Their squadron commander, Lt. Col. [now Maj. Gen.] John Treacy, had a phone in each hand as he tried to get the Otis Tower and Northeast Air Defense Sector communicating with each other. Treacy is now the deputy director for anti-terrorism and homeland defense with the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.
“It’s American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to California,” Treacy told Duffy. “It looks like the real thing.”
Duffy and Nash headed to their jets for the scramble alert, and within minutes, a green light directed them to take off. The fighters were scrambled at 8:46 a.m., the same minute American Airlines Flight 11 crashed between the 94th and 98th floors of the World Trade Center’s north tower.
The pilots were headed toward JFK when they received the radio call that a second aircraft had hit the towers. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the south tower at 9:02 a.m. The news shocked them because they didn’t know there was a second hijacked plane.
“My first reaction was what happened to American 11,” said Nash, a lieutenant colonel who has flown with the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Wing in Westfield since 2008. “Basically, at that point, it was pretty apparent to me that it was a deliberate act.
“It was mostly anger and frustration because even if we had been scrambled as soon as they lost communication, as soon as the airplane turned south off the route it was supposed to fly, went down the Hudson all the way to New York City, we would have had to follow it and undoubtedly watch the entire thing unfold. Basically, what you had were people taking advantage of the way things were with the freedoms that we enjoy and the way security was at that point to use those airplanes as a weapon.”
“At one point, I was escorting a Delta jet to land at Kennedy, and I saw a little bit of motion out of my periphery. I turned back, and all I could see was a tan cloud over the southern end of Manhattan. It was the south tower collapsing.” — Col. Tim Duffy
Duffy and Nash were headed toward Whiskey 105, an area just east of Long Island south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Islands to be within 40 to 50 miles of New York, when they received orders to fly directly to Manhattan and set up a combat air patrol .
“OK, I don’t think this has ever happened in our country before,” Duffy said to himself.
Nash knew there was a tanker from Bangor, Maine scheduled for the squadron’s training mission that morning, so Duffy called the Air Division to have it ready for refueling when needed. They refueled four times during the day, with one fighter remaining above Manhattan while the other was at the tanker. Without it, they would’ve had to wait for a tanker to be scrambled and possibly be forced to land a couple of hours after they left Otis ANGB.
The tanker kept them in the air for at least another three and a half hours that day, Duffy said.
They spent the next several hours intercepting, identifying and diverting aircraft in the confusion over the New York City airspace. Duffy also relayed back what he saw from the air as he flew over the towers.
“At one point, I was escorting a Delta jet to land at Kennedy, and I saw a little bit of motion out of my periphery,” he said. “I turned back, and all I could see was a tan cloud over the southern end of Manhattan. It was the south tower collapsing.”
After a few more intercepts, Duffy flew back to check on the north tower. He’d already reported that he didn’t think rescuers could save people from the roof because the top floors were completely engulfed in flames. Now, he was checking on the structural state of the building and thought at first the tower could be saved.
“From the structural side, it looked pretty good,” he said. “It wasn’t twisted, leaning or anything like that. I was just about to tell them the top floors would burn out, but I thought the building was going to be OK, and we were right over the top of it, looking down at the roof.
“As I was looking at it, the square, which was the roof, I was looking at started getting smaller. Then, I realized the building was falling away from me. I think the worst part of my day was watching that. I gave myself five to 10 seconds to be horrified by what I was watching. Then, you snap back in that mode where you’ve got a job to do.”
Nash had been checking radar for unidentified aircraft in the other direction and didn’t see the beginning of the tower’s collapse. What he saw was more than enough to fill him with horror. As terrible as the casualty count of almost 3,000 was, Nash’s first fears were even worse.
“It was pretty horrifying because I thought there would be even more people killed,” he said. “I thought at least 15,000 people were killed.”
Duffy sometimes feels a little uncomfortable when people talk about him and the other fighter pilots who protected the skies above Manhattan that day.
“People sometimes say ‘You guys are heroes,’ but it doesn’t seem right,” Duffy said. “The guys who ran into that building to save people were the heroes. We were doing our job, and we would’ve done whatever we needed to do. But we were never at risk. We were the ones flying the fighters. We were just doing what we needed to do to save lives on the ground.”
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