At the moment the planners and controllers at Command Center were scrambling to slow the arrival sequence of 287 aircraft headed for the Atlanta area. Safety was the paramount consideration on their minds. Restoring order was the only way to achieve that goal. Everyone was cooperative, but no one had anticipated this type of communications breakdown and the system couldn’t cope with the blocked frequencies. Simply stated, there wasn’t a contingency plan to deal with this magnitude of sabotage.
Louis Traweek sat in stunned silence and stared at a radar symbol that represented American Airlines Flight 864—a Boeing 727 carrying 124 people that was passing over the airport and flying almost straight at the corridor for traffic inbound from the northwest. A reformed chain-smoker, Traweek reflexively reached for his empty breast pocket as he visualized the midair collisions he believed were imminent.
While chaos was spreading through the darkened control room, Traweek snapped out of his daze and repeatedly tried to call Delta Flight 176—the MD-88 that had been given a counterfeit order to go around as the captain was preparing to flare for a landing. With the hapless crew unable to see out of the airliner, or communicate with an air traffic controller, the airplane was now flying straight north toward the combined inbound traffic congestion from the northeast and northwest.
What concerned the shaken controller most was United Flight 1147. For whatever reason, the crew had changed course and, according to their current altitude readout, had descended to 4,500 feet without receiving an ATC clearance to deviate from their assigned heading or altitude. Under the circumstances, the captain had elected to play a deadly game of airborne Russian roulette.
The cluttered radarscope indicated another frightening catastrophe in the making. After losing communications when they were told to turn to a heading of 280 degrees, the pilot of Air Force One had obviously decided to use his command prerogative to declare a lost communications situation and proceed toward Dobbins Air Reserve Base. They were squawking 7600 on their transponder while the Boeing 747 was rapidly merging with United Flight 1147.
With his insides twisted from stress and sheer frustration, Traweek helplessly watched the United flight and Air Force One close on each other. He knew the only salvation would be if each maintained their current altitude. More midair conflict alerts went off as nine airplanes converged near the airport and occupied a one-square-mile section of airspace.
Louis Traweek and his fellow controllers wanted to close their eyes and block out any thoughts of the high probability that they were about to witness multiple collisions in the skies over Atlanta.
For most air traffic controllers, their worst recurring nightmares were about personal miscalculations that resulted in two jumbo jets colliding over a highly populated area. The present situation was even worse than their most frightening dreams. They were actually living the nightmare, and Air Force One was in the center of the flail.
Involuntarily, Traweek flinched when two blips indicating the same altitude merged for a long moment before separating on the scope. They couldn’t have missed each other by more than 100 to 200 feet vertically or horizontally.
37
“Traffic! Traffic!” TCAS warned as Bolton and Upshaw stared at the screen, then made a minor correction in both course and altitude. Eleven seconds later Bolton cringed when his airplane was buffeted by American 864 as it passed overhead in the dark clouds. Flying in these conditions was like being in a submarine and unexpectedly having another sub scrape across the top of the hull of your boat. For Bolton and Upshaw, the near midair experience was too frightening even to contemplate.
Bolton was a cool customer by nature, but his present predicament was unnerving and unprecedented in his accident-free aviation career. Even the most shocking emergencies he’d faced weren’t as stressful as flying blind in a dark sky full of metal objects traveling hundreds of miles per hour in many different directions. With no positive control, Bolton and his crew and passengers were in the hands of fate.
Bolton glanced at Upshaw. ‘This could only happen when the president is onboard.”
“No shit,” Upshaw said while he yanked open his approach plates and selected the military ATIS frequency for Dobbins. “We’re all passengers for the time being.”
The cockpit became eerily quiet while they listened to theDobbins information. The weather wasn’t any better than what had been reported at Hartsfield/Atlanta.
“Traffic! Traffic!” TCAS warned.
“Curt.” Upshaw hesitated while he tuned in the busy approach-control frequency at Dobbins, then carefully framed his question. “Do you think we ought to step down a couple of hundred feet, get below our cardinal altitude?”
“Maybe miss a fender bender?” Bolton calmly asked.
“It might give us a better-than-even chance.”
Bolton stared at the altimeter for a few seconds and initiated a slight descent from their assigned altitude of 5,000 feet. “What the hell — it’s a roll of the dice any way you look at it.”
“Yeah, a roll with our eyes closed,” Upshaw said cryptically as he selected the UHF frequency for approach control. “Dobbins approach, Air Force One.”
“Stand by, Air Force One — all aircraft on this frequency, stand by!” the controller blurted in an exasperated voice and then addressed two flights he was trying to work into the traffic flow for Dobbins. “Northwest Seven-Twenty-Four, descend and maintain four thousand. Delta Six-Ninety-Nine, turn right to two-eight-zero and continue your descent to six thousand.”
Unlike the normal pattern of communications between controllers and pilots — where instructions issued by a controller are read back to him by the flight crews — this controller was issuing a constant stream of instructions and expecting the pilots to respond instantly to the orders. There wasn’t time for the usual clarification procedure.
Summoning his courage, Bolton leveled Air Force One at 4,700 feet and listened to the harried controller trying to sort out the flights in the most immediate danger. The controller’s problem reminded Bolton of a triage surgeon in the process of sorting victims to determine priorities for action in an emergency. He fervently hoped the tormented controller would find time for the president’s plane. I’d give up my retirement pay if I could just see what the hell was happening.
Kirk Upshaw involuntarily ducked his head to the side. His sudden action caused Bolton to twitch.
“What’d you see?” Bolton asked while his pulse raced.
Upshaw was trying to find his voice. “I thought I saw something converging from the left — it passed right in front of us.”
“Steady at the helm,” Bolton said quietly in an effort to calm the jumpy copilot. “We’ll be on the ground soon.”
“If we survive this,” Upshaw said through clenched teeth, “I’m going to church every Sunday, so help me God.”
“I’ll go with you,” Bolton said in a tight voice.
Stirred by his intense anxiety, Chief Master Sergeant Brewer made small talk. “I remember a tanker crew who had a religious awakening,” he said in a nervous voice. “They were descendin’ at night to ten thousand feet over the ocean. The moon wasn’t out and the night was pitch-black. When the pilot leveled off at what he thought was their assigned altitude, the crew felt a series of continuous bumps — sort of like they were in light turbulence. They turned on the ice lights and discovered they were flyin’ in ground effect only a few feet above the water.”
“Wonderful,” Upshaw observed, unamused.
Ignoring the interruption, Brewer continued. “The engines were blowin’ spray off the ocean when the major began climbin’ away from the water. Ground effect was the only thing that kept them from becomin’ shark food.”