The First Fifteen Minutes of September 11th
Former Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon speaks out
on 9/11, NORAD and what should have happened on 9/11.
By Jeremy Baker

Former Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon

Within three hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Robin Hordon knew it was an inside job. He had been an Air Traffic Controller (ATC) for eleven years before Reagan fired him and hundreds of his colleagues after they went on strike in the eighties. Having handled in-flight emergencies and two actual hijackings in his career, he is well qualified to comment on what NORAD should have been able to achieve in its response to the near simultaneous hijacking of four domestic passenger carriers on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

“There had to be something huge to explain why those aircraft weren’t shot down out of the sky. We have fighters on the ready to handle these situations twenty-four-seven. We have NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) monitors monitoring our skies twenty-four-seven. We have a lot of human beings, civilian and military, who care about doing their jobs.”

Henry Kulbaski, 74; Ordered Copter Over White House Downed

By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 14, 2007; Page B06

Henry S. Kulbaski, 74, a uniformed Secret Service agent who played the accordion on the South Lawn for President John F. Kennedy and ordered an errant aircraft shot down over the White House in 1974, died of cancer June 17 at Geisinger Hospital in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Mr. Kulbaski was watch commander in the White House Executive Office control center in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 17, 1974, when he received word from the Maryland State Police that an army helicopter had been stolen from Fort Meade and was being chased into restricted air space near the White House.

As the purloined UH1B Huey helicopter circled the Washington Monument, Mr. Kulbaski watched and waited. President Richard M. Nixon and his family were away, and at 1 a.m. Mr. Kulbaski was having difficulty reaching his superiors.

"When no one answered, I knew I had to make the decision myself," he told the Citizen's Voice in Wilkes-Barre in 1994.