Word: contact
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...then proceeded to explain how both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been hit in acts of terrorism. A woman in the fourth row began to cry loudly, and other devastated and concerned students left the room with cell phones in hand as they frantically tried to contact their loved ones...
...became horrifyingly clear moments later: controller's voices crackling into airplane cockpits across the United States were calm but the message was disturbing and unprecedented. "Every airplane listening to this frequency needs to contact your company." With those eleven words, the world's most complex - and safe - air traffic system was brought to its knees...
...Thousands of pilots rapidly began dialing up the operation centers of their airlines via the airborne communication systems that allow crew to contact the ground with e-mail or voice systems. Pilots were informed that there had been terrorist attacks, were instructed to deny all access to the cockpit and get the plane down as quickly as possible. In one cockpit, a pilot checked that the door was locked. Then he made sure that the 'crash axe' that is carried in all cockpits was in place...
...country are the linchpin of an air traffic system that manages tens of thousands of flights a day. The system is almost dull in its routine. Controllers and pilots use regular routes, fly prescribed altitudes along decades-old highways in the sky, and most important, are in constant contact. Controllers are like flashlights in the dark for commercial airplanes: those FAA employees know what's going on in the air around a plane, and can 'see' exactly what each plane is doing. Each plane appears on a controllers radar screen as a so-called 'target' in controller-speak, and each...
...says the authorities must have been scrambling. "Coordinating a response to one airplane accident is daunting enough, I can't imagine anything like this." At approximately 9:37 am, controllers in the tower at Washington's National Airport likely used their secure hotline phone that reaches the Secret Service contact in charge of protection of the White House and informed them that an unidentified plane was hurtling towards the area. Usually, the calls come the other direction - from irate Secret Service agents complaining that this or that commercial flight took off too close to the White House...