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The assignment desk calls us out to cover breaking news several
times a day. Usually the call comes from the desk over the Nextel radio
with the familiar 'beep, beep.' They wait for my reply. We are conditioned
to dread the 'beep, beep.' It means we have to go out and work.
I heard the infamous 'beep, beep.' Only this time it was different;
it was followed by my name, 'John,' in an inquisitive but urgent tone.
I sat back on the couch in our Linden, New Jersey hangar, and for
a second considered calling them back on the phone. But the phone
rang. It was one of our assignment editors.
'John,' she yelled, 'a plane just flew into the Twin Towers!
Just . . . just flew right into it! Go now!'
'We're gone.'

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It was when the first plane hit, right about 8:48 a.m. I'm finishing a report talking about delays at the George Washington Bridge and see this fireball. It seemed so unreal. It was mind-boggling. We just started flying toward it. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth saying, "There's an explosion near the top of one of the towers," I still didn’t believe it.
— Brian McKinley, traffic reporter, Metro Networks/Shadow Broadcasting

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I was in the helicopter, near the George Washington Bridge, and we had just made a turn to the south. It was 8:48 A.M.—time for what would normally be my last traffic report of the morning. I saw a flash and a fireball from the top of the World Trade Center.

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A Pilot
Remembers
by Arthur Anderson

September 11, 2001, started out as a
beautiful day. Nice flying weather. It
was crystal clear with a strong wind,
and afforded good hovering conditions.
I was flying what we at the
base call "the radio ship" (N8BQ).
Onboard was Brian McKinley
reporting for 1130AM Bloomberg
Radio and Tom Kaminski for
880AM CBS Radio. Sometimes we
are required to do cut-ins for
WABC-TV in New York, so we were
also carrying television-broadcasting
equipment (including a camera).
The radio ship has the longest
morning shift of all the news helicopters.
It usually launches at 6 a.m.
and runs till 9 a.m. Most of the
television ENG helicopters land
when the news goes national at 7 a.m.
It was late in our shift and we were
headed back to the base.
After looking at the traffic near
the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, we
had crossed over the George
Washington Bridge southbound,
when I noticed something odd. There
was an airplane flying over lower
Manhattan. You never see a plane
over lower Manhattan. I was working
LaGuardia Tower (LGA) when I saw
the plane fly into the north tower of
the World Trade Center. In my mind,
for a second, it was like a cartoon.
There was a hole in the shape of an
airplane in the side of the building! It
was just for an instant and then the
smoke and flame came billowing out.
Stunned, I asked LGA if they lost
one, and I could hear the confusion
and shock in their reply. They didn't
know what was going on either. I left
LGA airspace and headed into the
Hudson River Exclusion, where there
is no air traffic control. I flew southbound
toward the towers. We knew
we had to go and cover this story.
Brian and Tom (my onboard
reporters) were broadcasting and
they started rolling the camera. We
flew down to the site and it was just
incredible. Debris was falling. Smoke
and fire was billowing out from at
least 3 sides of the building. When I
first saw the plane, I had not realized
it was so big, but we soon figured out
that it must have been an airliner;
you just had to look at the destruction.
Everyone was trying to find out
what was happening. Brian and Tom
were doing a great job of story
coverage given the little information
we had. We started to feed video
to WABC Local News, who then
went national with Good Morning
America and it spread from
there. At first we were the only news
helicopter in the air because the
other guys had landed around 7 am.
The first pictures the world saw were
taken from our ship. I radioed the
base to tell the other guys to get in
the air, but there was no answer. I
assumed they were on the way.
When they arrived at the scene, we
were all on the radio talking about
what we were seeing.
We continued to move around
the area, trying to view the different
angles. We had been in the area of
Chelsea (lower Manhattan), but then
moved down the Hudson and ended
up near the Colgate Clock in Jersey
City. We surveyed the damage to the
North Tower and decided to move
back up to the north side. When we
arrived back in the area of Chelsea,
unbelievably it happened again! One
of the other pilots said it was another
plane.
I had been facing north, so I
didn't see the plane, just the explosion
coming out of the building. It
was huge. And it was strange,
because of all the paper in the air; it
looked like confetti. I can't recall
who said it, but someone said it was a
terrorist attack. At that point I felt
like I had a target on my back. I
wondered, how many more planes
were out there?
Fuel. We needed fuel. It was the
end of our shift and we were coming
close to minimum fuel. I told Tom
and Brian I was going to Ridgefield
Park Heliport to refuel, and then
we'd get right back up. Also, NYPD
Aviation was telling everyone to clear
the immediate area. We landed and
refueled. I called Teterboro Tower to
depart from Ridgefield but they
directed us to stay on the ground.
"The airspace has been sterilized."
Sterilized? What did they mean?
We found out that not only was
Teterboro airspace closed but so were
Newark, Kennedy, and LaGuardia.
Brian and Tom continued to do
reports from the ground. And all I
could do was watch as the towers
burned and fell.

Arthur Anderson is Line Pilot for
Helicopters Inc. in New Jersey and flies
under contract to WABC in New York

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The second airplane actually flew right past us.

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On September 11, 2001, News Copter 7 was airborne as the tragic events at the World Trade Center unfolded. John's coverage began as the second plane flew past his helicopter over New York Harbor and ended more than five hours later, his reports and images seen worldwide.

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The driver, Mohammed Chowdury, told reporters last night he was forced off the road by a black car that cut him off.

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Sally: Kai can you start by telling me where you were the morning of Sept. 11?

Kai: I do the local Fox morning show from the air and we had just recently landed from the morning show and I had gotten paged with a text page from the news desk here at fox five that a plane had crashed into the WTC and that we should get flying right away and so we did that.

Sally: So you saw everything from the air?

Kai: I didn't see the first plane hit. Once we launched, we launch out of Caldwell, NJ, and once we came up in the air we saw a lot of smoke coming from the World Trade Center.

broken sticks

Sep 10 2009, 02:32 PM

*listens to WCBS-AM 880 mp3*

we should sync this up with the ABC coverage and see if it correlates with (for instance) that trip around to the south-west that we see on ABC at about 9am. i'll check that now.

broken sticks

Sep 10 2009, 04:39 PM

just speculating...
did the FOX5 'marta' shot get allocated to a chopper already?

Matt

Sep 11 2009, 03:01 AM

Here's the point of perspective for the Marta shot: "hovering over Tonnele Ave, near Bleecker St and Terrace Ave in Jersey City, NJ at about 625 feet above sea level (above ground elevated at 11 feet);

40deg 45min 14.73sec N
74deg 03min 24.00sec W"

Thanks again, YougeneDebs


That one remains a mystery.

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We were climbing through eleven hundred feet toward an assigned altitude of fifteen hundred feet, and then we saw it. Paul Smith, my pilot, saw it before I did ---an airliner, traveling from south to north, traveling low and fast.

"Now what's this guy doing?" I asked Paul.

"You see this yahoo?" he shot back.

Paul was thinking the same thing I was: the jetliner was on an approach to Newark's shortest and most seldom used runway, and was, for some reason, slightly off course. Airplanes would come up from the south and then turn west near the Statue of Liberty onto final approach. Paul assumed that this airplane would do just that, and he was perturbed that Newark's air traffic controller hadn't advised us that there was an airplane in our vicinity.

I could see the rear profile with engines on both wings as it approached the statue. A Boeing 737, I thought. And then it dipped. Not a nice, gradual descent, but a brief dip and then a sharp turn to the right. Not a graceful, gradual airliner turn like you see in commercials; this was a sharp, abrupt turn that put the plane into a forty-five-degree bank, and it flew into the shade being created by the smoke plume from the north tower.

Something made me reach for the remote that controls our onboard tape deck and point our camera at the World Trade Center. I moved and focused the camera, placed the remote in my lap, pressed "play" and "record," and looked back up at my camera monitor. It now contained the image of a huge fireball.

"Did he just . . . ?" I said out loud to Paul. I couldn't get anything else out. I knew what had just happened.

"Holy sh!t," Paul said calmly. "Yeah. He just hit the building!"

"Chop 7, news desk!" I yelled into my two-way radio. "Another plane just hit the building!"

"What? What did you say?"

"Another plane just hit the building!"

I got no reply. My on-air television monitor turned to "snow." I called back on the radio and got no reply again. The station's transmitter and communication equipment were on top of the building. And it was all out of commission.