Fingerprint matching to start 9/11 Starting Sept. 11, hundreds of foreign visitors will be fingerprinted and photographed by immigration inspectors http://www.fcw.com/ For air traffic controllers, a historic achievement BY Alan Levin, USA Today Aug. 13, 2002 Printing? Use this version. Email this to a friend. On a typical summer day, a thunderstorm somewhere sends air traffic controllers scrambling. Even a small storm can disrupt the meticulous choreography of flights from coast to coast. Now, imagine violent weather blanketing the entire country. That, in a nutshell, is what the U.S. aviation system faced on Sept. 11 after officials ordered all planes to land. Never before had the air traffic system responded to so many problems occurring simultaneously. For individual air traffic controllers, the work was chaotic and intense but straightforward: Pick a new route for each flight. Radio instructions to turn. Hold traffic to keep airways from overcrowding. But collectively, landing nearly 4,500 planes was a massive undertaking and a historic achievement. It required intense cooperation, swift decision-making and the unflinching work of thousands of people. Across the nation, controllers searched for alternate airports to land large jets even as their traumatized colleagues streamed back from break rooms after watching the attacks on TV. A bit of luck helped, too. The weather across the country was excellent: There were few actual storms to deal with. The attacks occurred before most of the first wave of flights took off on the West Coast. By late afternoon, there would have been as many as 7,500 aircraft aloft. Yet everyone agrees the system, criticized for years for flight delays and computer problems, performed admirably on Sept. 11. On a normal day, about 20 aircraft each hour are rerouted to new destinations because of emergencies or bad weather. On Sept. 11, controllers rerouted more than 1,100 flights in the first 15 minutes after the order to land the fleet was issued at 9:45 a.m. — more than one every second. In all, about 3,300 commercial and 1,200 private planes were ordered to land by U.S. and Canadian authorities that day. Almost 75% of those planes landed within just 60 minutes of the 9:45 order. Canadian controllers and airport managers cleared space in small airports north of the U.S. border for 252 jets arriving from Europe and Asia. During the morning, each part of the nation required its own battle plan: · New York air traffic officials shut down hundreds of miles of airspace almost immediately after the second hijacked jet struck the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m. · In several air traffic facilities — including Boston, where two of the hijacked jets had taken off — controllers feared their own lives were in danger and evacuated.