Robin Hordon – Former FAA Air Traffic Controller at the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center, located in Nashua, NH, 1970 - 1981. Former Certified Commercial Pilot for light aircraft holding multiple category ratings. Former Certified Flight Instructor and Certified Ground Instructor. After leaving the FAA, he had a 12-year career in the field of comedy ending up as artistic coordinator for "Catch A Rising Star" in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA. In that capacity, he chose to support comic talent that spoke truth to power, truth to hatred, truth to racism, truth to sexism, truth to xenophobia, and truth to militarism, not knowing where the young talent would go, but knowing that they would say something somewhere for the good of the country and for the good of the world. When Air America Radio launched in 2004, a "Catch" vet was on air or writing for four of the five shows making up the daytime schedule. Currently he lives in Kingston, WA, where he continues his four decades of activism on behalf of peace and justice in the world.
Statement to this website 4/10/07: "I was an FAA Air Traffic Controller from 1970 - 1981. In 1981, I was one of 15,000 FAA air traffic controllers who went on strike and one of the 12,000 fired for going on strike, a strike that was primarily based on our complaints about safety and working conditions within the FAA, which are still seen today.
During my time as an Air Traffic Controller, I worked at the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center in Nashua, NH, and I was certified in the air traffic sector where American Airlines Flight 11 became an "IN-FLIGHT-EMERGENCY" before being declared a "hijack" on 9/11.
In my 11-year FAA career, I worked in the development of "procedures and airspace design", including some military operations, and was part of the team which trained other Air Traffic Controllers and transitioned the FAA from its old broadband radar and simple flight data processors into the RDP (Radar Data Processing) and computerized radar displays.
I was a Facility Training Instructor and was certified to create transcripts from audio tapes, to interpret radar data in tracking aircraft from computer files, and to analyze computer tracking data, all of which would combine to "tell the story" of air traffic incidents. I was also the main creator of the Boston Center Profile Descent and Metering Program for Boston Logan airport.
And while "on the boards", I personally worked one commercial airliner hijacking and assisted on another.
I received several Letters of Commendation for my work, including one where my piloting experience was instrumental in saving the lives of two people on board an aircraft suffering an "IN-FLIGHT EMERGENCY" in which the aircraft had a total loss of electrical power while in the clouds. Our air traffic controller team ordered the scrambling of suitable military aircraft and directed the intercept which successfully led the helpless and lost aircraft down to a safe landing in "socked in" weather conditions.
Several times each year, practice exercises were conducted on how to handle high speed scrambles and group departures called "flushes" all in conjunction with military exercises and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). Out of Otis Air Force Base alone, twenty to thirty jet fighters would scramble and then later return.
In addition to my career as an Air Traffic Controller, I have a great deal of other experience in aviation. I was a Certified Commercial Pilot and accumulated 1600 hours total time in light aircraft; qualified in Single-Engine Land, Multi-Engine Land, Single-Engine Sea, and Glider. I was also a Certified Flight Instructor and Certified Ground Instructor. And prior to my becoming an Air Traffic Controller, I passed the Flight Engineer Basic exam focused on the Boeing 727 and accumulated over 2000 hours of aircraft maintenance, repair and rebuilding time.
I knew within hours of the attacks on 9/11/2001 that it was an inside job. Based on my 11-year experience as an FAA Air Traffic Controller in the busy Northeast corridor, including hundreds of hours of training, briefings, air refuelings, low altitude bombing drills, being part of huge military exercises, daily military training exercises, interacting on a routine basis directly with NORAD radar personnel, and based on my own direct experience dealing with in-flight emergency situations, including two instances of hijacked commercial airliners, I state unequivocally; There is absolutely no way that four large commercial airliners could have flown around off course for 30 to 60 minutes on 9/11 without being intercepted and shot completely out of the sky by our jet fighters unless very highly placed people in our government and our military wanted it to happen.
It is important for people to understand that scrambling jet fighters to intercept aircraft showing the signs of experiencing “IN-FLIGHT EMERGENCIES” such as going off course without authorization, losing a transponder signal and/or losing radio contact is a common and routine task executed jointly between the FAA and NORAD controllers. The entire “national defense-first responder” intercept system has many highly-trained civilian and military personnel who are committed and well-trained to this task. FAA and NORAD continuously monitor our skies and fighter planes and pilots are on the ready 24/7 to handle these situations. Jet fighters typically intercept any suspect plane over the United States within 10 - 15 minutes of notification of a problem.
This type of "immediate, high speed, high priority and emergency" scramble had been happening regularly approximately 75 - 150 times per year for ten years. In the same ten years, there were ZERO "low speed, delayed reaction, and low priority" hijacking scrambles reported, which means that the only time interceptors were ever scrambled for ten years before 9/11, they were using the high speed immediate scrambles. The system was well tuned and ready before June 2001. However, the "emergency scramble" is NOT what was used on 9/11/2001...it was the "laissez fair" scramble for a hijacking that had to get Pentagon approval before departing…and there was none forthcoming.
I have the deepest and most sincere respect and sadness at the loss of so many lives on 9/11. With no disrespect towards the surviving family members still feeling the horrors surrounding the attacks on 9/11, I see the events of September 11th as being a symptom of a far bigger problem. A problem that Dwight David Eisenhower had brought to our attention as he left office in the 1950's where he warned this country about two significant elements of our economy looming above us: The Military Industrial Complex, and the Military Industrial Congress. 9/11 served the goals of both of those elements but our government and military failed to serve and protect its citizens.
In my fourth decade within the Peace Movement and now the first decade in the 9/11 Truth Movement, I can now clearly see that General Eisenhower was absolutely correct and that the military-corporation-political-economical cabal has indeed gone out of control.
believe that 9/11 was what is known as a "False Flag Operation" in which a country inflicts casualties upon itself, and then blames it on an enemy that they want to go to war against. It is one more instance in the United States’ long history of using "False Flag Operations" and blatant propaganda to ramp-up hostile emotions towards an enemy in a population otherwise resistant to going to war. The destruction of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor, which led to the Spanish-American War, allowing the attack on Pearl Harbor to occur, the declassified 1960's plan Operation Northwoods, which was going to be used as a pretext for going to war with Cuba, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which justified the war in Viet Nam, the planted story about babies being taken from incubators and killed by Iraqi soldiers to help justify the first Gulf War, and now, the attacks on 9/11/2001 being used to justify the current war in Iraq, were all used to manipulate the "warring emotions" within U.S. citizens so that they would come to support this country going to war against this "new enemy". And in all of these wars, everyone in this decadent cabal shares in the financial profits associated with war, and, of course, share in none of the pain and deaths associated with war. Bob Dylan says it best in his unheralded, yet seminal song "Masters of War".
Four decades of experiencing the John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam lies, the Watergate saga, the Iran-Contra scandals, stolen elections and the conglomerization and ensuing control of the mainstream media, instructed me that this was going to be a long battle to uncover the truth about who was behind the attacks on 9/11/2001. That I can show how Rumsfeld's Military reshaped interceptor protocols so that 9/11 could happen without the airliners being shot from the sky, is but a small bit of evidence that is flooding past the Bush regime, the U.S. Military and the mainstream media’s best efforts to continue the cover-up of their callous and deathly malfeasances.