Template:(8:35 a.m.) September 11, 2001: Boston Center Military Liaison

(8:35 a.m.) September 11, 2001: Boston Center Military Liaison Makes His First Call to NEADS, Though 9/11 Commission Does Not Mention It
Colin Scoggins, the military liaison at Boston Center, claims he makes his first call to NEADS regarding Flight 11. He later recalls that he informs NEADS that the aircraft is “20 [miles] south of Albany, heading south at a high rate of speed, 600 knots.” Flight 11 was over Albany at 8:26.

At such a high speed, it would have reached 20 miles south of there around 8:28. However, Scoggins says he is quite certain he only arrives on the floor at Boston Center at around 8:35. He says that although he’d later tried to write up a chronology of events, he “couldn’t get a timeline that made any sense.” Furthermore, Scoggins claims that even before he’d arrived, Joseph Cooper, a Boston Center air traffic management specialist, had already phoned NEADS about the hijacking. The 9/11 Commission Report makes no mention of either call. It says “the first notification received by the military—at any level—that American 11 had been hijacked” is when Boston Center calls NEADS just before 8:38 a.m..

However, a report by ABC News is more consistent with Scoggins’ claims, indicating that Boston Center contacts NEADS about the hijacking earlier, at around 8:31. (Boston Center also contacts the FAA’s Cape Cod facility at 8:34 and requests that it notify the military about Flight 11 . Apparently around the same time, it tries contacting a military unit at Atlantic City .) Scoggins says he makes “about 40 phone calls to NEADS” in total on this day. NEADS Commander Robert Marr later comments that Scoggins “deserves a lot of credit because he was about the only one that was feeding us information. I don’t know exactly where he got it. But he was feeding us information as much as he could.”