After two planes hit the World Trade Center, another the Pentagon and a third crashed into a Pennsylvania field, federal authorities ordered all planes in flight to land, wherever they could. Air traffic controllers at sleepy Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport were unknowingly about to enter the eye of the storm.

Within hours, at least six flights had to land at Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport. One of the first diverted flights arrived at 10:30 a.m. It was an American Eagle jet with 28 people aboard en route from JFK Airport, New York, to Cleveland Municipal Airport. A Continental Airlines flight carrying more than 200 passengers and bound from Newark, N.J. to Denver also landed at the airport along with a TWA flight from Boston to St. Louis. The airport had been notified to accommodate unexpected flights.

Tom Nolan, airport manager, said the airport was used to receiving two or three planes on the ground at once, not six.

"We have several hundred operations of different types of air crafts and we've had wide body planes, but it's unusual to have six large jet liners all landing at once. It's difficult for any airport especially with an element of terror there. It was a huge challenge, but we did fine and it worked," Nolan said.

Air traffic controllers guide pilots and watch over planes traveling through the airport's airspace. They keep an organized flow of aircraft in and out of the airport while using radar and visual observations to monitor safe distances between planes.

In an effort to acknowledge the role air traffic controllers played a year ago, The Herald attempted to interview several controllers particularly at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport. Our requests were turned down by the Federal Aviation Administration, the government agency primary responsibility for the safety of civil aviation.

Elizabeth Cory, Deputy of Federal Aviation Administration Public Affairs said as a result of an ongoing FBI probe of the attacks, there weren't going to be any interviews with any air traffic controllers.

"We have to be very careful about what is said and so we're not doing anything at this time outside of the events that we have already done," she said.

"If it's any comfort I feel like a broken record. We've been turning them down left and right. We even turned down the History Channel, so you're not alone."

She said the FAA's events were held several weeks ago -- in Washington D.C., Cleveland, Boston and New York -- where they discussed Sept. 11 issues.