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Flight 3407: Air Traffic Controller Recalls Fateful Night

Larry Pogorzola is now retired from his job as an air traffic controller. But his voice on a night ten years ago, is forever linked to a tragedy.

CLARENCE, N.Y. — He came to a memorial dedication at the Clarence Town Library on Tuesday, the 10th anniversary of the crash of Continental Flight 3407 which killed 50 adults and an unborn child.

He was not clad in red, like many of the others honoring those lost.

He came, he said, to get to know the names and see the faces.

His face would be unknown to most.

But his voice is forever linked to their tragedy.

Now retired, Larry Pogorzala was the air traffic controller on duty in the tower at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport at the time of the crash.

His voice has been heard by thousands all over the world who have listened to the air traffic control broadcast of the events surrounding that tragic night.

Pogorzala can be heard repeatedly calling out to Flight 3407 after it disappeared from radar and stopped communicating minutes before its scheduled arrival.

His voice, though calm, has a heightened sense of urgency when he is heard to say...

"You need to talk to somebody at least five miles northeast…possibly Clarence that area right there possibly Akron area. Either state police, sheriff’s department… you need to find if anything is on the ground. This aircraft was five miles out and all of a sudden we have no response from that aircraft.”

“I was trying to call the police, I was trying to call my manager, I'm trying to talk to Cleveland Center and I look across the field and I see the fire rescue door open up," Pogorzala recalled.

At that moment all he knew definitively was that the plane was not communicating…he could not know for certain it had crashed. But he had his suspicions that a tragedy had occurred.

“For one thing, we were not getting any ELT, which is the emergency device that's on the aircraft, which is a little transmitter that didn't go off. There was no response…and nothing on radar.”

Amid the growing concern at the airport, and the chaos erupting five miles to the north in Clarence Center, Pogorzala had to remain calm, as he still had a job to do.

“We still had to get airplanes off the ground,” he said, remembering that several other inbound flights were approaching the airport and others were getting ready to depart.

Though his shift ended at midnight, less than two hours after the crash, it would be another five hours before he left.

“We had to stay we had to listen to tapes," he recalled. There's a lot of stuff… gathering of information…I got home at about 5 o'clock.

Then he still had to internally process the realization of what had happened.

“Yeah…that's the sucky part,” he said. “But you had to do it.”

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