9/11

My work/flying pocket calendar from September, 2001.

I wish now, for the sake of this blog and your reading entertainment, that I had some thrilling, exciting, heart-wrenching tale of my flying life on the road the morning of the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.

For months and months after the attacks, I would hear tales from my fellow flight attendants about what they endured during 9/11.  The fear, isolation, distance between them and their loved ones, the boredom of sitting in a hotel room day after day with little to do, and no control over when and where they would leave.  Every airport in the country was closed.  Every airplane grounded - unless you were a member of the Saudi royal family.  No one seemed to know for how long.

I heard these stories from my flying friends, their impatience and frustration at the inability of anyone in charge to make a decision, forced to finally make decisions on their own, who would eventually rent cars and drive cross-country to return to the safety of their homes and family.

I have no such story.  Through the sheer luck of my schedule,  I arrived home about midnight on Monday, September 10th.  I got home six hours before the 9/11 attacks. 

I used to keep a little pocket calendar, shown in the picture above, of my flying.  If you can make out my chicken scratch, you may see that I played hockey on Wednesday, September 5th (in Santa Rosa) and then flew back to Philadelphia the following afternoon on my own time.  I paid $40 to stay at the airport Days Inn that night.  The following morning, Friday, September 7th, I started a four day trip in Philadelphia and wound up in Baltimore for the night.  The second day I worked out to San Francisco - where I can only assume I drove home on my overnight, which I normally did on any long SFO overnight - and headed back East the following day, Sunday, finishing day three in Providence, Rhode Island.

I called crew scheduling the next morning to put in a list of the few two day trips that I was still legal to work.  I flew up and down the East Coast that Monday the 10th - the day before 9/11 - finishing up in Philadelphia.  I called back in to crew scheduling and discovered I didn't get a trip for the next day, so I boarded the last flight of the night home to San Francisco.  That flight usually arrived in SFO around 9:30 p.m., and after I got off the plane, made my way to my car in the employee lot and drove the 90 miles north to Santa Rosa, probably stopping at the A&W drive-in in San Rafael for a late night veggie burger, I usually walked in the door back home in Santa Rosa about midnight.

The morning after returning home from a long stretch of flying, I would be completely exhausted.  My wife had attached velcro strips around our curtains that fastened to the wall - holding the curtains in place and making our room completely black - so I could catch up on my sleep.

My wife and my boys - both boys then two months shy of their seventh birthdays - would get up around 7:30 a.m., get dressed and eat some breakfast, come in to my room and give me some hugs, and then head out to school.

My precious golden retriever pup, Maggie, a year older than the boys, and starting to show her age with bits of gray around her eyes and nose, would realize that an early morning trip to the dog park was not in the cards, and she would usually move from her place at the bottom of the bed and snuggle her back up against mine, where we would both try and catch up on our sleep until noon.  That was the usual routine the morning after I returned from a long trip.  9/11, of course, was different.

The first plane hit the World Trade Center about 5:45 a.m. California time.  Our phone started to ring just before six a.m., my wife's friend asking if I was home and had seen the news.  I got up, still weary after a long weekend of flying and  a short night of five hours of sleep, threw on a robe,  moved to the couch, and turned on CNN.

I knew a B-25 Bomber had once flown into the Empire State building during World War II.  That was years ago on a foggy night.  This was a blue sky, unlimited visibility, morning in New York City.  I knew that Middle Eastern terrorists had tried to blow up the World Trade Center with a truck bomb in the early 1990's, but didn't quite connect the dots immediately.  It was just weird at that point.  I was tired. 

The crash site of United Airlines flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa.

A second plane hit the second tower a few minutes after six a.m. California time, and it quickly dawned on every American that we were under attack - this was another Pearl Harbor.  Another day that would live in infamy.  Our phone now started to ring off the hook.  My wife answered most of the calls and assured everyone that I was safe at home, while I sat transfixed on the news reports, switching back and forth relentlessly from station to station, trying in vain to get a clearer picture of what was happening.  I was relieved when it became apparent that no planes from my airline were involved.

While I was not flying during the 9/11 attacks and didn't know anyone who lost their lives, it still had a huge impact on my life as a flight attendant.  2001 was my best earnings year as a flight attendant, and the 9/11 attacks set off a wave of layoffs, schedule cutbacks, bankruptcies and concessions that would eventually lead to my taking a voluntary separation package - a buyout - in late 2006, ending my career in the sky.

The Federal government immediately ramped up airport security to unprecedented levels.  Within a few months, we would all be removing our shoes, belts and shampoo bottles just to step on an airplane.  Or maybe not.  It seemed to vary every time.  You had no idea how much time to allow to get through the security checkpoint and what to expect once you got there.  A traveler no longer saved time by flying distances shorter than 350 miles.

The disgust and indignity that airline crew members felt toward the F.A.A. and the Federal government and its huge, growing security apparatus was deep.  They had failed to protect us on 9/11, and now every security checkpoint seemed to be manned by some clueless young kid with an attitude - or worse, a foreigner - with little or no previous security or aviation experience, who was now telling pilots with 20 - 30 years of flying experience to take their shoes off and stop asking questions.  Pilots don't take kindly to others telling them what to do.  Any one of these pilots - who resented being treated at security checkpoints as if they were the enemy - could take down any airliner they wanted any day of the week: with their bare hands.  It didn't go over well.

The largest single difference I saw as a flight attendant in the post 9/11 security was with the Federal Air Marshal (or F.A.M.'s, as we called them) program.  In my 13 years of flying prior to the 9/11 attacks, I NEVER had a working Federal Air Marshal on one of my flights.  Never.  They were believed to number less than a hundred, mostly working international flights.

Once the Air Marshal program was revved up and running at full capacity - with thousands of law enforcement officers transferring over from dozens of other agencies - it was rare that a week went by that I didn't have F.A.M.'s on a flight.  Based on the presence of F.A.M.'s I witnessed soon after the 9/11 attacks, I would say that had the program been in place at that level on the day of the attacks, I would have been surprised if F.A.M.'s had not been present on at least one of the four planes that were hijacked (I've been told that the F.A.M. staffing has been drastically reduced in the past few years).

As my father, a longtime Defense Department civilian employee loved to say, "The Government never tries to fight the next war - they always fight the last war, better."

America returned to flying after a few weeks.  Word quickly spread among airline crew members that we could show up at Ground Zero, show our airline employee I.D.'s and get an "insider's" tour of the site given only to family members, dignitaries and airline employees.  On every New York overnight I had in 2002, someone in the crew made their way downtown and took the tour.  They all said it was a sobering, powerful experience.  I just couldn't do it.  I didn't see the point.  Just flying into New York and seeing the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center site in the Fall of 2001 was enough.  I didn't need to see more.

I couldn't help thinking of the 9/11 hijackers, many of them caught on surveillance videos as they went through security checkpoints at airports around the country that morning, each time I would start my morning at one of the same cities they did:  Boston, Washington, Newark and Portland, Maine.  As we as airline crew members would experience the normal security harassment each working morning at each of these security checkpoints, that had failed to detain the hijackers, we all felt like patting the security personnel on their backs as we passed.

"Way to go, boys.  Nice work.  Well done."

We all knew airport security was just a big show.

I know this week, for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, we will all be bombarded by stories and images from that fateful day.  Through all the news reports, documentaries, movies and books, and government reports, I'm still not sure we, the American public, have been told as much as possible about the attacks.  New information will continue to trickle out in the coming years, but some things we will never know.