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.

"Flight Attendants Prepare for Arrival and Crosscheck"

An aft door on an Airbus A-319.  The yellow lever with the red cloth "tail" on it is where you would "arm" and "disarm" the emergency slide on this door.

Have you ever been on a plane and upon arrival at the gate heard a flight attendant announce over the public address system, "Flight attendants please prepare for arrival and crosscheck," and wonder to yourself, "What in the hell is a crosscheck, and why are flight crews so obsessed with them?"

Is a "crosscheck" violent?  Does it hurt?  What happens if you don't "crosscheck?"  All good questions.  You've come to the right place.

Upon arrival at the gate, if you were the "A," or Senior flight attendant, the first thing you would do is make the arrival and crosscheck announcement to the rest of the cabin crew, and then disarm the forward door, deactivating the emergency slide, on the left, front side of the plane (1L).  You would then turn around to the door on the other side of the aircraft, the 1R door, and confirm the other flight attendant had disarmed the slide on that door.  You would then both say to each other, "your door is crosschecked."  You are double-checking that the emergency slides on each door have been disengaged and can not accidentally deploy while the airplane is parked at the gate.

Then you would stay at the door and wait for the agent to open the door.  We were trained NEVER to open an Airbus door ourselves from the inside, unless in an emergency, because if the emergency slide wasn't deactivated it could rapidly deploy out onto the jetway, likely injuring the gate agent.  On most newer aircraft, if the door is first opened from the outside by an agent, the slide will be deactivated. 

Despite this simple procedure and copious training, inadvertent slide deployments occurred several times a month. 

(I only witnessed one slide deployment - when a cabin cleaning person opened a door they weren't authorized to open without disarming the slide.  The whole plane shook as if we were experiencing an earthquake.)

This is what could happen if you didn't "cross-check."

Any aircraft incurring an inadvertent - that is, non-emergency - slide deployment is unable to fly until the deployed slide has been removed and replaced.  If you're in a large maintenance hub, which in my case meant Pittsburgh, Philadelphia or Charlotte, this could often be accomplished in a couple of hours.  This still meant the flight was most likely canceled.

If a deployment occurred at an outlying, smaller station such as Albany, Norfolk, Kansas City or Sacramento - it meant you were, and this is a highly technical aviation term, "totally screwed."  Your long overnight at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, probably the reason you took the damn trip in the first place, just turned into a short overnight at the Best Western Airport Inn in Albany, New York.

As Flight Attendants, we were always told by management that an inadvertent slide deployment costs the company, on average, $40,000.  That included the cost of replacing the slide and accommodating passengers on the flight that canceled.

The flight attendant found responsible for the slide deployment - the flight attendant who did NOT "crosscheck" and make sure their assigned door was unarmed upon arrival - would be required to fly down to Charlotte, North Carolina and attend a two day refresher course before they could return to active duty.  Not fun.

If my memory serves, my airline averaged two slide deployments per month when I was there - a figure that could, and did, skyrocket in the first six months to a year after the introduction of a new type of aircraft.

That's a "crosscheck" in the airline business.

Now in ice hockey, a crosscheck is a two-armed horizontal push of your stick into an opponent's body.  This crosscheck often does hurt and results in a two minute minor penalty.  For this, you must go to the penalty box for two minutes and feel shame.  But it will not result in an unscheduled overnight in Albany, unless you're playing the River Rats of the AHL.

On behalf of this entire San Jose based flight crew, we'd like to thank you for joining us today.  If you're future plans once again call for reading material, we do hope you'll come back and catch our smile.

Flight attendants please prepare for the end of this blog post...and crosscheck.

Flying Eyes and Traveling Bears

When you step on an airplane and settle into your seat, you are probably unaware that much of what's being loading into the belly of the plane right beneath your feet isn't bags or items checked by fellow passengers on your flight. 

It's Air Cargo:  items that need to be shipped quickly from one destination to another.  I've seen flowers leaving Seattle, Salmon from Bellingham, boxes and boxes of computers being loaded in San Francisco, and voluminous amounts of U.S. Mail at virtually every destination in the country.  An airline's ability to fill its cargo bins on every flight can make a huge difference in its bottom line.

But there are occasionally a few other items "shipped" in the cabin that you never see.

One item that I would see as a flight attendant on a regular basis in the cabin is something you would probably never guess:  human body parts.  Primarily eyes.  The gate agent would come down just prior to boarding with a small cooler, usually solidly sealed with duct tape, and accompanying paperwork.  The paperwork would have details of where the item had started and who would pick it up at its final destination.  An airline employee was responsible for it at all times, signing the paperwork with their name and employee number.

On flights without food service, we would usually just place the cooler in a secure spot in an empty compartment in the galley or in the valet closet.  If the flight had a meal service and the galley was full, we would often place it under the extra pilot jumpseat in the cockpit.

When the flight arrived at the gate, the "A," or "Senior," flight attendant would usually disarm the emergency slide on their door (1L) and wait for the agent to open it from the outside.  As the agent opened the door, the first words out of their mouth would always be, "any specials?," meaning any passengers requiring special assistance.  They would have been notified about the eyes, but we would remind them, and they would sign the paperwork and take the cooler before anyone stepped off the plane.

The other item we used to see being transported in a similar, yet unofficial, fashion was what I called the "traveling bears."  They reached the height of their popularity in the 1990's.  A teacher of an elementary school class, usually in an attempt to bring home the idea of U.S. geography, would bring in a medium-sized stuffed animal, usually a bear, and add a small backpack or fanny pack that would contain a small notebook and a sheet of paper, often laminated, introducing the bear, maybe giving his/her name if the class gave one, and giving instructions on how to return the bear.

The instructions asked the crews to travel with the bear to as many different places as possible, take pictures,  and place them back in the bear's pack, if possible, and write anything about the bear's travels in the notebook.  The bears would typically travel for a couple of weeks and then be returned to a particularly city on a given date.  Some of these bears traveled so widely that they'd put Rick Steves to shame.

When you had one of these bears onboard, the crew would usually look through its backpack during a break to see where the bear had been.  Some crews would take pictures of the bears at famous landmarks and leave copies of them in the bear's backpack.  I'd see pictures of bears in front of, or on top of, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State building, the White House, the Trevi Fountain, Big Ben, the Golden Gate bridge or sitting at sporting events or taking in Broadway shows, and strapped into a seat in First Class with a cocktail.  These bears lived life in the fast lane.

I never took a bear on an overnight, but plenty of crews did.  I would write about their travels in their notebooks.  The bears were deemed a security risk after 9/11 and we never saw them again.  I would have loved to have been in one of those classes when the kids got their traveling bears back, and the teachers pulled out the stack of pictures and postcards from around the world, recording the bear's adventures over the past month.  I hope it inspired some of those kids to travel and see the world themselves.

Anytime one crew would take over a flight with through passengers (let's say my crew is waiting on the jetway in Philadelphia for a plane arriving from Boston, and we are working the same flight through to its final destination in San Francisco) continuing to another destination, the Senior or "A" flight attendants would have a short, informal briefing giving the incoming crew any information they needed to know about the plane or continuing passengers.  A typical conversation would go something like this:

"Hey guys!  You have quite a few thrus (passengers continuing on the same flight to the next destination), 2 chairs (passengers requesting a wheel chair to exit the plane), a UNAC (an unaccompanied minor - a child or children traveling without an adult), eyes in the cockpit and a bear in the forward galley.  Oh, yeah, and your aft coffee maker is inop (inoperative - broken).  Make sure they dump the biffys (empty the lavatories - you never wanted to push back on a long flight if the lavs hadn't been properly serviced).  Have a good flight!"

A third and final cargo item that I'd see in the cabin as a flight attendant only occurred on flights between Buffalo, New York and Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  And it had an incredible smell.

Our "short" overnight (the hotel we used on layovers shorter than 14 hours) hotel in Buffalo, New York was the famous, or infamous, Airways Hotel.

The old Airways hotel in Buffalo, New York.

The place was retro before it was built.  The rooms were small, the beds and sheets uncomfortable, the carpets filthy and the walls paper thin, but the staff was very accommodating to airline crews, something all crew members appreciate.

But the real attraction was the Irish pub, the Shannon, conveniently located on the first floor, right off the lobby.  And the meal everyone ate at the pub in the Airways was an order (or two) of their famous Buffalo wings.  I mean, crews just went crazy for them.  Some people would even admit to me they had bid the trip just for the overnight in Buffalo and the wings.  I've been a vegetarian for thirty years, so I never tried them.  But everyone else - and I mean everyone - couldn't get enough of them.

And that included airline employees, mostly guys working on the ramp, who had never even been to Buffalo.  They would call up the Airways Hotel from their break room at the airport in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, and place a large order of their coveted wings.  They would charge it to a credit card and tell them what flight to ship it on.

Then a few minutes before departure from Buffalo, some delivery guy from the Airways hotel would walk down the jetway to the front door of the plane with a large, brown bag of steaming buffalo wings from Buffalo.  We would stow them in an empty galley compartment, and then pass them along to a ramper or mechanic meeting the flight in PIT or PHL.  I saw this happen dozens of times.  I think this may have stopped after 9/11 as well, although I'd find it hard to believe that the Airways even survived into the 21st century.

I would love to stay around and chat, but I gotta' fly.  In this biz, you aren't making any money on the ground.