Never Forget

It was six in the morning, and I was sitting at the dining room table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. The day before I had come down from the mountains with my horses, riding one and leading the other two as pack horses. It was deer season, and I had come home empty handed as usual.

The telephone seemed unusually loud that early, and before I could say hello, my buddy Gremlin’s voice said, “Are you watching the television?”

“No, why?”

“Turn it on.”

“What channel?”

“It doesn’t matter,” then he hung up.

Taking my coffee to the living room I grabbed the remote and pushed the red button and the whole world changed.

It was September 11, 2001.

The television screen showed a building on fire, it was the World Trade Center. There was speculation an airplane that hit it, but no one knew what size airplane it had been, but it was a big fire.

That speculation ended when out of the side of the screen a large dark airliner swooped into the picture and smashed into the other tower in an enormous ball of flame and debris spewing out the opposite side.

I don’t know how long I sat there with my mouth hanging open before I realized my coffee was cold.

Facts came dribbling in. The Pentagon had also been hit. Two of the planes used in the attack were American Airlines. That hit me hard. Who were the crews? Were they people I knew? What bases were they out of?

I had flown past the World Trade Center towers dozens of times; you couldn’t look at the city without seeing them. I’d been to the top of tower two on the observation deck. Now they were gone, it didn’t seem possible.

It became even more obvious that the country was under attack when after the Pentagon, there was another crash of an airliner in Pennsylvania. The air traffic controllers heard fighting in the cockpit.

I turned on the VCR and slid a new tape in and set it for an eight-hour recording cycle. No matter which station I tuned in to, the news was all the same. The phone started ringing off the hook, which lasted all day. I must have gotten a call from everyone I knew that day, wanting to know if I was working and was I safe. Ironically, I was on vacation all that week. The next day I saved the front page of the Arizona Republic with its headline and photos..

I was supposed to go back to work on the Los Angeles to London run in a few days, but now the skies were shut down, no one knew what was going on and rumors were rampant. Later I heard all kinds of dramatic stories from pilots and flight attendants who were working that day and after having their flight cancelled, having some very agitated Middle-Eastern men get off the airplane glaring at them, some threatening, “You have been very lucky today.”

As the details came out, after checking my logbooks, I didn’t know the crews, but found that I had flown the very same airplanes that were hijacked that day. Also, flight 77 that hit the Pentagon was a Dulles to LAX non-stop. I was based in Los Angeles and had flown that same flight many times. Not only as First-Officer on the 757, but also as Captain on the 737.

The United States airspace was now shut down, there were no flights anywhere by anyone except the military. I wouldn’t be going back to work any time soon.

Once again, I had been lucky, while someone else was not. I was home and safe while my coworkers died. Others, I heard later, had stories of having to divert into small airports, or big hubs, whichever was the closest available. It was chaos. They were stranded along with their passengers. The lucky ones got to rent cars and drive home, sometimes across the country.

Some were out of the country, in Europe, South America, Japan, all over. The small town of Gander, Newfoundland was temporary home to thirty-six wide-body airliners and almost seven thousand people.

For every flight crew’s story about being stranded, there are a hundred passenger stories. All over the country, all over the world. Sometimes in expensive vacation spots.

During this time of hatred and murder, it was also a time of people coming together and helping each other. It was the worst, and it was the best of times.

Immediately there was talk of arming pilots so they would never be helpless victims again. Late night comedians foolishly made jokes about it. The president was against it, but Congress was for it. The program later came to pass and is active today.

Within a few months someone decided that pilots and flight attendants should be fingerprinted, and background checked by the FBI. I thought it was a waste of time and money, and with my background, I held my breath for months, not knowing how much they might find out about my past. But I worried for nothing and never heard a word about it.

We are coming up on the twenty-third anniversary of that terrible day, and it still seems like yesterday. The day the world changed, when innocence was lost. When we woke up to the fact that people out there hate us. Since then, because of the resulting ‘War on Terror,’ many more people have died than on that day, and it looks like it will not get better anytime soon.

As for me, I still try to remember the people lost that day, who were just trying to live their lives, and didn’t hate anybody.