On 9/11/01, I was flying cross country
On 9/11/01, I was flying cross country from Buffalo, NY to San Diego, CA.
We hopped to Chicago in the early morn, then flew out of Chicago’s O’Hare airport towards San Diego mid morning. We had just reached cruising altitude, and crossed the Mississippi, when the pilot came on. “Ladies and Gentlemen…uh…we’ve…uh…we’re going to turn the plane around and …uh…return to O’Hare. There are no…uh…technical problems with the plane.â€
I looked at my wife, who was holding our 6 month old on her lap. “That’s weird.†The content didn’t freak me out so much as the delivery—pilots are usually the smoothest talkers around, next to lounge lizards, and the distracted, hesitant tone he took was a little unnerving.
A few minutes passed in silence as the plane turned, but as I looked out the window, I could see that, instead of heading back east to O’Hare, we were now heading south along the Mississippi. The pilot came on again: “Ladies and Gentlemen, we…have…just been informed that ALL U.S. domestic flights…have been asked to land. This is …just a…uh…precaution…we have no…reason…to believe our flight is in danger…â€
At this point we still didn’t know what was going on or why the planes had been grounded. A few minutes later, the pilot returned, more composed this time, but with more unsettling news. “Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re now en route to St. Louis. O’Hare is full.â€
We sat on the tarmac, with a crabby 6 month old, for over an hour while we waited for a gate to be free. No-one told us anything about what was going on. It was only by piecing together overheard cellphone conversations that we found out that someone had “accidentally†flown a plane into the World Trade Center. By the time we found out about the second one, it was clear that it was no accident. The St. Louis airport was pandemonium. People were running everywhere trying to get refunds, or at least hotels (after waiting in line for a half hour for a phone, and 12 calls to hotels, I found one). Meanwhile the police were clearing the airport for security reasons. People gathered around the closed and gated food courts, watching the TVs that were showing footage of the twin towers interspersed with pictures of Osama bin Laden.
The most surreal thing was, in the middle of all this panic, our little 6 month old was now babbling happily, as my wife, tears in her eyes, pushed her stroller down to a van, overpacked with people, waiting to take us to our hotel. “It’s a national emergency—you’ll have to wait,†the driver told us as she drove off. We turned around to see National Guard jets landing on the runway.
We ended up, through great perseverance, finding one of the last rental cars available, and we drove back across rural Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania on our way back to upstate NY. I worried about my wife’s safety –she’s second generation Indian-American, and a number of her relatives and family friends got harassed and threatened after 9/11—but everyone we met along the way just seemed to be in shock. Aside from a screaming 6 month old who was NOT happy about being in a car for 8 hours a day, our trip home was anticlimactic.
My boss called me into his office the day I got back into work, to see if I was ok, and to get my perspective on the whole thing, since I was the only “liberal†on the team. I said, “I can’t deny there’s a part of me wants blood. But if we don’t figure out why they did this, we’ll never find a lasting solution.â€
And that’s a big part of why I started this site. To hold our elected officials– our employees—accountable. So this never happens again, and more importantly, we take away the core reasons for it happening. Why are we so fired up about the misinformation in “The Path to 9/11â€? Not just because it’s conservative fan fiction being touted as “The Official True Storyâ€. But because anything that takes our eyes off the ball is at best irresponsible, and at worst, an aid to terrorists everywhere. My little girl, babbling in that St. Louis airport, deserves better.
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Ok, here’s a crazy 9/11 story. I’m not sure how true this is just because it’s so implausible, but bear with me…
On 9/11 I was still a junior in college. One of my good friends was from Long Island and one of his friends from there was working as a courier. Anyway, on that fateful day, the courier was to deliver a package to the trade towers. When the morning arrived, he got up and discovered somebody had stolen his car. Flustered he grabbed the keys to his mom’s car and drove to the towers. He was on the phone reporting the stolen car when he was walking into the tower, however in his flustered state, he neglected to actually carry his cargo with him. Pissed off he returned to the car to collect the package, turned around and…
BAM!
Had he shaved a second off his day by not having his car stolen or being pissed and forgetting to carry the package…?
I’ve actually heard a number of stories like that. I don’t know if it’s divine providence or the fact that there’s SO MANY friggin people living and working in NYC, that statistically, something like that could happen. I’ve heard more sad stories about how so & so wasn’t supposed to BE in work at the TT that day, but had an urgent meeting, etc…
My favorite 911 good luck stories:
1) The guy who decided that the day was so beautiful he was going to “call in sick.” (Probably more than one of these.)
2) The guy who, on a whim, stopped to get doughnuts and come into the office a little late.
On the other hand, there’s also stories of people like:
1) The temporary worker just starting his second day at the WTC.
2) The deliveryman who just happened to be in the WTC when the planes hit.
3) The folks in Windows on the World who normally worked a later shift but had to set up for a special event/swapped shifts.
4) The people who didn’t normally work in the WTC who had meetings there. (A fair number of these.)
Divine providence aside, consider that many of the people who “fortuitiously” got to work early or were just in the building by chance either didn’t live to tell their story or didn’t think it worth reporting if they did survive. Nobody’s going to say, “You’ll never believe how easy my commute was this morning before the planes hit!”