Where were you on 9/11?

 On September 11, 2001, I was teaching Ground School at the McCormick Elementary School US Airways leased as a training facility. It’s probably 10 minutes from the Pittsburgh Airport by car, which is where I was serving in the Reserves as a C-130 Navigator.

By 2001, I had enough seniority to be teaching International Procedures, which covered pretty much anything and everything associated with flying across the Atlantic Ocean to our European destinations. My students were all seasoned pilots, finally having the seniority to hold positions on the lucrative International routes.

My classes started at 0800, and every 50 minutes or so, I’d give a break. At about 0851, we walked out into the hallway for a restroom break and coffee refills. The school had a main entry way with a security guard sitting at a desk, who provided at least the look of deterrence. He would sit at a desk right in the middle of the hall facing the entrance, with a small b&w TV to fill the hours while he was on duty. As we came out, he waived us over and told us a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

By the time we huddled around him, news cameras were starting to pick up the story and we could see smoke coming out of one of the buildings. I don’t think any of us knew what we were looking at. One or two planes had hit tall buildings in NYC before, a B-17 ran into the Empire State Building on a foggy night back in the 40s or 50s, and I’d heard that a Cessna hit a building sometime recently, so I figured it was something like that again…. but it was a clear day…. And then we saw the 2nd airplane hit!

It happened so fast, you didn’t understand what you saw until the replays in slow motion, then you saw the jet. It was crazy: as aviators, you just couldn’t wrap your head around the idea that TWO planes hit these buildings by accident.

At some point I think one of the Supervisors came out of the office and herded us back into classrooms. People were getting paid to be trained, and airline pilots aren’t cheap; we had to at least go through the motions so someone wouldn’t complain to the FAA they weren’t getting the required training they were due (it happened!).

From that point on, there wasn’t much training going on. Guys were on their phones trying to get information. People knew dispatchers and were pinging them for the latest. Then at 0937 a plane hit the Pentagon, and from there on there was no doubt we were being attacked.

Suddenly guys heard from the Dispatch Center that there was a plane headed towards Pittsburgh. Speculation was all over the place. It was going to hit the Airport Control Tower. It was going to crash into the Training Center. None of that made sense. Why even bother with Pittsburgh? And then it did crash, south of the city.  What was next?

By then we were hearing that all flights were being forced to land at the first available airport, and that anyone remaining airborne would be shot down. I’m sure some semblance of that was true, but everyone knew that would be a hard, difficult call to execute: shooting down an airliner? Better be right.

At some point I’m sure I called Laura and checked in. Did she know? How was she? Any word about the kids and schools?  I’m pretty sure every community in Western PA thought Flight 93 (as we found out later) was headed at them or their schools.
We all watched and waited, wondering what was next, and then the unthinkable happened: the second tower at the World Trade Center suddenly imploded, slowly collapsing in on itself and came crumbling down. I think everyone who watched that was completely stunned. It’s still a point of conspiracy theorists today: how could two building that size collapse to basically ash?

The rest of the day is still a blur. We were required to stay and “teach.” There was a cafeteria on-site, so I’m pretty sure we grabbed food and ate in front of the TV just trying to make sense of it all.

I called over to the Squadron to see if they knew anything, but they were just as clueless as the rest of us. All flying was cancelled, and anybody who was out on the road was stuck until it was deemed safe to fly again. But no one knew when that might be. A big question was who or what was on the flights still coming from overseas. As it happened, anyone outside the US had to land before they got to the US, or turn around and head back to Europe. That’s how all the aircraft stacked up in Gander, St. Johns, Stephensville, and Halifax, and ended up staying there for a week or more.

When I got home, I think Laura texted me that she was at Chris & Dave Seaman’s house, a few blocks away from ours in Zelienople. They had just brought home their new adopted daughter Carly. I remember going over to see them and sharing this surreal moment where such happiness at this new addition to their family was overwashed by such a crazy, tragic blow to our nation and psyche.

In the days that followed, the news was 24/7 on the attack. The FBI started figuring out who was who, how it had happened, where they came from, what the plot was, etc. The toll from the attack started to sink in: how many had died, both in the planes and in the buildings, and of course the tragic loss of so many first responders who had rushed to help.

No one seemed to know what the mechanism was for turning flying back on. I kept bugging people on base that we should be up and flying and showing that things were going to go back to normal, and on the next Thursday (about 8 days after the attack), the FAA let us take a pair of planes out for a training ride. It was VERY eerie being pretty much the only ones in the sky.

Almost immediately, Operation Nobel Eagle started. It was basically an all-out defense of the Continental United States. Fighters were up 24 hours a day over New York City and Washington, D.C. There was a thought someone would sneak a dirty bomb into the country, or use chemicals like Sarin gas, so response teams were put on alert all over the country.

In mid October, I flew out to McChord AFB, in Tacoma, Washington, and sat alert for a month to support a quick response decon team; ready to take them any place on the west coast that might be attacked. Between our days on alert, we practiced it a couple times, and it was pretty ugly, but we could have responded fairly quickly if such an attack had happened.

Of course everyone’s world changed after that. Airline travel became a royal pain. At first it shut down, and then slowly returned; by then the various second and third order effects became evident: hotels and restaurants were all effected by the travel industry. Anti-terrorism measures doubled and tripled in pretty much all aspects of our lives. Laws were changed. The Department of Homeland Security was set up, consolidating a host of other departments, with huge reach into every sector of our lives.

Simply put, 9/11 was a watershed moment for the entire country. It  was the beginning of the busiest 14 years of my life, and included six more trips to Southwest Asia (2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2015) as we took up the Global War on Terror.