Twenty two years ago today I was sitting in my office in Northern Virginia. I was fortunate not to be on the road, although several work colleagues were and it was a challenge to help them get home when planes were grounded on 9/11. A whole generation of adults was born after that day that remains ingrained in my experience. To show how much has changed in the country, even the White House now praises Saudi Arabia on the anniversary of the attacks.
We welcome this weekend’s announcement by Saudi Arabia committing $20 billion to support President Biden’s signature initiative, the Partnership for Global Infrastructure (PGI).
— Adrienne Watson (@NSC_Spox) September 11, 2023
The first news I heard about planes crashing into the World Trade Center came over email. It wasn’t on the newswires yet. I was on an industry list, and the subject line was “Terrorists are bombing us with airplanes.” I didn’t think it was real. News was quickly coming in, much of it wrong, speculating on the aircraft types and that there could have been an accident (especially after only one plane had hit).
Two 9/11 hijackers almost missed their flight. One American Airlines agent deals with the guilt of helping them make it onto American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles that crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing 59 passengers and crew and 125 in the building as well.
Ticket agent Vaughn Allex saw two full fare first class passengers and wanted to offer his best customer service.
"I realize that there's probably nothing I could've done to prevent what happened. I've come to terms with that."
Vaughn Allex, former American Airlines gate agent, speaks about the guilt he feels for allowing hijackers onto Flight 77 on Sept. 11, 2001. https://t.co/qabkKxf6WD pic.twitter.com/HYj7VXTVRK
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) September 10, 2021
He marked the two men for extra security because they couldn’t answer the standard security check-in questions, but they didn’t have bombs or guns.
Here’s an amazing thread with an inside look at how 9/11 unfolded. Dick Cheney gave the order to shoot down United flight 93. Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney scrambled her jet without any missiles on board, in a suicide mission to take out the civilian jetliner. She made the decision that she would ram the tail of the aircraft. It was the first time the U.S. military had been given permission to shoot down a civilian plane, and with U.S. citizens on board. It would not be the last.
On 9/11 it didn’t happen because passengers took matters into their own hands. One passenger dialed 911 from the lavatory using a cell phone while other passengers used Airfones to call loved ones. Passenger Todd Beamer: “Ok. Let’s roll.” The cockpit voice recorder has a man in Arabic saying “Cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen.” And as United flight 93 is crashed into an abandoned coal mine in Pennsylvania, nine times in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest.”
People cleared out of my office fairly quickly after the news broke, but my boss at the time kept me around wanting to work through budgets. Traffic that afternoon was terrible, worse than I’ve ever seen in DC. The atmosphere in the city was completely surreal, and the days that followed were just sad.
D.C. didn’t ‘come together’ in the same way I remember New York being different at the time. And I didn’t lose anyone very close to me, though many friends of friends were in the Towers that day. One friend lost all four of her roommates. I grew up visiting the towers.
I would bring snacks and chocolates and other little gifts to the agents I knew at United’s city ticket offices. There were neighborhood offices then and those are the people I knew best. Here are the names of the flight crew who lost their lives on 9/11.
Flying in the aftermath of 9/11 is hard to describe. I remember flight attendants who were genuinely scared. And when the flight attendants are scared passengers are too.
Washington National airport didn’t re-open right away. The approach path is so close to ‘important people’ and important people are always more protected. When anthrax was delivered in the mail on Capitol Hill, Hill staffers all got Cipro but Postal Service employees didn’t.
I had a ticket to fly in and out of National airport before flights had resumed, so United moved me over to Dulles but capacity was limited. I had to fly back from South Florida Miami – Orlando – Washington Dulles since I couldn’t get anything non-stop home.
Many airfares after 9/11 actually rose briefly even though people were avoiding the air. Normally you think empty planes means lower prices. But dropping price wouldn’t have convinced marginal flyers into the skies. The people flying were the ones who really had to and they were less price sensitive.
Airport security was federalized. The TSA was initially part of the Department of Transportation, there was no Germanic-sounding Department of ‘Homeland Security’ yet. We got secondary gate screenings but could still bring liquids through checkpoints for about 5 more years. We didn’t have to take off our shoes yet.
Passengers became our best line of defense. Before 9/11 if a plane was hijacked passengers would remain docile. We’d wait it out until terrorist demands were met, and in all likelihood most people would be ok. The equilibrium shifted and passengers now assume terrorists will bring down planes, so they aren’t going to sit idly by. That may be the most important change in aviation security over the past 20 years. Reinforced cockpit doors are a net positive as well. Everything else is far less clear, or clearly negative. It saddens me to see this displayed by TSA as though they somehow own the legacy of 9/11, even if they’re a sad result of it.
Each day for the next 8 years was a reminder for me of 9/11 because my daily commute at the time took me right past the Pentagon. Flying for me wasn’t scary. Neither were most of the places I’ve visited. I attribute that to driving twice a day past an actual target from 9/11. What else that I would do would be more dangerous?
We all remember 9/11 in different ways. In 2013 the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley offered 30 minutes of free mini-muffins for guests.
What pic.twitter.com/L35ytAtCWP
— guillotease (@eclectrica) September 11, 2013
9/11 will always be personal for many people, and I’ll forever resent those who used it for their own political or business purposes. Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia for instance, a month after 9/11, declared of the government pork opportunities “It’s an open grab bag, so let’s grab.”
Sadly the legacy of 9/11 isn’t the part about coming together, it’s the forever wars (including in places not at all connected to the attacks) and the forever war at home that’s given us a ramped up security state. George W. Bush said they hate us for our freedoms, but if that’s true then surrendering our freedoms capitulates to them.
And lest anyone think that my reference to the Biden administration today was in any way political, here’s Donald Trump on 9/11 bragging (falsely) that with the downing of the World Trade Center towers, one of his New York buildings becomes the tallest in Lower Manhattan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcKlPhFIE7w&t=71s
I was in flight school at the time at the same small airport in Maryland as Mohammed Atta. I believe I ran into him once but can’t be certain. My instructor was also his. My first solo flight was Sunday September 9th, 2001 and then all the airspace anywhere near DC was closed. My next flight wasn’t until November and I had to drive all the way to the Eastern Shore as everything closer was still closed.
May God have mercy on their souls. Very sad to remember that day.
P.S – they don’t hate you “for your freedoms”. They just hate you agnostic to whatever you do, you practice or behave. These are Islamist supremacists that have a (messed up) moral system in which all the world must submit to Islam eventually, at some point. And they’re willing to partner or ally themselves temporarily (even if ‘temporarily’ means many many years) with whoever can help them get stronger, and fight whoever is in their way (like, America, for example).
Jim Moran was my congressman. I hated his guts. I was stuck with him because the people the Republicans put up were always worse.
He was very corrupt.
As for airport security…it’s time to stop making everyone take their shoes off and walk through a disgusting area in stocking feet. The terrorists win when we do stupid things in the name of “security.”
(I’m talking about checkpoint security theater here, of course, not actual improvements such as the doors).
I lived in the Dallas area at the time and was in Philadelphia for a deposition of a vendor my company was in dispute with. Went to our attorney’s office that morning and everyone was watching TV. That was the first I heard of it. Our attorney’s wife was a deputy mayor of Philadelphia and she told him there had been unconfirmed reports of a potential attack on central city Philly!. Obviously we left the office and I walked the streets until I could find a taxi to take me to the airport. Line at rental car (had one reserved) was very long and no cars so paid the taxi to drive me to Wilmington Del (stopping at an ATM along the way) to get basically the last car available for rental then proceeded to drive almost non-stop (got around 5 hours sleep in Nashville) back to the Metroplex. Something I will never forget!
@ Gary. Poor taste to take such a horrific moment in time and compare it to a generation of people who weren’t around then.
@Steve I think you’re missing something? I do not compare 9/11 *to a generation* I note that memories aren’t shared in the same way by people who weren’t there.
Gary,
thank you for posting your remembrances and reminding us that we have to teach history if we are to avoid repeating it.
Hopefully all of us learned something about ourselves and the world because of 9/11 just as was true of covid and WWII etc.
It isn’t our job to tell people how to interpret history but it is our job to make sure the facts about each event are known as accurately so each person can shape their own understanding.
Was it really necessary to include the former President’s bragging as the FIRST reply to your own article, even as had to make sure you weren’t turning another statement into politics?
The reason young people don’t want to deal w/ history is because everything is politicized including history.
The biggest lesson we all should have learned is that the human heart and mind in its most defiled condition is capable of doing something that no one else could have imagined – turning commercial airlines into weapons of war targeting (some of) the richest and most prestigious buildings and the people that worked there in the world.
I had family in the air and didn’t know what flights they were on. Blessedly, they were safe.
God bless those who weren’t so fortunate and those who willingly ran toward those buildings and those who refused to let another airliner crash into a building.
I went to Pennsylvania about a year later. The tops of the trees nearby were angled downward as the plane scythed through them. It still brings a tear.
May we never forget.
I started flying post 9/11. That’s all I know. 9/11 was the day before my 40th birthday. My mom said this a birthday you will never forget. I said with all that’s going on I don’t know if I’ll have a birthday tomorrow. I was driving a school bus at the time. I finished my route and went to have the oil changed in my personal car. They had a tv on and I saw the planes running into the towers. When I got home my mom asked me if I had heard all that was going on. I told her yes. My younger son was almost 2 and my older son had just started high school. They postponed the high school football games that week but quickly resumed normal activities. They wanted to honor the dead but figured the terrorists would want everyone to be afraid. A lot of American flags went up and the Christmas decorations that year had a lot of red, white and blue. My mom talked about America fighting amongst themselves but when trouble comes from the outside they come together. I feel for all the people that lost their lives that day and all the people who care about them. I have never forgotten and won’t unless my memories are taken from me.
https://twitter.com/bscholl/status/1701262385799971172?s=20 pretty cool
On 9/11, I was living in the East Village of Manhattan, and immediately, NYC became a changed place, with the effect lasting for months. People looked at each other knowingly while walking down the street, and stopped and looked when a fighter jet made a pass overhead. I became a news-junkie on a state of high alert for quite some time…
I moved away eight months later, and it was years before I returned to see the memorial. Most years, I prefer not to participate in remembering that day, though some years are an exception.
I mourn not only the loss of life that 9/11 meant but also what else we have lost as a country and in the world as a result of 9/11. We are still paying an ugly price for 9/11, and In that regard Osama Bin Laden is getting the last laugh from his oceanic grave each and every time Islamophobic racism/bigotry is on display as following 9/11 and each and every time all the “it’s for your own safety” security state nonsense is on open display even as it is operating even more on full cylinders hidden behind closed doors and “secrecy” while being defended/supported by the useful idiots of and for the security state.
Want to see a sign of how the security state has won at airports at the expense of the public? Just look how criticism of the TSA/airport security and immigration/customs authorities has been shut down and marginalized on Flyertalk. It gets less criticism now than it used to there, and yet the price being paid for the security state is worse than before and headed to get worse.
@Airfarer – You might recall that, but it’s not possible. United 93 crashed practically vertically. Photo of the site after the crash show no sheared trees. But don’t worry, lots of people have faulty memories of such things. Millions think they watched the Challenger disaster live – almost no one did. People also recall watching the Zapruder film shortly after the JFK assassination, but it wasn’t shown until 1976 or 1978.
However, AA 77 at the Pentagon did shear off light poles.
Notice how the Marriott logo looks like the twin towers falling? I sure hope that wasn’t intentional.
I worked for a government contractor in Va, right outside DC. I heard about the first plane as I arrived at work. We sat in a conference room and watched it unfold on TV. You could see the smoke from the Pentagon just over the horizon; the company lost employees there.
We were scheduled to fly to the UK on business not long after, and the man heading up the group asked us all whether anyone would rather not go under the circumstances; we all went.
I think its in poor taste to label today’s 22 year olds as “adults” given the twits we see on twitter…
I first heard of the first airplane attack on the morning news before hitting the shower. After showering, there was news of the second attack and I knew instantly it was terrorists. After all, terrorists had attacked the Twin Towers before. I told my wife to not go to work but I went in. I saw the towers fall on TV before heading out for field work. We were recalled to the office a few hours later. The next day I worked for a few hours three stories underground below the tallest building in Los Angeles. It felt kind of eerie and I was the only one in that location. Later it came out that that building had been considered for an attack early on but was taken off of the list. A Filipino American friend from work went with his church group to help out in New York City after the attack.
@Dude26
Of course they don’t hate us for our “freedom” because we don’t have any. Freedom doesn’t mean going to prison for not paying 50% federal, state, local tax. Freedom isn’t being forced to rent your home to who you don’t want. Freedom isn’t nuns being forced to provide birth control or people who want to operate schools solely for their own ethnicity or religion sued for doing so.
We should be honest that they did what they did because the government in this country was and is the biggest supporter of the state of Israel which abuses Palestinians. This government had interfered in the Middle East since the British lost being a global power after WWII. Sure, there are hundreds of millions of islamists just like there are tens of millions of legitimate christians who want the world to turn Muslim/christian but they really aren’t interested in pressing the issue outside of their countries. It’s about Palestine and the other areas in the region that the U.S. government does not keep its hands off.
It’s unfortunate Americans paid the big price of more government power, less freedom, TSA abuse, spying, and of course trillions spent on a war started from fake intelligence by the same people who said Hunter’s laptop was fake. More American military personnel died in Iraq than died on 9/11 and all over a lie and the idea they did what they did because they hate our freedom.
It’s a sad thing all around. Rip to the civilians in the buildings and planes that day. I wouldn’t say let freedom ring because supposedly freedom is public school teachers reading drag stories to elementary school children.
@ C_M says:
Unless you were there do not refute my commentary. When I was there, there wasn’t even a memorial building. It was a wooden hut, with some photos posted of the dead. There were many motor-cyclists there – no cops – with, I suppose, with the aim of ensuring the place was not defaced. There is/was a large copse of trees nearby before the impact site. The tops were all missing.
Try had not to be an idiot.
Jack Hudson for VP….or some govt post. Good points all around. Thanks.
Also, 9/11 went according to plan. They, whomever they are, made their $$$$ and kept the gravy train going to make more money. Lets be honest, Wars arent fought over values yours and mine…its about who can make the most money out of it….even if it means sacrificing human lives.
@Airfarer – Okay, now I’m going to call BS, because no one who wasn’t in the search crews was allowed anywhere near the crash site. I too was there before the memorial was built and where you could go was very, very far away from the impact crater.
The crash site is extremely well documented with both still and video images – nowhere do you see trees that were sheered off. (If you can find an image that shows that, by all means point me to it.) The plane struck an old strip mine, inverted, 40 degree nose-down attitude, at roughly 600 mph. There is a small patch in front of the crater that was burned, that’s apparent in the photos. Some debris from the plane shredded trees, but that would come from below, not above, and any debris from the impact was mostly small, not large enough to sheer trees, and you don’t see that in any image I’ve seen.
https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/investigation-of-flight-93.mp4/view
I thought I watched the Challenger disaster live too. I didn’t. I watched it on the kids’ news right afterwards. Along with my dad. But not live.
That said, false memories can be a lot of fun. When I was five years old, we went to the Scilly Isles. The ferry crossing was so rough and unpleasant (I honestly blame it for my seasickness ever since) that neither I nor my mother would get back on the boat. We splashed out for what was, at the time, the only good alternative: The commercial helicopter trip.
For years I distinctly remembered getting on a helicopter that was orange and had two rotors.
The actual helicopter I rode was blue and white and had one set of rotors.
But I had a TOY helicopter that was…and somewhere in my brain the two things conflated. Once I worked that out, I could retrieve the real memory.
So…don’t criticize people for not remembering things accurately, it happens to every single one of us.
I was in grad school and took at road trip to NY & DC a couple of weeks prior to 9/11. Went up the World Trade Center to the observation deck and restaurant. Still think about some of the workers in that building. Hope they survived.