• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By 6:30 A.M. Pacific time, every airplane in the skies above the United States had been ordered to land, and the FAA had banned takeoffs of all civilian aircraft. It was clear I wouldn’t be getting to Pittsburgh that day to fly my scheduled flight. (My particular flight was one of some thirty-five thousand canceled that day nationwide.)

I spent a little time in the US Airways operations office in San Francisco, and there were two crews there. Unlike me, they didn’t live in Northern California. They were stranded, and no one knew when planes might fly again. “You’d better get hotel rooms right now,” I suggested, “before they’re all gone.”

I called pilot scheduling and told them that I couldn’t make it to Pittsburgh, obviously, and then I went home and watched CNN. As an American and as a pilot, I found the coverage very hard to take. It was so upsetting and disturbing that, at one point, I had to stop watching. I turned off the TV and went into the backyard to compose myself. It was a beautiful day in California, and it was remarkably quiet outdoors. Because all aircraft were grounded, you couldn’t hear any airplanes flying anywhere. My ears are always pretty attuned to the sounds of jets, and this saddened me.

On Wednesday and most of Thursday, only the military was flying. I felt anxious about the terrorism and the national ground stop instituted by the FAA, and was eager to return to flying. Like so many pilots, I also felt a renewed sense of patriotism. I wanted to fly to prove our system could function, that we could take passengers safely to where they needed to go, and that the terrorists would not succeed.

On Thursday night, I was able to get on a red-eye to Pittsburgh. On Friday morning, I was set to fly again.

It was pretty chaotic in the crew room underneath the terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport. Not all crew members were able to make it in, and so a captain would say, “I have a first officer but need a flight attendant,” and a flight attendant would volunteer to take the trip with him.

Eventually, I was assigned to fly from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. Not many Americans were yet ready to return to the skies, so we took just seven people to Indianapolis and eight people back from there to Pittsburgh.

There were so few of them, they barely outnumbered the crew. We put them all in first class. Some of the passengers said that they were nervous, and I tried to reassure them with small talk when they boarded.

It was just three days after the attacks, and our planes were still vulnerable to terrorism. But I wanted passengers to know that even though the cockpit doors hadn’t yet been strengthened, there was a strengthened resolve among us in the cockpit, and the flight attendants in the cabin. The passengers had strengthened their resolve, too.

“We’re determined not to let anything like this happen again,” I told a few passengers.

The pilots murdered on September 11, 2001, were the very first victims. And so it was natural for pilots to discuss how we might have responded that day. The reality was that all our training until then had been aimed at preventing or managing a potential highjacking, not a kamikaze-style suicide mission.

For airline employees, life is different now. The airline industry suffered a financial collapse after the attacks, and a great many people at the bottom of the seniority list were laid off. So many of them were good pilots, and they are missed.

The attacks of September 11 don’t come into my head as often as they once did. That’s true for a lot of Americans. Time has passed. New tragedies have followed. I’ve piloted hundreds of flights since that day.

But for someone who works for an airline, the reminders are still here, offering reasons for reflection. Sometimes I’ll be at Boston Logan International Airport, passing by the gates from which two of the flights departed on September 11—American Airlines Flight 11 from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and United Airlines Flight 175 from Gate 19 in Terminal C.

There are American flags flying outside both of