I just put down a 45+ page document on the 9/11 commission's record of events for the morning of 9/11. It's part of one of my Psychology class assignments for the week and to be honest, I don't remember what we were supposed to do with this after we read it. The rest of the assignment will have to wait until tomorrow.
My heart is just aching all over again and I've been fighting back tears reading through it. I failed several times and had to walk away for a few minutes before picking it up to finish it.
I remember that day like it was yesterday. It's amazing how raw it can still be, even after nearly 8 years. I was a dispatcher for TWA, which had been taken over by American not 6 months before. I was working the international desk watching and taking care of our flights coming back from Europe and the Middle East. It was the peak of storm season so I knew my "guys" in the squadron were down in the Caribbean doing who knows what.
I remember hearing about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center so someone flipped on the TV in our office. Aviation junkies do that sort of thing, always hoping that it wasn't your flight; speculating on what could've gone wrong. We kept doing our jobs, but listening to the commentary from the Today Show out the corner of our ears. Our ATC guy was listening in to the daily shift conference call with ATC.
The second plane hit and collectively, our hackles went up. It didn't take long before either someone in the office told us or we all started reacting to calling our flights to land wherever they could. It was pure chaos. As we watched the towers smoldering, the Pentagon was hit.
Most of my crews were past the 40' longitude line which meant I had to start getting them into Canadian stations wherever we could land them. Canadian controllers were difficult to reach to have them radio the word to land asap. I struggled with trying to figure out how much to tell the crews. Too much and they might be focused more on the potential than flying; not enough and they could have just as many issues.
One of the guys in the back office, navigation I believe, started calling some of the cities in Canada and securing rooms for our crews with his own credit card. We didnt' know how we were going to get the crews to the hotels, we just knew we had rooms possible for them and we'd work out the details later.
The ASD screen, which shows the position of all aircraft at any given time, was slowly going blank as all the planes in the country quickly landed wherever they could. In St Louis, we had planes from companies we hadn't seen there before and even a few planes we hadn't seen in ages. A 747 sat outside our operations office parked quietly for the next week until it could leave.
Over the ATC conference call, I overheard NORAD on the call telling controllers on the west coast to tell flights that if they didn't turn around, they'd be shot down. One was a Korean Air flight off of LA somewhere; another was somewhere either on the way to Alaska or near Alaska. It sunk in that we were in some serious shit. Thankfully, both aircraft complied.
We were stunned and tried to figure out what to do next. Our planes had all landed. Now what?
With the relief that our planes were on the ground, the head turned off and raw emotion kicked in. The enormity of the situation was terrifying and suddenly, nothing felt safe.
It took several years to not get weepy at the thought of the events that day. Reading this commission report for an assignment really brought back the events of the day and many of the emotions.
Thank God there wasn't more.
No comments:
Post a Comment