Posted by Editormum on 11 September 2006 in
News Commentary |
∞
I wasn’t a blogger in 2001, so I don’t know that I’ve ever posted anything about where I was and what I was doing on this date five years ago.
At that time, I worked for a pilots’ union. This union served the flight crew of a major global cargo carrier. It was around 7:45 a.m. my time, and I was on my way to work when I heard on the radio that an aircraft had accidentally struck one of the Twin Towers. My first thought was, That was no accident. You can’t fly a plane into one of those buildings by mistake. Every alarm in the cockpit would be shrieking, and it’s not exactly hard to see the twin towers!
Five minutes later, I was in my office, frantically trying to tune in CNN to get the straight story. I finally got the receiver tuned and straightened up in time to see a speck in the sky near the second tower. My God, I thought, there’s another one! And seconds later I and my pilot friends watched in horror as the second tower was struck. My guys were standing in stony silence; I was standing with tears raining down my cheeks.
Throughout the day, we got more news. Another plane struck the Pentagon. Courageous passengers took down a fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field … God only knows where that one was headed. The towers collapsed. People were missing. People were dead. Four brave and highly-trained flight crews were lost. Many of my guys knew the pilots and flight engineers on those hijacked aircraft.
That was the first time I heard one of my guys swear. One of the news anchors had the audacity to suggest that the pilot had been forced to fly his aircraft into the tower. My guy swore colourfully and shouted, “No effing way! They are dead! You couldn’t make one of us fly a plane into a building. You’d do something like that over our dead bodies! Those pilots were killed and these —— took over!” Turns out he was probably right.
That day was the beginning of a week of 14-hour days for me. My guys were grounded — and they were scared. Even more so when the TSA and other government agencies focused almost exclusively on passenger flights. My guys wanted to know if the Feds realized that it would be easier to hide in a cargo jet than in a passenger jet, and why weren’t the Feds paying attention to the dangers to cargo flights. Five years later, I’m still wondering that.
Tags: 9-11, Fedex pilots, news, terrorism, True Stories, Work Life
Remembering
I wasn’t a blogger in 2001, so I don’t know that I’ve ever posted anything about where I was and what I was doing on this date five years ago.
At that time, I worked for a pilots’ union. This union served the flight crew of a major global cargo carrier. It was around 7:45 a.m. my time, and I was on my way to work when I heard on the radio that an aircraft had accidentally struck one of the Twin Towers. My first thought was, That was no accident. You can’t fly a plane into one of those buildings by mistake. Every alarm in the cockpit would be shrieking, and it’s not exactly hard to see the twin towers!
Five minutes later, I was in my office, frantically trying to tune in CNN to get the straight story. I finally got the receiver tuned and straightened up in time to see a speck in the sky near the second tower. My God, I thought, there’s another one! And seconds later I and my pilot friends watched in horror as the second tower was struck. My guys were standing in stony silence; I was standing with tears raining down my cheeks.
Throughout the day, we got more news. Another plane struck the Pentagon. Courageous passengers took down a fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field … God only knows where that one was headed. The towers collapsed. People were missing. People were dead. Four brave and highly-trained flight crews were lost. Many of my guys knew the pilots and flight engineers on those hijacked aircraft.
That was the first time I heard one of my guys swear. One of the news anchors had the audacity to suggest that the pilot had been forced to fly his aircraft into the tower. My guy swore colourfully and shouted, “No effing way! They are dead! You couldn’t make one of us fly a plane into a building. You’d do something like that over our dead bodies! Those pilots were killed and these —— took over!” Turns out he was probably right.
That day was the beginning of a week of 14-hour days for me. My guys were grounded — and they were scared. Even more so when the TSA and other government agencies focused almost exclusively on passenger flights. My guys wanted to know if the Feds realized that it would be easier to hide in a cargo jet than in a passenger jet, and why weren’t the Feds paying attention to the dangers to cargo flights. Five years later, I’m still wondering that.
Tags: 9-11, Fedex pilots, news, terrorism, True Stories, Work Life