September 11, 2001
September 11th, 2001 was my oldest son’s 9th
birthday. I understand other events happened that day that would affect a lot
of people as well, but the #1 thing on MY mind was how to make it a wonderful
day for Neal. I was working as the hub manager for the fastest growing airline
in the country, Midway Airlines, which was based in Raleigh-Durham
International Airport.
We had recently declared bankruptcy, one of those “airline
bankruptcies” that were once so common, where we downsized a lot of people and
had a lot of “Will My Tickets Still Be Good?” press, but it was really only so
that we could unload a bunch of aging Fokker 100’s that American Airlines had
foisted on us, and to realign some flights and contracts when some of our
largest customers decided to start doing more phone and video conferencing and
less actual flying.
In other words, on September 11th, we were a
profitable airline. One without any money in the bank, but we were making that
up fairly quickly, and were poised to continue our growth. These issues were
important to me, because along with spending the previous month laying people
off and enjoying my birthday in the hospital, Alyson was now six months
pregnant with our second son, and the last thing I needed was to be unemployed.
Anyway, I headed in to work and relaxed into the hive of
activity that was RDU on a Tuesday morning. My primary responsibilities in the
slightly slimmer Midway were mostly trying to negotiate baggage handling
contracts with delivery companies skittish about working with an airline in
bankruptcy and rewriting the baggage handling manual, but I was in my office
behind the ticket counter when I started hearing comments about a small plane
crashing into the Twin Towers building in New York.
The American Airlines break room had a television, and we
drifted over that way to see what was going on. There wasn’t anything on the
news yet, so we sort of dismissed it and went back to work. I was talking with
my assistant and best friend Danny on the phone about the rumors when we
decided to check cnn.com. “It’s still talking about the Michael Jackson concert
and stem cell research,” he said dismissively.
To this day, he still claims that the three words I
responded with had a more chilling effect on him than when he was a Marine
staring down snipers in Somalia. I don’t know how I sounded, but somehow, when
my website finally loaded, CNN had gotten the first picture of a smoking
skyscraper on the website.
“Refresh your screen.”
A few seconds later, I heard a woman crying, so I ran over
to the American breakroom where a friend from AA was holding a long sheet of
printer paper. “This is the passenger manifest of flight 11,” she choked out.
“It’s a 767 with 76 passengers and 11 crew.”
