Hey guys,

As I sit here on the couch with my 17 year old daughter watching video of that day (it happened on her second day of preschool...hard to believe it was that many years ago), I'm once again transported to that morning, and feeling those sickening, gut wrenching emotions once again.

I penned this about six months after that horrible day. It was originally publish by my dear friend, Mark "Frugal" Bush, at his (now defunct) website "Frugalsworld of Simulations".

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What A Difference A Day Can Make
(written January 2002)


For the world’s airline crewmembers, September 11th was “the day the Earth stood still”. For many of us in the aviation world, it will for years be the day from which all others are measured. Both literally and physically, we were transfixed motionless as if the World Trade Center (and Pentagon) had crumbled down upon our individual heads…and in a way they had. Volumes have been written about the event, with surely more to come, and the talking heads from all sectors of the media have scrutinized and analyzed those hours with numbing totality. With that said, the following thoughts and opinions will be from a source that has been (mostly) quiet about how that day has affected the world of professional airmen. They will come from the little room on the “other” side of the cockpit door.

In the last four months, scores of people have asked me about aviation in general and my job in particular. Although this isn’t at all unprecedented, I believe the emotions involved have been. They’ve run the gamut from technical questions, to my opinions about “the event”, to heart-felt queries about my level of fear walking onto the Boeing flight deck. All of the questions were delivered from the soul and not all have been easy to respond to, but they’ve all deserved the most honest answer I could muster. After a lot of serious thought, I guess this is what I’ve come up with: During those horrible events that morning, everything about airline flying changed…but strangely on that day, in many ways, very little changed at all. Maybe the best way I can put it is this: piloting a transport category aircraft didn’t change very much, but BEING the pilot of said machine did. Sound confusing? Rest assured it’s taken me several long hours of pondering to come to grips with that statement.

On that fateful morning, as I sat there mired in horror, watching the images of those airliners being turned into weapons from hell, I was shocked and sickened to the core of my humanity. Funny thing though, something else began to happen. My “pilot brain” began to take over, and the emotional volume was turned down to make way for more pragmatic thinking. We are trained from our flying infancy to separate ourselves from our emotions when we find our aviation world down around our ankles, and this day was no different. As I fought back the queasy feelings, I began to think about how these terrible few hours would change my profession forever. I was witnessing events that professional pilots the world over had never before even dreamed of. Unheard of things were happening, and the reactions to them, were no less incredible. The ENTIRE airspace above the United States was erased as if turning off a light switch, and until it actually happened, no one could imagine the effects. Aircrews and passengers the world over were feeling the effects, and although I was at home, I could just imagine the cold chill that was present in those cockpits. I’ve since talked with crewmembers that were airborne when the plug was pulled, and they all tell of prevailing feelings of “shock, followed by weirdness, and dread”. But they too speak of turning off the emotions, and getting back to the business of getting the jet safely on the ground.

I was back in a cockpit on the first weekend that operations resumed, and it wasn’t without a bit of dread. The night before, I had lain awake wondering what the next day of flying would hold in store, and I hadn’t done that in almost twenty years (I remember doing it as a brand new Captain back in the early 80’s). During the first few days following that black morning, I'll admit that I was quite upset that we were not getting hour by hour “sitreps” from the airline, but naturally that couldn’t be done when things were changing almost literally by the minute. Our pilot’s union finally broke the ice, when roughly twenty four hours after the happenings, we began to receive lots of emails outlining what was taking place not only within our airline, but also within the entire commercial aviation world. In more ways than one, it was going to be a whole new ball game those first few days back.

The moment I walked into the terminal, I could feel the difference. Gone was the feeling of just being at the airport to “go somewhere”; you could dish up the dreadful atmosphere with a spoon. Everywhere in our Flight Operations, you could see people reading bulletins, talking in small groups, or just generally milling about with a tense air of hesitation. The flight attendants (for obvious reasons) were nervous, and once on the jet, they all looked at me with faces that I hadn’t seen before. They hung on my every word in the crew briefing, they asked lots of questions, and although I had heard rumors of hundreds of resignations, these cabin crew professionals were there to do their jobs (albeit a bit scared and concerned)…and I was proud of them. We weren’t making it up as we went along that first day back, but we weren’t far from it, for the guideline bulletins were changing (almost) hourly.  

It took us almost an hour past the scheduled departure time to get off the gate (we were headed to Newark, New Jersey followed by an hour turn around, then back to Minneapolis/St. Paul). Some of the passengers (and two of the flight attendants) were concerned and nervous about how another passenger was acting. It turned out to be nothing more than the idiosyncrasies of an elderly gentleman, but no less than the NWA Airport Manager was called to the jet to help straighten it out. Were emotions running high in the cabin? I would have to say yes. Were emotions running high in the cockpit? Not really, remember the statement about “very little” having changed? Once I sat my butt in the seat, the job of actually piloting an airliner safely from point A to point B hadn’t changed one iota. This was the part that made it easy for me to climb back into that cockpit and do what I draw a paycheck to do. It was a matter of staying focused and getting the job done.

The hundreds of items we check before every flight were still checked (from logbooks to landing weight, fuel loads to weather forecasts, and checklists to ATC clearances), NOTHING about actually manipulating the airplane was different. You still had to “pull back to make the houses smaller, push forward to make them bigger”. It’s true, Orville and Wilbur were spinning in their graves, but the things they showed us about how to act like birds, had not been altered. We still needed fast air going over the airfoil to defy gravity, and no matter what the murderers did on those doomed airplanes, that wasn’t going to change. I will say that we flew with the crash axe unstrapped and ready for battle, and I briefed the crew that ANYONE coming through the cockpit door unannounced, was going to be parting their hair a bit differently. (note: the cockpit doors have all been reinforced, and the flight attendants can no longer open them from the outside. BB)

Even though piloting the airplane hasn’t changed, again, many things about BEING the pilot have. We are now looked at as the “trigger to the weapon”, for without access to the cockpit, the events of September 11th could not have happened. (IMHO, the animals that commandeered those jets got very lucky that morning, for had lots of things not lined up just as they did, they wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the level of death and destruction that they did…but that’s just my opinion) Our cockpit doors have been re-enforced, we are in the process of becoming armed, our “mindset” if you will about the people we are charged with safely moving about the planet has been adjusted a bit. Trust me; I’ve heard the entire BS about “racial profiling”. So you ask, do I look at my passengers any different now? Honestly? No, the nice folks still look like the nice folks; the morons still look like the morons. And that’s been the way of the world since Chuck Lindbergh, regardless of race, color or creed, and….

(Side story) I was standing in the gate area the other day preparing to launch from Detroit headed for Phoenix, and as I was signing the Dispatch Release one of the passengers approached me. “Excuse me Captain, would you mind talking to my son Zach. He’s been really, really scared about flying since September 11th.” As I walked over to where they were sitting, I could see (6 year old) Zach sitting by the window intently staring at the machine we would be taking westward that morning. As he turned to talk, I was greeted by an innocent little face that was clearly very concerned, almost trembling. We conversed for a few minutes, and he hit me with this statement, “Are we going to crash?” I was stopped in my tracks. How do you answer a question like that coming from such a wonderful little person? “Zach, of course we’re not going to crash. I’ve been flying for almost thirty years, and I’ve never even come close. We’re going to have a great flight out to Arizona, and you have nothing to worry about.” When he and his family boarded the jet, we brought him into the cockpit, sat him in my seat, took the obligatory pictures, chatted a bit, and sent them back toward the cabin. Did he feel any better? I think he did, but who knows? A six year old mind is an amazing thing. I guess when those jerks did their deed back in Sept.; the shock waves they caused went out a long, long way.  

How about the way the world perceives us as airline pilots, has that changed? I would have to say yes. The bad news of course, is that we are lumped in with everyone else in terms of “security risks” (it’s been that way for some years now, but with the increased level of “molestation”, it’s really gone just a bit too far). Having me take my shoes off, run them through the screening machine, undo my belt buckle, and pat down my fat ass is not going to save 180 (plus 6 crewmembers) lives. I guess the FAA in it’s “infinite wisdom” doesn’t quite understand that for me to be a TRUE hazard to the traveling public, all I have to do is not do my job very well.

As the security screeners are having me undress (well almost) each time I head for the jet, I just want to say to them, “hey wait, I’m the good guy, remember? The guy that wears the WHITE hat?” I’ll never forget the nursing home conversation I had a few years ago with retired NWA Capt. Bertram Ritchie shortly before he passed away (he was 92 years young, hired in the 30’s, flew during commercial aviation’s formative era, and retired in the early 60’s). As I was explaining to him about how we as the crew are screened and searched for weapons, bombs, etc., he lay there with a very quizzical look on his face. Finally he said, “Bill I have a question…why in the world would you ever want to hijack your own airplane?” I couldn’t answer him. You should have seen the look on his face when I told him about us being forced to urinate into a plastic bottle…he definitely came from a different time in history.  

There is an upside to all of this I guess. I can truthfully say that in the last four months I’ve been greeted at the end of my flights with many more passenger “thank you’s” than in the past. Not only have I been touched by the volume of words, but also by the eye contact involved. People seem to be very intent on looking me square in the eye with their comments, and their sincerity hasn’t gone unnoticed. One lady went as far as to call us “heroes”, but she couldn’t be more wrong. We get paid to battle windshear, thunderstorms, ATC delays, mechanical problems, etc., it’s what we do. The true heroes are YOU FOLKS, the people that are braving the horrendous lines at the security checkpoints, the uncertainty of the airlines schedules, and the fear that a group of idiots could pull something like this off again. I chose my profession many years ago, and maybe that took a bit of courage from an average 18 year old. But I see REAL courage everyday when I walk through the gate on the way to my jet. It’s a privilege to fly you people…you heroes.

I guess the bottom line on all of this, is that my job has gotten harder in some ways, but it was hard to begin with. So I guess in that respect, it’s nothing to get too excited about. That doesn’t mean that it’s not fun, it’s always been fun (well, maybe not the FAA checkrides and the thunderstorms, but most everything else). I guess it’s just a different kind of difficult. I’ve played “dime store psychologist” before, but that was for the usual kind of passenger trepidations. Now, with the aftermath of September 11th, we have a whole new bag of concerns to deal with. I suppose that’s O.K. though, for gentlemen of the ilk of Captain Ritchie and his brother “aviation pioneers” dealt with passenger fears also. I guess the big difference is that they were trying to convince people to embrace air travel as the wave of the future; and we’re just trying to convince people not to despise and fear it as the tool of the devil.

‘till next time
BBall

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Thank you for taking the time to read this.

God bless all the men and women fighting for freedom the world over.

BBall