xolinlevh

On 9/11 I was in my AP chem class in high school. I remember sitting there watching the news in class. I remember watching live as tower 1, and then tower 2, fell live infront of me. I'll never forget that. Me and my dad flew about a month after that out of MSP. Will also never forget the armed soldiers with M-16s walking the airport.

orca15

I was flying patrol over the Artic Circle protecting us against the Russians.

Seriously.

Bicostal

I flew on 9/12. LHR-CDG. A lot of security and apprehension. My father in law and brother in law were visiting us in the UK from the US and stayed an extra 10 days. Flew into NYC about a month later (EWR) and the approach was pin drop silent as we made the turn with a view of the smoldering still evident at ground zero.

moxielady

I was in Philadelphia doing a workshop. Was supposed to fly home that evening. Took two days before I could get a rental and then drove home to Michigan. The lack of cell phone service was tough because my kids couldn't get ahold of me, couldn't remember where I was, and we're just hoping that I wasn't on one of those airplanes.

StayingHomeIsBetter

I was on a business trip in Fort McMurray, Alberta. After a few days, flights resumed inside of Canada... but there was no indication when flights back into the US would resume.

My boss and I ended up flying to Calgary and driving the 900 miles to SLC.

But we were the lucky ones... we got home.

av8tr22

I was 11, and remember getting up and watching the news. My mom home schooled my brother and I at the time, and she and my dad would watch the news in the morning before my dad went to work. The TV was already on when I got up, and they were talking about how a plane hit the first tower. From a young age, I've been a complete aviation nut, so I figured it had to be a Cessna. A few minutes later, I watched the second plane hit the other tower, live. I'll never forget that as long as I live. The silence from the reporters made it even more eerie. We ended up leaving to go to a home school group co-op, but they ended up canceling the class because people were so concerned. We watched TV for the next 3-5 days, and did pretty much nothing else.

A month prior, we had been deciding where/when and what family to visit either in September or October. Even at 11, I was booking flights for the family ;-) I specifically remember searching for flights from TPA-SNA on AA, departing on September 11th. We ended up booking a trip from TPA-MSP to visit our MN family instead, and left on October 4th. The utter silence and somber mood at TPA was the most freakish experience I've ever had in an airport. The security lines were SO long…hardly anyone spoke, and those that did almost whispered. It was like being in a library. We boarded our flight from TPA-ORD on an AA MD-80. There were 8 people on the flight. It was the early morning (7-7:30AM) departure to ORD. Looking back, I'm surprised they didn't move us all up to First. We were in row 6 or 7, there was a couple that moved back behind the wing, and there were two people in first. So eerie. We then connected to an AA F100 flight from ORD-MSP. This flight was more full, but ORD was so empty.

Air travel has changed so much, but I do have to say, I miss what it used to be. I'll never forget those who perished on 9/11…so, so sad.

GNVFlyer

I remember the day vividly. I was a travel agent in SFO (another life) and remember taking the subway to work, a ride that took 45 minutes longer than normal because of long station stops where people walked in the subway. I had seen the disaster on tv and knew I would be needed.

I remembered I had a client flying EWR-SFO and then heard a plane went down. My heart sank. To my frustration, the airlines had shut down search capabilities on the GDS and I was beyond afraid I had put a client on a flight that went down. Luckily, I was wrong. Turns out, a few days later, in true frequent flyer form, the 1K called from the airport because he had a middle seat on the first flight out. We both laughed hysterically. I told him to put himself on the upgrade list. He got back and told me it was the happiest middle seat he ever sat in and told me he would never let me get away with that again...lol...you had to be there

I worked from home while the system was getting up (on a slow dial up connection) and I have, in an awful time, a very fond recollection of a client who had rented a car at BWI and needed to get to MSP calling me at every exit for an airport asking if the aviation system had opened again. Mind you, I then came to work a few days later only to greeted by a 25% pay cut effective immediately.

I can argue about the purpose of travel agent in the current online environment, but that day and the few days that followed, I was worth every penny clients paid. I am now in a new career but can say, in times like that, everyone needs someone on their side.

nichelle

Thank you all for sharing your stories.

I'd just switched jobs. My old job (same company) involved working with a lot of road warriors. We had hundreds of field based employees who were traveling state to state for project support. And I used to fly every other week.

I spent the morning in stunned silence and like most everyone else felt helpless. I called my old boss and asked if they needed any help. His response was, 'Yes please'. So I spent the day reaching out to the employees who were now stranded in the field. We made sure all were accounted for and those with flights that day had accommodations or rental cars to make the one way trip home. Well, at least we did our best.

I just needed to do something, anything. My ex worked at the Pentagon at the time so a good portion of the day was spent worrying and then finally reaching him too.

Leezell

Interesting. I was running one of 4 teams that were doing the Camry launch. My team was in Lakeland, FL that day. We tapered off our program by around 2 when almost no one showed for the noon session. Another team was at the Meadowlands. They never got underway. A third was up there in WI at some National Guard base. They were requested to leave the property about 20 minutes after the 2nd plane hit. The fourth team ran all day out in SoCal.

Throw Down Your Leavy Screens

My 9/11 experience didn't involve airports or flying, but I am surprised how well I remember everything I did that day, even after 13 years. I remember a coworker screaming "A plane has hit the WTC!" and thinking it was a Cessna or some sort of freak accident, then having to go to a construction site to meet with a contractor and the site inspector, stopping to get gas on North Tryon St. in Charlotte and seeing just streams of traffic outbound on Tryon St., getting back to work and being dismissed for the day, taking the bus home. Hell, I even remember the shirt I was wearing.

To at least get my post on-topic, I had just flown a week before CLT-ATL-TLH scoring an awesome last-minute Labor Day weekend fare. TLH had mostly DL mainline planes there to go to ATL -- I was on an M88. After 9/11, that M88 was downgauged to a CR2.

CKDGM

I was living & working in Boston, and didn't have any flights planned then...but had a rental car booked at BOS because my then-wife and I needed it for some errands that week. When we went to pick it up, as we stood at the curb at the old Airport T station waiting for the shuttle there was a guy there waiting for the terminal shuttle so he could catch his flight -- he had somehow missed realizing that there WERE NO FLIGHTS.

Afterwards, when DL and other airlines were offering double MQMs and rock-bottom fares in an attempt to keep some kind of cash flow, we wound up taking a trip over Thanksgiving weekend.

That trip? BOS-CVG-LAX-NRT/NRT-LAX-BOS, at $550 pp RT for more than 32K MQMs. Obviously not upgrade-worthy (U fare!) but when the LAX-NRT MD-11 has 77 people on it (only 55 of whom were in coach) there's still plenty of room. The hotel in Tokyo upgraded us to a suite even though we were on the "Internet special rate", because they were similarly empty. Everyone we dealt with thanked us for traveling.

To this day, every time I taxi in or out at BOS, I look for the flags over the jetbridges at B32 and C19. When I was last in EWR, I gave similar attention toward A17. (Does anyone know if there's a flag at IAD? I haven't been there since before 2001.)

baccarat0809

On the evening of 9/10 I flew BUF-BWI on WN for a client meeting in Delaware on 9/11. Up until that flight, I had NEVER flown WN, but somebody convinced me that flying direct was the best way to go.

Anyway, I was at a Springhill Suites half-way between Baltimore and my client's office, and had just gotten out of the shower when my mom called to check in on me. My mom NEVER checks in on me.

She told me to put the TV on, and that's when I saw tower 1 burning, with lots of reports of other planes being taken. I called my wife, who said her employer was sending her home for the day. She was VERY pregnant at the time (son was born about 5 weeks later) and couldn't stop crying saying how its not right and how can we bring a baby into this type of world.

After an hour or so on the phone with her talking her "down" and making sure she drove home, I called my boss and told him I was cancelling the flight, and I'd be back in town when-ever I could. Probably the only time I was told not to worry about expensing anything back, cost didn't matter - just take care of myself.

I called Budget to change my rental car to a one way instead of pickup and dropoff at BWI. Person on the phone told me I needed to get the car back asap as they needed it to rent out to other people .... yeah, right. I hung out one more day at the hotel, then 9/13 I drove home.

My biggest memory of that day, however, was dinner that night. I was within walking distance of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, where I had dinner on 9/11. The place was packed, but you could hear a pin drop - with everybody deathly afraid of everybody else in the place. Nobody trusted anybody that night.

On the drive home on 9/13, it seemed 95% of the bridges I drove under on I-95 had a US Flag on it.

I will NEVER forget.

andrewk829

When the aviation industry tanked after 9/11, Delta for a brief time offered domestic award tickets for only 10,000 miles round trip (or maybe it was 15,000, but I think it was 10,000). My wife and I were living in Jersey City, NJ and got married on Oct. 29, 2001. We took advantage of the reduced award ticket level for our honeymoon in Arizona. EWR-SLC-PHX outbound, PHX-CVG-EWR on the return. I remember the 90-minute security line at EWR and the 2-hour line at PHX, and bad-a$$ expressionless National Guard guys with scary weaponry manning the security checkpoints, and a general sense of grimness by everyone in the airport. I asked myself what kind of country we had become.

Our return trip was on Nov. 12, 2001, on which American Airlines 587 crashed after takeoff from JFK en route to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This happened just after we cleared security in PHX, and of course everyone was freaked out because it could have been terrorism. We boarded the PHX-CVG plane, but then everyone who was bound for any NY-area airport was asked to deplane because all NY airports had closed. I told the gate agent I'd rather be stuck in Cincinnati than in Phoenix, because at least Cincinnati to New York was drivable. So he let us back on. By the time we got to CVG, NY airspace had reopened.

On the PHX-CVG flight, the captain decided to offer all passengers some perqs because everyone was jittery . . . I think they passed out free headsets and everyone got a glass of wine. The in-flight movie was the silly but enjoyable Woody Allen flick, "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion". Later, the captain made an announcement that the FAA had rules out terrorism as the cause of the New York crash.

PIONEER

It's just like it was yesterday. I had flown MCI-ATL-DCA on the evening of the 10th. At ATL the pilot, as I was boarding, was in the process of denying boarding to some suspicious person. I later called the FBI hotline to report this.

On the morning of the 11th I turned on the TV and saw one of the towers in flames. At first I thought it was a replay of the previous bombing, but as I watched the 2nd plane came in. I then called my wife in KC (still asleep) and she called other family and friends out West. I saw the fleet of helicopters fly into the White House that night.

Not that it really matters, but DCA was totally shut down, and my meetings were cancelled. Every day, there were rumors that DCA was going to reopen. Then there was a rumor that RIC was open, so I got a car and drove there, but it was closed. So I kept driving (listening to NPR with the news and the ceremony from DC). Spent the night along the way, and finally made it to CVG, where I was fortunate to get on a flight to MCI.

Don't get me started on the need for revenge on the perpetrors.

Kentski

I remember the day vividly and I'm shaking a bit as I type this. I lived in BOS and was a consultant, and flew early that morning (a small commuter plane from BOS to RDU, but still terrifies me that I was in the same airport as those-that-I-hope-burn-every-day were in the airport as well at the same time). I think the flight left at 5:45am and we had arrived in RDU before initial reports started coming in, and had driven to our client in Greenville, NC, which was about 90 miles away, right before 9am. As I booted my laptop at our client, I went to CNN, saw the initial report, and turned to a co-worker and said "a plane just hit the World Trade Center". At first, like others, I thought it was a small Cessna-like plane.

We started getting more news reports and realized that this was significant. The facility shut off all TVs and Internet access (I'm still pissed at this), so we had to go to our rental cars to listen to AM radio to get news reports. I had many friends that worked in and near the WTC, and was terrified that I had lost a number of them (and I did one).

I returned to the local Greenville, NC Hilton that night and finally saw the enormity. People at the hotel bar were just stunned, and I didn't sleep at all that night, just trying to find out news of my friends and former colleagues. Cell phone lines were jammed. I had a rental car that I was supposed to turn in but, luckily, I hung onto, as me and two others drove back on that Thursday to DC (where I dropped off, as that's where I still had a residence) and my two colleagues returned to Boston. I-95 was completely empty.

My next flight wasn't until November 12th (I had driven from DC to Boston, as flights from the DC-area airports were still very limited). I flew early again from BOS to RDU, I think the same time frame as before. We went on an emergency diversion, and we were told we were landing at LGA. Flew very near the AA Santo Domingo flight that had just crashed and we could see the wreckage, and thought that 9/11 had just started again, and that something had happened to our plane. Fire trucks met us at the gate at LGA. The airport turned to chaos, and everyone was told to leave. Everything then cancelled, and all tunnels and bridges throughout NYC were closed. I immediately asked a colleague to get a mini-van (there were four of us) as the rest of us searched luggage that was sprawled throughout the airport and we were so lucky to get one of the last cars/vans available, and drove back to BOS that day.

I'll never forget that period. Crying as I typed this. Sorry for the length.