FriendlySkies

Eighteen years have passed and it still seems like yesterday.

FlyinHawaiian

Proudly flying UA out of EWR this morning.

Mr. Vker

I was just going to bump this. I read the first post every Sept 11.

Mr. Vker

I believe the transcripts are posted, but here is audio. Some graphic language.

princetonflyer

I too read the first post every year. Never fails to bring tears ... 9/11 is the day THE WORLD changed, at least for every American. Travel safe everyone.

jhayes_1780

As they have done for a while now, the United's AFA site replaced their landing page with the original 9/11 tribute:
https://unitedafa.org

MostlyUA

Like everybody, I remember 9/11. I had a VM that morning from a client in the WTC who died in the attack; for months, I couldn't bear to erase his message. Finally, I had my helpdesk record the message and send it to his widow.

I had flown UA 93 just a few days before 9/11. I flew on the first day that flights were allowed to fly out of SFO. It was nearly empty with seat occupied by United staff. I remember how grateful everybody was that I was on the flight.

I try to fly every 9/11 since.

fezzington

Thank you for sharing... I almost never go onto the homepage so I would have missed it.... Unfortunately, Linda Farrow, the former MEC President who read the Eulogy at the Chicago Memorial Service (posted on that landing page), earned her forever wings last October.

COSPILOT

Unless you are a Pilot, I imagine this is likely difficult to understand. However, it brings home the chaos for everyone. Living in COS, we yanked my younger siblings out of school, as in the moment we didn't know what the next target was. In my case my Parents asked my wife and I to keep them as far away from Norad as possible. That day will forever be etched in my memories, only matched by my wedding day.

radonc1

I will be happy to relate my experience on that day as well as the week afterwards.

My wife and I were at a conference in San Fran and had arrived there from CLE on a Saturday. The meeting progressed well until that morning when I actually watched the second event occur in the hotel lounge while eating an early breakfast. Needless to say, the conference ended and many people rented cars or buses to drive back across the country.
San Francisco was completely shut down for 2 days. All bridges were closed and people were told to stay home. The Hilton we were in actually told us not to go out of the property. They fed us and housed us without charge for the 3 days we stayed there.
One interesting outcome of this was that on the third night, a number of us decided to go out for dinner and we were able to get into a 3 star restaurant without reservations (standard 3-4 month wait) that night. It was about 1/2 full and the food was great. Who knows where the help came from.
By Thursday, we realized that SFO was not going to be opening anytime soon. Since we were on CO, they told us that if we could get down to LAX, we could catch a flight on Sat. We did need to get back home since our 3 children were with a baby sitter who had not planned on their parents taking an extra week to get home.

So on Thursday, we managed to rent a car and drove down to LA. It was surreal since overpasses were draped in flags and people just standing there watching the traffic. Needless to say, traffic was light. We did luck out in that my in-laws lived in LA, so we had a place to stay.

On Sat., CO first told us that the only flight that day from LAX-CLE was booked full but we went to the airport anyway. The airport roadways were closed and the only way to get in was to board a bus which would drop you off at the deserted terminals. It is the only time in my life when I didn't see any civilian cars in LAX. Totally empty.

As stated, the CO terminal (7) was empty, but there was one flight going which was the CLE one. It also was only about 20% full and we were upgraded. It was a very interesting flight. They boarded us in about 5 minutes, slammed the door shut, fired up the engines and literally without stopping taxied to the nearest runway and took off. The flight was about the fastest mid-con I have been on. No turns or banks and literally a direct approach and landing. We zipped up to the gate, opened the door and told us to leave the airport. CLE was also deserted as well.

All in all, it was a surreal period of time in my life.

nnn

Great story. I can say from personal experience that SFO opened for a few flights on Friday 9/14. I was on one of them. Some friends and I had long-standing plans to go to LAS that weekend, and we decided to go ahead with the trip. Our flight was on the old National Airlines, and that was one of the first flights out of SFO. We accounted for about half the passengers on the flight, as nearly everyone else obviously chose not to fly that day. It took off about five hours late, and we spent that time as some of the only people at the nearby airport bar. The airport terminal (T1, gate 25) was almost completely deserted. Very eerie.

ctownflyer

IIRC, CO was in T6.
I had a LAX-CLE flight booked for 9/12. CO allowed free changes on those through the end of validity and I wound up using it in June.

radonc1

You are of course correct. I should have said simply "The CO terminal"

Continuing on with my travels around 9/11.

Unfortunately, my father of blessed memory was in the final day of his life at that time and I had to travel from CLE to LGA to see him.
It was just after CO re instituted CLE-LGA flights that I flew about 1 week after returning from the West Coast into NYC. I was in the 145 sitting on the one side and the landing pattern was right over ground zero. I actually looked down into the smoking wreckage as we flew over it. Another sight that I will never forget.

When we landed, several things were apparent. The airport had almost no passengers. We were ushered out of the boarding gate area (there were about 15 of us on the flight) and into the main concourse which was deserted (at 5 PM on a Friday, no less). What was crazy was that all the pay phones in the terminal had been torn out . And I do mean "torn". There were dangling wires and some holes where apparently the phone had departed company with the wall reluctantly.

I used a car service to pick me up. The airport itself was empty. In the arrival area, the auto traffic was so sparce that I could literally lie out on the street in front of the terminal without fear of being run over. There was no traffic.

It was very sad that some of the last memories my father had of this planet was watching terrorists smash planes into buildings.

pinniped

Wow...just reading this thread for the first time, thanks to a link from one of the other boards. The OP takes us all right back to that day.

My first post-9/11 flight was with family to visit a friend out on Cape Cod in late September. Flew into BOS on YX - probably was Sept 27 or 28. Fairly empty flight even then.

DenverBrian

Bumping for tomorrow's 19th anniversary. Children born on 9/11/01 are freshmen in college - with a completely new, unique set of issues.