This is my husband's story from that awful morning ten years ago, committed to written words for the first time. May it serve in some tiny way to honor the heroes, the victims, and the families of those so unfathomably effected on September 11, 2001.
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(Listening to the firefighters of the FDNYon a YouTube account of that day, I feel ashamed to even tell my story. Climbing 80 flights of stairs hoping to save people, knowing what awaited them. Yet they kept climbing up and up until the moment the South Tower fell. I cannot imagine such bravery. ~Randy)
I began my shift at the Colorado Springs Air Traffic Control Facility--located not at the airport but on nearby Peterson Air Force Base--on the morning of September 11, 2001 in the normal fashion: I worked a few airplanes then we had our normal morning crew briefing. Walking through the breakroom after the meeting, we noticed the television coverage of smoke rising from the North Tower of the World Trade Center as CNN explained that a plane had crashed. Of course our assumption was that a small aircraft had accidentally struck the building. One among us wondered how a general aviation pilot could make sure an overt mistake.
I continued across the hall to the radar room, thinking the story was as simple as that. I began working airplanes on a somewhat busy Tuesday morning, when a fellow controller came into the room and informed us that a second plane has struck the second (South) Tower and that it was a commercial airliner. I wondered what was going on, but was primarily focused on the traffic in my care.
The next few hours are still a blur. I know I got a break and went to watch the television. I remember the flames, the burning. I saw that the Pentagon had also been attacked. Now I knew that something really bad had begun. Something was spiraling out of control: We were under attack and I wondered how much worse it could get. There seemed to be nothing I could do. I went back on position and continued working aircraft. Within minutes, a supervisor came over to my position and told me "All aircraft must land immediately." She handed me a sheet of paper, an official FAA order, which I read from, announcing over the frequency to all the aircraft in our airspace that they had to land. There were two of us in the radar room--working planes within 30 miles of our airport--and we began sequencing planes into a pattern in order to have them land either in the Springs or at a nearby facility. Two other controllers in the tower halted planes on the tarmac, returning them to their gates. They also informed general aviation pilots who were performing their touch-and-go exercises that they had to land.
We began to receive unscheduled air carrier presence in our airspace as those pilots had been instructed to find the closest airport and land. It wasn't the busiest I've ever been and larger facilities actually had to close down runways to create parking for the extra aircraft, but those moments, however many of them there were, were hectic: I was scared, not knowing just what was going on.
In the middle of this massive shutdown we learned that the South Tower, the second to be hit, had fallen. I recall saying, "Oh My God!" I recall thinking that once I'd gotten all my planes down safely I had to call home to make sure they were okay. On my next break I saw the North Tower fall and learned about the crash into that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
With no planes to work, we wondered what we would do; a short-lived concern as it became evident with the verbal command to: "Watch the airspace for any aircraft not in communication with air traffic control." Fighter jets were on their way to fly over NORAD and we were to communicate with them in the event that such a "primary target" appeared on the scopes. Shortly after the F-16s begin their flights over NORAD we spotted a "primary target" coming off of a general aviation airport within ten miles of our location or within twenty miles of NORAD. We radioed the F-16s and they responded, "We've got it." In the twenty years I've done this job (ten years at that time) I've never seen any aircraft fly that fast. It seemed like they covered those twenty miles in a matter of seconds. They intercepted the plane, whose pilot was unaware of the morning's events, and escorted him to the ground without incident.
With the horror of the morning settling in, and some of us unable to get into communication with our families, we began to ask if we would be able to go home after our shifts or if we would be retained for security reasons. President Bush was in flight at the time and we were told that he was coming to NORAD and would be landing at our airport. No one would be leaving until the President was secured within that underground facility, deep in Cheyenne Mountain. Moments later we were informed that a United flight from San Diego was missing, was not in communication with air traffic control, and might indeed be headed for NORAD. We manned the scopes and shortened our "on position time" in order to give each other opportunities to communicate to family members that we might not be coming home that night.
President Bush in fact did not come our way and the San Diego United flight simply had a very badly timed case of radio equipment failure. We were going to be able to go home. Little did I know as I passed through the gate at Peterson Air Force Base, that the protocol would change, that I had just left the Base on its last day of operation as normal.
I returned on Friday, after my two-day mid-week "weekend" to a very different work environment. As a matter of fact my supervisor had to call me with directions around the barricades, had to instruct me on how to get to a job I'd been driving to for six years. I expected increased security, but had not realized the degree to which readiness had been escalated. Every vehicle was searched by bomb-sniffing dogs; sometimes it would take a half-hour to get onto the Base. And the one thing I will always remember, the one thing that signified that the world had changed was having machine gun nests with 18-to-20-year-olds pointing machine guns at my car as I came to work over the next few months. Not even the snipers walking around our tower's catwalk those same months--only their heads and the tips of their guns visible to us--would have that effect on me.
My kids were one and two years old. It's sad that they will never know the world, this country as it was before that day. I'm proud that in fact there was something that I could do that morning and that along with my brother and sister controllers, we got it done.
In the years that followed, the FAA decided to develop a strategic plan to put into place should U.S. airspace need to be shut down again. After much research, the agency came to the conclusion that what we had done in fact couldn't be planned for, that leaving the emergency in the hands of the controllers on the job at the time was really the only way with which the situation could be dealt. There was no plan for what we had done and there never would be.
I cannot imagine going a day without my family much less ten years. My heart goes out to all of those whose reality was altered materially more, whose horror and grief so eclipses the slights of my experience that the two cannot be compared. I can adjust to more security at work, to a new protocol there. What I could not adjust to would be a new protocol at home.
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