What follows is exactly as I wrote it on September 12, 2001
Compared to others’ stories, mine is nothing. But people have been asking me where I was, and I wanting more details when I said I was in NY, and on a plane, and I realized I wanted to write it all down.
I’d actually been planning to write it down from the start. This was supposed to be an “airline-flight-from-hell” kind of story. But before it was over, it had become a hell of another sort altogether. A very real one. And deep tragedy had overtaken my light farce like those clouds of dust rolling down Manhattan streets.
It starts – well, it starts in Iceland, I guess. I was there for a bit over a week. A short trip by my standards, but it’s not a big place. And I padded it out with a few days in NY on either end – mostly because I got a great deal by flying through NY. So I returned from Iceland on the 8th. I spent Sunday in Central Park, and had dinner down in lower Manhattan at the Pakistan Tea Shop, on Church near Reade. This is just a hole in the wall but it always has half a dozen cabs parked outside, because it serves excellent and cheap Halal food all night. [It is also, incidentally, now inside the Police cordons around Ground Zero]
Monday, I went to lower Midtown to check out B&H Cameras (an amazing place – it’s like Santa’s Workshop for cameras, with Hassidim standing in for the elves). I was down there with all my camera gear [and had I been there 24 hours later, I would’ve been watching the WTC towers collapse].
My United Airlines flight departed out of JFK at 5:00pm. Generally leaving at 3:15 from Midtown barely gets me there in time, and this time I had a bag to check. So I decided to try to leave extra early. Unfortunately, as I dragged my bags to the curb at 2:50, thunder boomed. Way out in the Atlantic, a tropical storm was headed north towards the Maritimes. It was casting off thunderstorms in its wake. In the torrential rain, suddenly every cab was occupied. I huddled under an awning, hoping to flag someone down. I had my goretex jacket with me (necessary gear for Iceland) but it was so hot I couldn’t keep it done up. Fortunately, the shower was brief, if intense. But by the time I finally flagged down a cab, I was running late.
The trip out to JFK was the usual slow slog. There was more rain, and traffic slowed even more. It was almost five as we circled the airport drive, on our way to terminal 7. The cab driver sat up suddenly and looked out his window, looking back. “We have a flat tire!” he announced. What? I looked around. He was busy peering back at his tire. We missed the turn to terminal 7. “Pull over!” I yelled at him. There wasn’t really any place to do that – there’s little shoulder there at the best of times, and hoardings and equipment from random construction was occupying it. We rolled to a halt, more or less in the main traffic lanes. It would take forever to fix the flat, forever to go around the airport again to Terminal 7, and there was no other way to drive. I threw the money at him, climbed out and grabbed my bags. Facing two lanes of hurtling cabs and irate limo drivers, I started to jog back towards the terminal. On the positive side, my gear was in a pack and a couple of shoulder bags, so carrying it wasn’t difficult. On the negative side, the gear was heavy, the air was hot and humid, and I was out of time. And traffic was trying to kill me.
Into the terminal and up to the United counter, where there seemed to be two agents actually dealing with passengers and four agents doing, well, it wasn’t clear exactly. But they weren’t dealing with customers. I was in the business class line (because I have “premier” status on United, not because I had a business ticket) but it was moving even slower than the economy line.
Finally I got to the counter. My only hope was that perhaps the thunderstorms had delayed flights. I told the agent I was on the flight to Seattle. “Well, you missed that,” he replied. I started to tell him about the flat tire in the cab, but quickly gave up to think about my options. United has only one direct flight from NY to Seattle: the one I had just missed. Perhaps I could just ask to be rebooked on the one at 5pm on Tuesday, the 11th. I was weighing another day in NY against another $80 in cab fare to get back into Manhattan and out to JFK again. Meanwhile the agent was prodding his computer terminal. “I can get you on a flight to the west coast with a connection to Seattle, but you’ll have to move quick. It leaves at 5:20” My thoughts of flying out the evening of the 11th evaporated.
[Had I stayed, I would still be stuck in NY]
I thanked him, grabbed my bags, and went through security. The flight to San Francisco I was now on left out of Terminal 6, but there was a shuttle bus that ran between the terminals. Fortunately this left almost as soon as I arrived, and I got to the gate with minutes to spare.
I walked onto a packed 767. My seat was literally the last open seat in the aircraft. But at least this was a wide-body 767, and not the narrow-body 757 that does the Seattle route. [Only now, in retrospect, do those simple plane models that I’ve flown so often seem darkly ominous.] I would have an aisle seat, with just one neighbor in my row at the window. As I settled into the seat, he asked me if I had been on the 4:30 flight. I summarized my situation, and he explained that half the people on this airplane had been on a 4:30 flight to SF that had been cancelled. Hence what would’ve been a half-full flight was now packed to the gills.
There was a delay before we pushed back from the gate. We taxied for a while, then stopped. Another short move, and we stopped again. We waited. And waited.
Puzzled, I put on the headphones and tuned into channel 9. United flights typically put the pilot chatter through on this frequency. The pilots can turn it off if they want, but usually they leave it on so you can hear exactly what they hear and say over whatever frequency they are using. It quickly became apparent things weren’t looking good. Air Traffic Control was using the runways for arrivals only. Thunderstorms were expected to shut down the airport at any minute. They were scrambling to fit airplanes everywhere they could. All the gates were full, but they needed to open some up for arriving flights. Departing flights, and idle aircraft, were getting stuffed onto taxi ways nose to tail, parked on inactive runways, slipped in anywhere there was room. Realizing they were in for a long wait, pilots were calling up and asking for permission to shut down their engines to conserve fuel. Our flight did the same. Our pilot came on the intercom and explained the situation. We were going to wait.
And wait. And wait. The thunderstorms passed, and a few flights took off. Many more landed. More thunderstorms moved in. [You wonder: if the storms had come 12 hours later – as unlikely as morning thunderstorms are – would the hijackers have had difficulty finding New York? Would their flights have been delayed? Would the flight out of Newark that hit the Pentagon never have left? The imponderables mount.] On board our flight, people were walking their kids around, talking on cell phones, going back to the lavatories. Many of the people had been in NY to watch the New York Open Tennis match, so there was a lot of tennis talk in the aisle. The flight attendants distributed snacks. They started playing the movie.
Meanwhile, on Channel 9, more aircraft were calling in. Some couldn’t get to their gates. The ATC guy was sounding more and more harried. Now planes were calling in to report their crews were going to run over the maximum work hours before they would be arriving at their destination, so once the aircraft started moving again they were going to have to get out of line and go back to their gate for a fresh crew. I was really wishing I had made it onto my Seattle flight. Then I heard them call in: they were still on the ground too, up near the front of the line. But they now had a problem: because they had been close to takeoff, they had been running their engines longer than most. They no longer had enough fuel to get to Seattle. When they line started moving, they were going to have to get out, go back to the gate to refuel, and then get in line again. Wow: things could be worse.
Puzzled, I put on the headphones and tuned into channel 9. United flights typically put the pilot chatter through on this frequency. The pilots can turn it off if they want, but usually they leave it on so you can hear exactly what they hear and say over whatever frequency they are using. It quickly became apparent things weren’t looking good. Air Traffic Control was using the runways for arrivals only. Thunderstorms were expected to shut down the airport at any minute. They were scrambling to fit airplanes everywhere they could. All the gates were full, but they needed to open some up for arriving flights. Departing flights, and idle aircraft, were getting stuffed onto taxi ways nose to tail, parked on inactive runways, slipped in anywhere there was room. Realizing they were in for a long wait, pilots were calling up and asking for permission to shut down their engines to conserve fuel. Our flight did the same. Our pilot came on the intercom and explained the situation. We were going to wait.
And wait. And wait. The thunderstorms passed, and a few flights took off. Many more landed. More thunderstorms moved in. [You wonder: if the storms had come 12 hours later – as unlikely as morning thunderstorms are – would the hijackers have had difficulty finding New York? Would their flights have been delayed? Would the flight out of Newark that hit the Pentagon never have left? The imponderables mount.] On board our flight, people were walking their kids around, talking on cell phones, going back to the lavatories. Many of the people had been in NY to watch the New York Open Tennis match, so there was a lot of tennis talk in the aisle. The flight attendants distributed snacks. They started playing the movie.
Meanwhile, on Channel 9, more aircraft were calling in. Some couldn’t get to their gates. The ATC guy was sounding more and more harried. Now planes were calling in to report their crews were going to run over the maximum work hours before they would be arriving at their destination, so once the aircraft started moving again they were going to have to get out of line and go back to their gate for a fresh crew. I was really wishing I had made it onto my Seattle flight. Then I heard them call in: they were still on the ground too, up near the front of the line. But they now had a problem: because they had been close to takeoff, they had been running their engines longer than most. They no longer had enough fuel to get to Seattle. When they line started moving, they were going to have to get out, go back to the gate to refuel, and then get in line again. Wow: things could be worse.
Finally, the engines started. The passengers cheered. We took off. The passengers cheered again (and when we landed in SF they cheered a third time). We were in the air…at 9:20, four full hours after the flight was supposed to leave, and six and a half hours after I had first tried to hail a cab in Manhattan. Ahead of me: five and a half hours in the air, and then I would be in SF, not Seattle. Obviously I had missed my connecting flight. Well, I would deal with that later. I tried to get some sleep.
Next: SFO
Next: SFO
