9/11 Flight Crew Memorial

Trident

New Member
Tomorrow, September 11 2008, will mark the 7th year anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

Some may know that there is a 9/11 Flight Crew Memorial in Grapevine, Texas. http://www.911flightcrewmemorial.org/

While there were no Air Traffic Controllers killed in the attacks, I am a firm believer that the people of this country owe the controllers working that horrible day, debt of respect and gratitude for their courage, professionalism, and skill to clear the entire continental US of all aircraft in record time---An unpresedented event that has never occurred before, and will hopefully never happen again.

To all the controllers working that September morning, and to those that continue the job, THANK YOU!
 
We still have the strip grounding all flights that day...

What the ATC system did that day was amazing, there was no plan for it.
 
9/11 was the most surreal day of my life. It was so beautiful here, and a few miles away that horror was going on.

When I first found out I was walking out of math class in high school. My friends told me that the World Trade Center had collapsed, and I thought they were just saying something stupid to see if I'd be dumb enough to show a reaction. My school wouldn't tell us what was going on (I still don't understand why...so many of us knew people there, we should have been told), so I didn't believe it was real for almost an hour.

I went to Manhattan the next day...I just felt like I had to see it to believe it. I'll never forget all that dust in the air, coating everything. Just surreal.
 
Surreal is definitely the word to describe that day... My high school announced it to us after the second plane hit the towers, since we could see the smoke out the windows anyway, and we spent the rest of the day glued to the TVs in all of our classes. Since we're so close to Manhattan and so many of the students' parents worked at the World Trade Center... it just made it that much more emotional and terrifying... watching all these people line up outside the office trying to call their parents and relatives hoping to hear some good news.

So here's to anyone who helped out in any way, whether you're a controller, a firefighter, a volunteer, or just someone who lent out a room for the night when so many people were unable to enter or leave the city to get home.
 
watching all these people line up outside the office trying to call their parents and relatives hoping to hear some good news.

I think the best moment of my life was while I was sitting in Art History class around 1:30 and the nurse came in and passed me a yellow post-it note that just said, "Mom called, Dad landed in California." Since we had no media access and the teachers told us nothing, all I'd heard from the rumor mill was that private jets from Newark or Teterboro had hit the buildings. And my dad's a Falcon pilot out of Teterboro who had an 8AM takeoff that morning. My dad was grounded in California all week. He said that while he was landing he saw a 747 from China being escorted in to land with four F-16s.

Sadly, another girl in that class, her uncle LeRoy Homer, was the first officer of Flight 93.

That afternoon my mom, sister, and I went to keep some friends company a few blocks from us. Their cousins showed up (around this time of day, I guess it was). They had made it out of NY...I think they walked across one of the bridges. The parents had raced to their kids' elementary or day care school, which was right by the WTC, to grab their kids and haul out of the city. While they were picking them up the second plane hit, and these little 4 or 5 year old kids watched people jumping from the building. We spend the afternoon listening to the radio and looking online while keeping kiddie cartoons on to try and distract them. I haven't seen them since, but I hope they were too young to understand.
 
I think the best moment of my life was while I was sitting in Art History class around 1:30 and the nurse came in and passed me a yellow post-it note that just said, "Mom called, Dad landed in California." Since we had no media access and the teachers told us nothing, all I'd heard from the rumor mill was that private jets from Newark or Teterboro had hit the buildings. And my dad's a Falcon pilot out of Teterboro who had an 8AM takeoff that morning. My dad was grounded in California all week. He said that while he was landing he saw a 747 from China being escorted in to land with four F-16s.

Sadly, another girl in that class, her uncle LeRoy Homer, was the first officer of Flight 93.


Wow.. that must have been a tough time for you... not having any information until 1:30. I'm glad it turned out ok for you though. I was concerned about my father and my cousin who both worked in the WTC area, but I learned fairly early in the day that they were both fine. However, in addition to knowing several people who died in the towers, two relatives of a family friend were passengers on Flight 93, so my mind was really all over the place that day trying to think of every single person I knew that I should be worried about.
 
I was a Mormon back then, living in Maracaibo, Venezuela as a missionary. Details about the attacks came in bits and pieces -- the local stations were mostly watching CNN and then trying to translate it before rebroadcasting the images. I saw the ticker at the bottom say that the towers fell several minutes before they actually had it on video, and thought that they must've been mistaken. It was a confusing experience... at first we were told that someone had set off nukes in New York and Washington. And because the media down there tended to be more sensational than back home, there were reports about new hijackings and bombings for a while afterwards. We wondered if somebody had declared war on the U.S.
 
I was a flt attendant on a flight that morning, was rather unnerving to go from cruise to landing at IAD in what seemed like 5 minutes. All we were told was "Sit down quick, we're landing NOW and don't let anyone near the cockpit" I'll be happy to never experience a descent like that again... Was “lost in the system” for about 7 days there…

The scene at the airport after landing was absolutely indescribable - its 7 years later and it seems like yesterday.
 
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