The paramedics worked on the woman on the floor of the jetway for a number of minutes, using drugs, resuscitation equipment, and anything else at their disposal. But it wasn’t long before one of them looked up at me and said, “She didn’t make it.” It’s unclear when she died exactly. It may have been while we were taxiing to the gate.
It was a difficult moment, standing there with the woman’s family. I tried to say a few consoling words. They weren’t weeping; they just looked sad and stricken. My heart went out to them, but I couldn’t stay out there for long because I needed to get back on the plane and say something to the passengers.
The passengers had been understanding and cooperative, and had experienced this incident in full view. I felt they deserved to know the truth. And so I got on the public address system.
“The woman who was ill on our flight was under the care of paramedics out on the jetway,” I said, “but attempts to revive her were not successful.”
There was quiet in the cabin. It was a pretty sobering moment for all of us. Some of the other passengers had watched the woman come onto the plane just like everyone else, put her belongings in the overhead, and settle into her seat. Now, just over an hour after leaving Philadelphia, she was dead.
Because Linda had used emergency medical equipment to help the woman while in flight, we had to wait forty-five minutes for the maintenance staff in Norfolk to replace our medical kit. We also needed to refuel the jet and get a new flight plan. The passengers sat quietly in their seats while we did that.
The woman’s family removed their belongings from the plane—they’d be staying with her body in Norfolk— but their checked baggage, and the woman’s bags, would have to continue on to Florida with us. There was no time to find their specific bags and remove them from the cargo hold. They’d have to be retagged in Florida and sent back to the family.
About five minutes before we were set to take off again, I called the four flight attendants into the cockpit to join me and Rick, the first officer. As the captain, I was the person ultimately responsible for the decisions made that night. I knew it had been stressful for all of us. I wasn’t sure whether the flight attendants felt they could have done more to try to save the woman’s life.
First, I thanked them for their efforts. “You did your best. But as tragic as this outcome was, it would be even more tragic if a stressful situation allowed us to be distracted from our duties going forward.”
The flight attendants looked a bit ashen and weary. “Rick and I here in the cockpit, we’re going to do what we were trained to do,” I said. “We’ll do our checklist. We’ll get the plane into the air. We’ll make it safely down to West Palm. I know you have all of your procedures to do, and I know you’ll do them as you always have. We’ll all need to just fall back on our procedures, and get back into the routine, safe operation that we work so hard to maintain.”
The flight attendants headed back into the cabin. We pulled away from the gate with three fewer passengers than had arrived with us.
The flight from Norfolk to West Palm was routine. We arrived just an hour and fifteen minutes late, and I stood outside the cockpit door as all the passengers deplaned.
“Thank you for your patience this evening,” I said, nodding at them as they passed. They acknowledged my words with slight smiles or nods of their own. And all of us went to bed that night thinking of the family we had left behind in Norfolk.
EARLY ONE Tuesday morning in September 2001, I was driving from my home in Danville to the airport in San Francisco. I had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh, where I was then based, to fly an MD-80 on to Charlotte. I was listening to the radio, an all-news station, and I heard that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.
I parked my car in the airport lot, walked into the terminal, and that’s when I heard that another airplane had hit the South Tower and a third plane had hit the Pentagon.
By 6:30 A.M. Pacific time, every airplane in the skies above the United States had been ordered to land, and the FAA had banned takeoffs of all civilian aircraft. It was clear I wouldn’t be getting to Pittsburgh that day to fly my scheduled flight. (My particular flight was one of some thirty-five thousand canceled that day nationwide.)
I spent a little time in the US Airways operations office in San Francisco, and there were two crews there. Unlike me, they didn’t live in Northern California. They were stranded, and no one knew when planes might fly again. “You’d better get hotel rooms right now,” I suggested, “before they’re all gone.”
I called pilot scheduling and told them that I couldn’t make it to Pittsburgh, obviously, and then I went home and watched CNN. As an American and as a pilot, I found the coverage very hard to take. It was so upsetting and disturbing that, at one point, I had to stop watching. I turned off the TV and went into the backyard to compose myself. It was a beautiful day in California, and it was remarkably quiet outdoors. Because all aircraft were grounded, you couldn’t hear any airplanes flying anywhere. My ears are always pretty attuned to the sounds of jets, and this saddened me.
On Wednesday and most of Thursday, only the military was flying. I felt anxious about the terrorism and the national ground stop instituted by the FAA, and was eager to return to flying. Like so many pilots, I also felt a renewed sense of patriotism. I wanted to fly to prove our system could function, that we could take passengers safely to where they needed to go, and that the terrorists would not succeed.
On Thursday night, I was able to get on a red-eye to Pittsburgh. On Friday morning, I was set to fly again.
It was pretty chaotic in the crew room underneath the terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport. Not all crew members were able to make it in, and so a captain would say, “I have a first officer but need a flight attendant,” and a flight attendant would volunteer to take the trip with him.
Eventually, I was assigned to fly from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. Not many Americans were yet ready to return to the skies, so we took just seven people to Indianapolis and eight people back from there to Pittsburgh.
There were so few of them, they barely outnumbered the crew. We put them all in first class. Some of the passengers said that they were nervous, and I tried to reassure them with small talk when they boarded.
It was just three days after the attacks, and our planes were still vulnerable to terrorism. But I wanted passengers to know that even though the cockpit doors hadn’t yet been strengthened, there was a strengthened resolve among us in the cockpit, and the flight attendants in the cabin. The passengers had strengthened their resolve, too.
“We’re determined not to let anything like this happen again,” I told a few passengers.
The pilots murdered on September 11, 2001, were the very first victims. And so it was natural for pilots to discuss how we might have responded that day. The reality was that all our training until then had been aimed at preventing or managing a potential highjacking, not a kamikaze-style suicide mission.
For airline employees, life is different now. The airline industry suffered a financial collapse after the attacks, and a great many people at the bottom of the seniority list were laid off. So many of them were good pilots, and they are missed.
The attacks of September 11 don’t come into my head as often as they once did. That’s true for a lot of Americans. Time has passed. New tragedies have followed. I’ve piloted hundreds of flights since that day.
But for someone who works for an airline, the reminders are still here, offering reasons for reflection. Sometimes I’ll be at Boston Logan International Airport, passing by the gates from which two of the flights departed on September 11—American Airlines Flight 11 from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and United Airlines Flight 175 from Gate 19 in Terminal C.
There are American flags flying outside both of those gates as silent tributes. They are not part of any formal memorial. They were placed there by airport and airline employees. When I pass the flags, I am reminded of the sense of duty I felt on the day of the attacks—to get back in the air, to keep flying passengers to their destinations, to maintain our way of life.
