Waypoints

AOPA Pilot Editor in Chief Tom Haines has been flying for more than 20 years.

September 11, 2001 — This evening, after a day of watching endless news accounts about the airliners plowing into the World Trade Center towers, plunging into the Pentagon, and crashing short of a target in rural Pennsylvania, I step out the front door for a break and some fresh air. It is a spectacular late-summer evening. For major media impact, could the terrorists have picked a more brilliantly clear day to send the twin towers crumbling?

Clear as the toll of a bell, with a setting sun casting orange glows on a very few gauzy clouds, the sky is beautiful. Stepping onto the front porch, I notice it immediately. The absence of airplanes in the sky didn't register with a neighbor pulling weeds from her garden next door. But to me, the missing contrails and lack of light glinting off of fuselages or the distant drone of airplanes made the evening seem empty and incomplete. Like other pilots, I study the sky a lot, both for weather patterns and to see the airplanes out and about. Tonight it is unnervingly quiet.

Normally, we get a lot of traffic overhead. Airliners headed to Baltimore from the west pass just north of my house. Traffic to Washington Dulles International, only 30 nautical miles to the south, passes just west of my house when it is landing to the south, or sometimes overhead, depending on which runway is in use. In fact, I can lie on my back in my family room and stare up through the skylights to see airliners passing overhead — lined up all in a row and strung out for miles paralleling the Catoctin Mountains ridgeline.

On stellar nights like this one, general aviation is prominent too. The traffic for the ILS to Runway 23 at nearby Frederick Municipal Airport in Frederick, Maryland, passes just to the east of here. The VOR-A approach bisects my neighborhood. There's usually a Maryland State Police helicopter or Robinson R22 within earshot. The sky should be full of arriving airliners and general aviation tonight.

But it's silent outside. For the first time in modern history, the federal government has grounded all civilian flights. Early today, I watched Flight Explorer on my computer at the office tick down from more than 4,000 airplanes in the U.S. air traffic system at about 10 a.m. EDT to zero by early afternoon. The electronic map of the United States seemed eerily blank, as if aliens had crept in and stolen all the airplanes, leaving only stranded, bewildered passengers and pilots behind.

This is one of those days that we will all ask about in the future. Where were you when the terrorists hit?

I was a little kid sitting cross-legged in front of our black-and-white television late on Sunday, July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong so far away took those small steps for mankind. I credit those dramatic Apollo missions for feeding the imagination of that little kid and ultimately propelling him to the airport for a first flight lesson less than a decade later.

I was in my dorm room at college when I heard that John Lennon had been shot. I was in that same dorm when I heard a crass co-ed outside my window yell to someone else, "Hey, Reagan croaked. It's on the news." The president lived through the shooting, of course, but it was unclear early on that he would. I was driving my car south down Washington Street in Alexandria, Virginia, en route to a doctor's appointment when via the radio I heard about the Challenger explosion. An earlier generation may remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot or when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

I just tucked my two girls, ages six and eight, into bed. Will they remember this day? Do I want them to?

This evening I had to answer their countless questions about the day's incidents. I thought about the girls all day as the events unfolded. I tried to think how we might discuss what happened without frightening them. I was anxious to get home to see and hold them but dreading the difficult conversation. I felt like I had prepared myself for the questions they might ask. But they threw me off balance with the very first one: "Daddy, what's terrorism?" Well, there's a question and I don't have a good answer. "Why would they kill themselves? Didn't they know they would die too?" "Did the pilots do it? Why would the pilots allow that to happen?"

For a while today I thought pilots were going to be made out the bad guys, but fortunately common sense reigned and it was pointed out that no pilot would intentionally fly into a building, even with a gun to his or her head. If you know you're going to die, why take all of those others with you?

From an aviation standpoint, it remains to be seen how today's events will affect us. Will we face considerably more regulation and security? Certainly at the airline level we will. But what about restrictions to VFR flight? Will the government demand that it know whom we are, where we are, and why we are flying — at all times — in an effort to prevent another suicide bombing? It unfortunately seems a likely scenario, even though an airliner, under the strictest of air traffic control, couldn't be stopped. Obviously a GA airplane wasn't tapped for the missions because the impact simply wouldn't be great enough — either to damage the buildings as seriously or to take as many lives, the terrorists' real goal. Plus, the incident causes fear among all airline travelers. For GA, it actually makes us seem more secure. What terrorist is going to bother nabbing a Bonanza, particularly after these spectacular incidents? Seventy-four gallons of avgas just doesn't make much of a show compared to thousands of gallons of jet fuel aboard a wide-body airliner.

As the clock on the wall ticks this black-letter day to a close — relegates it to history — I think about my airplane parked safely in its hangar. What will its next flight be like? How different will it be?

The window next to my computer is open. Outside in the lonely darkness I hear the distant rumble of fighters patrolling the airspace over Camp David where the vice president is staying during this uncertain time. Is the rumble the sound of freedom or the start of a police state? On this day when we can't fly I am reminded that we really do take for granted the freedoms we have. The last time I flew it didn't occur to me to be thankful for the chance to go buzz around the pattern if I wanted to. Next flight I'll be sure to take a moment to appreciate the freedom to take off unnoticed from our nontowered airport and skim over ridges to no place in particular. After today it's obvious we don't know when or how world events will next affect such opportunities.

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