A John Carr Retrospective on 9/11—Part 2

Part 1 of this incredible narrative from former NATCA President John Carr ran Monday.  Today, we continue with what happened on “That Day” from a perspective you’ve probably not seen before:

We tracked Bill Peacock (FAA Head of Air Traffic) down as he was getting packed.  Bill was getting swamped with calls and data.  We were very collaborative with the FAA at the time and when Bill opened his door he did not hesitate for a moment, but rather said, “The airspace is shut down.  The agency is sending the jet down to take me back to Washington, do you want to go with me?”

I had a brief discussion with Ruth; I had Jill with me, our next NEB meeting had already been booked for the following week in Cleveland which was my hometown, Pat Forrey was also at the meeting and could travel with me, and I had a rental car which was becoming more precious by the minute.  I also felt responsible for the five region’s worth of people we had stranded in New Orleans, some from the Pacific Northwest and thought I owed it to them to try and work with their leadership to not only get them home but keep them on excused absence while they traveled.  Ruth immediately volunteered to travel back to DC with Peacock.  Bill said, “Get your stuff, when they get here we got to go.  When we get up there us and the President will be the only things moving besides medivacs and fighter jets.”

The rest of the day was a blur of briefings to the facreps as news came in; attempts to get cars, trains, buses, anything that would move going north, west, or east, and calls from facilities involved in the terrorist attacks regarding tactical situations they were facing.  I had a sense of foreboding the entire day, sure that I knew someone in one of the buildings, sure that a friend of mine was dead or dying.

I did not, but late in the morning I received word that Doug McKay, a controller at Boston Center, had lost his wife on American 11.  She had left the house early that morning, stuffing mailboxes along her street with thank you cards to her neighbors for a great summer, and then boarded her flight for the West Coast.  Doug got up later and drove in to work, only to be met at the gate by his co-workers who already knew the horror facing their co-worker and his two young children.

As a union we resolved that Doug would never return to work airplanes in the building that had handled his wife’s final flight, and together we donated enough sick leave to see him to his rightful retirement a year and a half later.  I carried a handwritten scrap of paper with the sick leave hours Doug needed in my wallet for almost two years.

I never called the national office on 9-11 to check up on them; I never once worried that they were anything but safe and doing whatever needed to be done.  I never checked in with the Center facreps or any of the facilities to see how the shutdown was progressing; there was no need.  It was going perfectly because it had to, and because perfection is the minimum that you will accept from yourselves and from each other.

When the order went out to land everything at the nearest airport 700 aircraft were landed in the first four minutes, 2800 in the first hour and over 4500 were put down in first three hours with over a million passengers on board without a single incident.

I said then and I maintain now that the landing of those aircraft stands as the single greatest feat in all of air traffic control history, and it stands in the top ten on any greatest-in-aviation history list unrestricted.  The combined efforts of air traffic controllers, engineers, airways facilities specialists and other aviation safety related professionals who contributed to that magic trick were then and are now completely unfathomable.  You might as well have pulled a bunny out of your scope.

Many in the aviation community, myself included, stand convinced that your grounding of the system that day prevented further attacks.  In the rush to disembark passengers in far away places all evidence of the box cutters and Mace they may have carried on was carried off of the airplanes with them.  I suspect that attacks were set to continue on a very rigid clockwork basis throughout the day; I don’t believe that the terrorists ever contemplated that the capitalist Yankee scum would simply shut down the money pipe and put all the airplanes on the ground.

I think the terrorists believed they were going to be able to have free reign, knowing that we would not shoot down every airliner over populated America and thinking we could not, in all their created chaos, safely bring down the rest.  If you think like a terrorist for a moment a day of rolling thunder from sea to shining sea is not outside the realm of possibility when you begin your morning by murdering almost 3,000 innocent people and reducing two hundred and twenty stories to rubble in twenty six seconds.

In New Orleans it took a day or two but slowly small gaggles of rental cars banded together and headed out towards facilities in New York, Charlotte, Seattle, anywhere in the five regions where a family member could come out to the interstate and get their family member as the convoy drove by.  By car, bus, rail…the reps found a way to get out of town and get back to their families and their facilities.

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11 Joel Brown, Martin Cole, Mike Hull, Dennis McGee, Dan Ossinger, Wade Stanfield, Jerry Whitaker, Ruth Marlin and Dale Wright manned the Emergency Operations Center at the FAA on the 10^th Floor, rotating through 24 hour shifts much of the time.  These men and women saw and heard things normal people shouldn’t see and hear.

Missing crop dusters full of anthrax.  Cargo ships in the Baltimore Harbor with suspected WMD on the top containers, aimed up the Potomac at the Capitol.  Student pilots from foreign countries enrolling for more flying lessons.  The FAA needed these men and women to make immediate and binding decisions on behalf of the entire union.  No phone call, no get-back-to-you, no lemme check.  This was FBI/CIA/NSA/FAA type stuff that I and the rest of the NEB would need to stand behind then and forevermore.  These professionals were so damn good it is scary now to remember, they really were.  They pitched a no-hitter for us, for the system, and for their country.

I remember one evening Mike Hull calling me about ten o’clock one evening, sounding like he was ninety years old.  These folks were pulling 24 hour shifts and sticking around afterwards to help because the work was top secret, it was interesting and the adrenalin in the room was like drinking five cases of 5 Hour Energy Shots.  “Johnny, they just rolled the bomb squad for a device they found outside the front door here at Headquarters.  While I’m evac’d I’m gonna grab a smoke and something to eat.  We’re going to get XYZ signed so they can resume sightseeing flights over the Grand Canyon first thing tomorrow.  Hey, they found that missing glider.  Do you want me to get you a sandwich?”  I thought I was talking to freaking James Bond or something.  “Yeah, Mike, get me a shoe phone.”