9-11, September 11, 2001, By Anonymous

From MemoryArchive

Who: Anonymous
What: 9/11 Terroist Attacks
When: September 11, 2001
Where: El Segunda, Ca

El Segundo, CA

I'm a licensed private pilot, and my recollection of September 11th 2001 and the days immediately following turns largely on how those events affected aviation.

The grounding of all aircraft flying in the United States airspace was unprecedented. But that?s what the FAA ordered on that morning, when it became obvious that the crashes of commercial airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and into the ground in Pennsylvania, were not accidental.

My husband and I live near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), and there?s a constant stream of air traffic arriving at and departing from LAX. In daylight hours you can see them arriving, spaced in some cases only moments apart, a carefully-choreographed dance that brings the aircraft down onto LAX's four runways. At night you can see the chain of airplanes like a chain of glittering diamonds shining in the night as the arriving traffic is formed up into a line in trail for landing at the airport.

Well, as my husband and I drove down Hawthorne Boulevard to work on the morning of September 11th, there were no aircraft in the sky at all. Nothing was arriving at LAX. Nothing was departing. The sky was empty and silent, eerily so.

The grounding continued for several days, the FAA re-opening the airspace only gradually, first to commercial flights. One of my recollections of that time was watching a 747 flying a tight pattern to land at LAX the second or third day after the 11th. This was the first aircraft I?d seen land since the 11th.

The Fixed-Base Operator (FBO) (the business entity that rented me the aircraft I flew and provided other services to me and to other private pilots) that I flew with was in a world of hurt because of the flight restrictions. Because of fears, all unfounded, that terrorists might try to use small private aircraft to carry out further attacks against the United States, the FAA was loath to allow private non-commercial aircraft to resume flying within crowded metropolitan areas. This meant that those who depended for their livelihood on aircraft rentals, sales of fuel, and other services to the private pilot community were badly hurt by the flight ban. Aviation businesses are mostly a labor of love; the way you make a small fortune in aviation is by starting with a large one. Every FBO in the metropolitan LA area that was covered by the flight ban was hurting.

That?s what I remember most about the events of 9/11 that directly impacted me: the way the people who depended on aviation to make a living were hurt by the flight ban. To me, many of these people represent another sort of casualty of the attacks: the businesses and people who were hurt financially (in some cases hurt so badly they never recovered) by actions growing out of the aftermath of 9/11.

Silent skies and the silent, unseen despair of the people who lived by aviation were the aftermath of the attacks.

Co-opted from Wikipedia's 9/11 Personal Experiences