Almost History: My 9/11 Flight to JFK

Ten years ago this weekend, I awoke from an Ambien dream in the morning hours on Jet Blue flight #90 from Oakland to JFK Airport in New York.

That morning and the next few days were unusual, to say the least, and while I’ve always thought that I was personally little changed by 9/11, I see now, in retrospect, that no one was immune.

What follows in block quotes are excerpts from the article I wrote over the next couple days, with commentary and perspective added.

Our flight out of Oakland left late, and I did what I could to nap on the overnight. I woke up about 8:30 AM EST, an hour or so away from touchdown.

The plane had individual TV screens in the back of the seat forward, so I was dreamily scanning the shows (ESPN, ESPN2, golf channel, Fox sports, all the high-information stations).

The morning news show on Bloomberg had a story about an explosion of some kind at the World Trade Center.

That's weird, I thought.

Well, obviously, it got weirder. From my airline seat I watched the story unfold - seeing live the second plane go in, the huge buildings collapse into rubble, getting word of some kind of fire at the Pentagon, and rumors of other explosions, all of which seemed to have something to do with airliners.

And there we were... in an airliner, just a few minutes from Manhattan, coming in for a landing.

A few thoughts passed through my mind: that it was a private pilot hot-dogging, showing off how he could slip between the two towers and not quite making it. Then, with the second hit, that this was a weird way to demonstrate labor issues (not enough pay for pilots?), or, as my imagination engaged, that some high-tech beam was taking over the navigation of the planes and sending them into buildings.

But the simplest explanation, however horrific, seemed to be the truth: we were under attack by so-far unnamed terrorists, and what was an undeclared war was turning suddenly into a very open one.

Which terrorists? Who has it in for us so powerfully that they'll take down a dozen or so of their own soldiers -- and 20,000 [sic] innocents - to make their hyper-inflated statement? Bin Laden, of course, the first suspect: he'd sent out taunting e-mail saying he was planning just such an event, a September Surprise as it were, and his previously-demonstrated focused wrath against the World Trade Center had already been proven in court.

But another thought occurred to me... WTC, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA... the military establishment and the Pentagon... Seattle and the Yuppies... was this some sort of bent leftist underground that grew out of the "levitate the Pentagon" movement of the late '60s and erupted again on the streets of Seattle and Genoa?

Nah. Bin Laden it is.

By now everyone was tuning into the various news channels, which seemed to have multiplied - CNBC, CNN, ABC News - and wondering just what role our flight path would take. The flight attendants looked over our shoulders to check up on the latest, as they didn't seem to be getting too much news from the pilots. Finally word came that we were being diverted from JFK, and would land at Stewart Air Base somewhere north of the city.

Since my eventual destination was a small town on the Hudson called Garrison, I wondered fleetingly if this might be closer. Someone at my destination, Outward Bound headquarters, had told me there was a nearer airport than JFK, though she said flights there were infrequent. But when I asked, Tony the fashionably dread-locked flight attendant suggested I look at the flight display on the TV screen (channel 12, the one with the little jet incrementally creeping across the maps) for our location.

I remember thinking then, while still in the air, that one possibility for the jets crashing into the Towers was no more far-fetched than terrorism: that the auto-pilot programming on the planes had been hijacked, not the planes themselves, and they jets were directed straight into the buildings by electronic pilots.

It didn’t seem so far-fetched, really – pilots trained in flight simulation cockpits, their maneuvers tracked by computers to replicate actual flight. Why couldn’t a nefarious agency, domestic or otherwise, do the same thing with a jet in flight?

While this wasn’t exactly a comforting thought, sitting in my Jet Blue aisle seat in an upset but otherwise uneventful passenger compartment, it seemed as logical as any other scenario, especially under clear blue skies.

The same thought occurred to me a year later when Sen. Paul Wellstone, a liberal democrat from Minnesota seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2004, was killed in a private plane crash in October 2002. Evidence released in 2010 showed he had been followed by the FBI since 1970.

We soon landed at the airport, and the nagging suspicion that our plan would at the last minute turn into another attack weapon evaporated at last. Having an aisle seat, I couldn't see out the window for glimpses of a smoky horizon, or get an idea of the terrain here. But as we taxied it seemed as if there were no other airliners on the ground, the place seemed almost deserted. It was like a Twilight Zone episode, or the Stephen King story "The Langoliers."

The whole day was weird, strange, unreal. The comparisons with movies and TV shows were rampant – watching the Towers fall, especially, seemed remarkably cinematic, as if a staged event.

Once more, as time passed and the “facts” emerged and were questioned, that remains one of the biggest: how could a jet-liner take down an 80-story building? Twice? The Empire State building had been hit by a B-52 in 1945; it was still standing.

The rallying cry for the so-called 9/11 Truth movement became, simply, “Tower 7.” Sure, Towers One and Two were struck by jetliners which conceivably might have caused such internal head that the eventually collapsed.

But the only damage Tower 7 sustained was some burning rubble on its roof. Yet it too collapsed, hours later, in the same accordion-fall as had the other two.

Strange, but according to the official 9-11 Commission, true. How about that.

As soon as we slowed to a stop, half the passengers seemed to leap up to jockey for a good cell phone reception near the front doorway. I had no luck with my local calls to New York or Garrison, but managed to get through to my girl friend in California and relayed my safe arrival, asking her to call my children and mother.

Most of the rest were calling loved ones and business associates – since they were headed for JFK, I felt certain that some of them knew people at Ground Zero.

Another passenger in my row borrowed my phone and tried to call his mother, who lived in the Wall Street area, but was unable to reach her. When I saw him later he had still not spoken to her, and I can only wish him well.

Toward the end of 2001, my mother – then living in Santa Cruz – decided to move up to Sonoma County to be closer to her children, my brother and myself.

I myself moved from the Bay Area back to Healdsburg, and in 2002 purchased a house here. My mother moved to Sebastopol, not far from where my brother lived, and I know that the trauma of 9/11 played a role in our family coalescing once again in the same county, Sonoma.

It turned out that the Stewart airport was in the town of Newberg, and was in fact the nearest airport to Garrison. Since my cell phone still couldn't reach local numbers, I found a pay phone and hoped a single quarter would get me Outward Bound. It didn't: I needed $1.70 in change, and I only had 70 cents and a wallet full of twenties.

Finally I just took out the Visa and rented a car. Monte Carlo or Blazer? I drove the SUV out of the airport, across the Hudson, and down the bucolic valley to Garrison, and shelter from the storm.

After staying at the Outward Bound estate for a couple days, driving to the nearest town to watch the horrific, unbelievable newscasts, helping plan a post-traumatic stress response program, I took the train down to New York City and caught a cab to JFK.

The cabdriver was dark-skinned, and wore a turban; I asked him how things were at the scene of the attack, and he said it was crazy, he didn’t like going down there, but the rest of the city seemed fine.

JFK was strangely quiet, but most flights were following their regularly scheduled departures, just a couple days after the attack. It was only in the following week that all domestic travel became severely constrained, and the next time I flew to New York was far more of a security hassle than during the week immediately following 9/11.

Over the next couple years, I traveled a fair amount for my work, to Europe, South America, even going to Cuba (legally) in 2002. But as the decade wore on, especially in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, everything became more difficult, more security-conscious, more unfriendly for Americans traveling overseas.

Despite my own active imagination aboard Jet Blue Flight 90 (a hyperbeam controlling the aircraft? Come on!), I could not have imagined the paranoid theories that cropped up in the wake of 9/11,  some of them by so-called “conspiracy theorists” or some by our national government.

But it was the myth of “weapons of mass destruction” promulgated by the George W. Bush administration in general, and Vice-President Cheney in particular, that was ultimately far more destructive in lives, money and our nation’s ethical standing than the al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Throughout the rest of the decade, patriotism has become distorted to mean only “love of country” and “freedom,” words without what they call an "objective correlative" in the real world.

(What is freedom? Franklin Roosevelt may have been on to something: the only freedom I know is freedom from fear, and I am more afraid now than I was on 9/11.)

I sometimes think this is a more suspicious, small-minded, prejudiced and authoritarian society than it was 10 years ago. Our country has been diminished, but not by a terrorist attack.