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I was at the airport, KCI --or MCI for airline geeks--working at the ticket counter for a now-defunct airline, America West, which is now, kind of American Airlines, but anyway…
I was the lowest man on the totem pole. Last in seniority. A baby adult who'd just graduated from college a few months before and gotten the job so I could fly for free.
The day was memorable as an employee, because prior to that Tuesday morning, every flight I'd ever worked was crazy packed. 9/11/2001 was the lightest day in my brief time there.
I worked a split shift from 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and then was to return for another shift at noon. At 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, we'd just pushed out our final two planes of the morning off of the gate.
I sat down on the bag belt with the most senior employee, Dawn, right after the planes pushed back from the gate. We had to wait until the planes were in the air before signing out of our shift, so we were listening to the local ATC radio.
I very clearly remember asking Dawn if all of September was going to be like that morning. Light passenger loads. Beautiful days for flying. Plenty of opportunities to trade shifts and hop on a flight with tons of available shifts.
I remember actually laughing about it, because the morning had gone so smoothly and the day itself was just so perfect. Everyone remembers the clear, cloudless skies and the hint of fall that day watching broadcasts from NYC. It was that way in Kansas City that day, too.
Over the local ATC radio, we heard that one of the two planes we pushed out was headed back to the gate. Dawn and I theorized it was probably a mechanical, which at best case meant keeping pax on the planes for an hour while maintenance came over and fixed it.
Worst case, everyone got off the plane and we started rebooking them. Either way, Dawn headed to the gate to meet the plane and I stayed at the counter. Before she reached the gate, I heard over the radio that the other plane was returning to the gate.
The local ATC said it was because a plane had hit the World Trade Center. There weren't TVs and smartphones all over the place in 2001. So my sole source of info at that moment was listening to the guys chatter over local ATC.
They theorized for a few short minutes that some air traffic controller in NYC was in big trouble for steering a plane astray. I called my mom and told her to turn on the TV at home.
About that time, a second plane hit the World Trade Center. I was on the phone with my mom as she described it. It wasn't a small plane. We were under attack.
And then chaos arrived at the airport, because ATC directed all planes to the ground. There are two major ATC centers in the midwest -- one in Indianapolis and one in Kansas City. In the U.S., more planes midflight landed in IND and MCI than anywhere else in the country on 9/11.
Someone brought a television up from the break room so we could watch what was happening. I remember one of my coworkers crying. I was too young and too stupid and too new at doing the tasks at hand that I didn't fully understand why she was crying in that moment.
She understood the implications long before the rest of us. Planes--America West planes -- continued to land in KC. We didn't have enough gate space so for a while, we kept everyone on the planes thinking things would be sorted out soon and they would be on their way.
Eventually, the pilots started demanding to let passengers off, which meant moving planes around, letting people off, and then moving the planes someplace to park. We left all the bags on the planes, because remember, they were all headed on their way soon.
Someone had to stay with the planes until bomb sniffing dogs could search the aircraft. The pilots and flight crews didn't want to sit on the planes so... I was put on a 767 and pushed out to the outer edges of the airport.
I sat on that empty plane for what felt like hours. When I got back to the terminal, it was starting to become obvious no one was going anywhere--at least not by airplane.
We had passengers from all over the country. Kansas City was not on their travel itinerary. We had a handful of planes of passengers traveling from BOS to LAX and the other direction. Full planes.
We had lines of people wanting to be rebooked. The passenger I will never forget is a guy who sobbed in front of me. His mother's funeral was the next day in Phoenix. I couldn't get him there by air, but it would be awhile before I knew that with absolute certainty.
I hope he made it there. The rest of the day, we spent trying to find hotels rooms, ground transportation, cots, anything we could to make the people stranded in KC comfortable. I remember finding a large passenger vehicle for a flight crew who planned to drive home to PHX.
I remember calling hotels begging to reserve rooms. I remember calling a deli and asking them to bring sandwiches to passengers. I remember trying to get the airport busses to transport passengers to hotels in outlying areas. I remember trying to round up blankets and cots.
And then we were waiting, waiting, waiting forever for bags. We weren't allowed to return them to pax until the cargo holds had and everything in them had been re-screened. There were people EVERYWHERE and many in some form of personal crisis.
Most airline passengers on any given day are traveling for work or for leisure, but in my experience, for every 10 of those passengers, there's another who is traveling for truly important things -- funerals, sick relatives, weddings.
Along with the victims on the aircrafts the terrorists used, the people in the buildings they destroyed or damaged, and the troops sent to war because of the terrorists’ actions, I always remember those people in my line on 9/11 trying to get to important things, too.
I didn’t leave work until sometime after 5 p.m. I remember the eerie quiet of my commute home. The skies were empty and it was noticeable.
