Remembering 9/11 - My Memories of September 11, 2001

September 11, 2001 started like any ordinary day for millions of people, but it is the day that changed air travel. At the time, I was working at one of the busiest airports in the world and things were quieting down after the Labor Day weekend rush.

My husband travels a lot for work and on that day he was headed for Washington, D.C.. He was flying in to get him there for his ten o'clock meeting. I wasn't working until the afternoon at the airport so I made a pot of coffee, scanned the air travel headlines for items that might be interesting to add to this site, and turned on the morning news. And then, like many people, I saw on the news what at first looked like a joke, then seemed unreal, then felt the horror of what was happening.

I began to flip out. I counted in my head the minutes between his arrival, his taxi ride, his meeting not far from the Pentagon. I tried calling his cell phone over and over with no response, and remained in a state of panic until I heard from him. The sound of sirens were booming in the background, he told me that a state of emergency had been called, and that some people had simply left their cars in the street and fled from federal buildings. But he was safe, unlike the thousands of people who died that day.

His day trip turned into a 5 day saga trying to get home from Washington. When he finally got out, he told me what it was like. He saw the flight hovering low over the Pentagon, his taxi was less than a mile away and said he'll never forget how it shook the cab as it took him to his morning meeting that would be cancelled minutes later.

I went into work, but couldn't concentrate. What would we all rebook? As passenger agents at an airport we didn't really know what the protocol was. A lot of us tried to console passengers who were now stranded, a lot of us tried to console each other. It isn't easy to reflect on it often because it was such a confusing, difficult, emotional time.

Now air travel is so different. Sometimes it feels so heavy in an airport that it really does weigh on those of us who work there. Because I work at a gates area, I get to pass through security searches pretty much every day. I know it is now part of the job, but I know what it represents - that every one of us who works at an airport is deemed to be potentially dangerous and untrustworthy. Of course, if one thought about it that way too often it could really cause one grief.

And every time a new security measure comes out, it is hard not to think about how things were before 9/11. Maybe we were all naive, but now there is a constant air of suspicion. People are removed for doing things that seemed normal, or at least not out of the ordinary. A man takes his shoes off at the gate area in the past few weeks and rocks back and forth where I work. He is removed by airport security as fellow passengers feel uncomfortable with his behavior. Later it is discovered that he has no criminal background, hardly a parking ticket, he just has tendencies towards panic attacks. A female passenger has a panic attack on board a flight and it is treated as possible terrorist activity.

Things are not the same and will not be the same in air travel. Five years later this is painfully obvious. Five years later we remember those who died, those who lost loved ones, and how we all lost the way air travel was - good or bad, it certainly was a less stressful experience.