9/11 - eight years to the day, I'm back in Dulles airport

september 11, 2001, i was working here at washington d.c. dulles international airport for united airlines... needless to say, it was a day that will be forever burned in my memory... i've posted on the details of that day in previous blog posts (here and here, among others), and i'm not going to repeat them here...

however, once again i find myself in dulles airport on 11 september, eight years on, this time waiting for a flight to london, and i'm stunned at how little things have changed... in many ways, it's as if the clock had been turned back... same gates, same crowds, same godforsaken airline...

here's what i consider to be a solid observation for the day from rebecca solnit at tomdispatch...

Eight years ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word 'terrorism,' which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don't know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it.

it's a sobering day for reflection...

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Where the government keeps stuff (like Flight 93) that they don't want you to see

well, well, well... this is fascinating... and how convenient that it's not too far from where flight 93 went down...



i stood on the tarmac at dulles airport the afternoon of 9/11 and bid farewell to united's emergency reponse team that was headed up to pennsylvania to the flight 93 crash site... i knew most of the people who were going because i worked with them on a daily basis... the really interesting part, to me at least, was talking to them when they got back...

for one thing, they were never allowed into the actual crash site, which i found most peculiar... after all, this was united's official emergency response team and the aircraft did belong to united... the most puzzling thing they told me was that there was a secondary crash site, some distance away from the primary crash site... to me, that could only mean one thing... the plane was already in at least two pieces BEFORE it hit the ground...

here's the piece that i think may explain it... earlier that day, i had reassigned myself to dulles lobby security... even though i was a staff guy, i had been an airport general manager, so i knew a thing or two, plus i couldn't see myself continung to sit at my desk when all hell was breaking loose elsewhere... besides dealing with all the people who suddenly found themselves in dulles airport rather than their final destination after their flights had been ordered out of the sky, there were a lot of police and fbi types running around trying to get information... since i was management, i got asked frequently to check flight data and passenger lists... the flight that was getting the most interest was flight 93... at one point i was told that we needed to be prepared to evacuate the airport because flight 93 was over southern pennsylvania and headed our way, but that they were preparing to shoot it down... ponder THAT for a while...

(thanks to casey at open your mind's eye...)

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