September 11, 2025

MY MOST VIVID MEMORY of September 11th, 2001, is my memory of a cockroach.

It was one of the biggest roaches I’ve ever seen — copper-colored and bullet-shaped, the length of my little finger — and it came crawling across the platform of the Government Center subway station at 7:00 a.m., as I stood there waiting for the train that would take me to Logan Airport. It scampered, stopped, then zigged and zagged, in that deliberate yet utterly directionless way of insects, its footsteps so heavy I swear that I could hear them, click-click-click on the greasy concrete.

It portended everything, this giant subway cockroach. Or it portended nothing. And as it came closer I drew my foot back — my right foot, I remember with absolute clarity — and nudged it, gently, off the platform and down into the dark and filthy space alongside the tracks, where it disappeared more or less instantly into the shadows and detritus.

This is how we remember things.

Once on the train, I would chat briefly with a United Airlines flight attendant, whose name I never got, and who maybe, possibly — I’ll never know for certain — was headed to work aboard the doomed United flight 175.

I was on my way to Orlando, where I’d be picking up a work assignment later that afternoon. My airplane would lift off only seconds after American’s flight 11, the first of the two jets to hit the twin towers. I had watched the silver Boeing back away from gate 25 at Logan’s terminal B and begin to taxi. United 175 would launch a few minutes later. My plane was in-between.

In an old briefcase here in this room, I still have my boarding pass from that morning. It shows me assigned to seat 11D, on the aisle, but there were empty seats and I slid over the window.

Elevens were wild that day. On the 11th day of the month, flight 11 would collide with the World Trade Center, two buildings that shaped an enormous “11” in the Manhattan sky. I looked down from row 11.

But there was nothing to see, yet. I recall an almost uncannily clear view of Manhattan, taking note, as I always do, of that graceful little bend that the island makes — the way it turns eastbound just below Midtown. There was no smoke, no fire. I was just a few minutes — a matter of seconds, maybe — too soon.

A short time later, about halfway to Florida, we started descending. Because of a “security issue,” our captain told us, we, along with many other airplanes, would be diverting immediately. Pilots are polished pros when it comes to dishing out euphemisms, and this little gem would be the most laughable understatement I’ve ever heard a comrade utter.

Our new destination was Charleston, South Carolina.

A bomb threat had been called in. That was my hunch. My worry wasn’t of war and smoldering devastation. My worry was being late for work. It wasn’t until I joined a crowd of passengers in Charleston, clustered around a TV in a concourse restaurant, that I learned what was going on.

And there I am. I’m watching the video of the second airplane, shot from the ground in a kind of twenty-first century Zapruder film. The picture swings left and picks up the United 767 moving swiftly. This is flight 175. The plane rocks, lifts its nose, and, like a charging, very angry bull making a run at a fear-frozen matador, drives itself into the very center of the south tower. The airplane vanishes. For a fraction of a second there is no falling debris, no smoke, no fire, no movement. Then, from within, you see the white-hot explosion and spewing expulsion of fire and matter.

And then, a bit later, the collapse. And this is the important part. Because to me, had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. Had the towers not actually fallen, I suspect our September 11 hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. It was the collapse — the groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattan — that catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to historical infamy.

As I stand awestruck in this shithole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are falling down. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers, collapsing onto themselves, is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen.

Then I would go to a motel and spend the night. The next morning I’d rent a car and drive all the way home to Boston.

This is how we remember things.

And pilots, like fire fighters, police officers, and everyone else whose professions had been implicated, had no choice but to take things, well, personally. Four on-duty airline crews were victims, including eight pilots. John Ogonowski comes to mind, the good-guy captain of American 11. Of the thousands of people victimized that day, Captain Ogonowski was figuratively, if not literally, the first of them. He lived in my home state; his funeral made the front pages, where he was eulogized for his philanthropic work with local Cambodian immigrants.

Maybe it’s melodramatic to say I felt a bond or kinship with these eight men, but it’s something like that. What they went through, these eight colleagues on the very front edge of the attacks, the very men whose airplanes would be stolen and weaponized, is something I can’t fathom yet, at the same time, I can imagine and visualize all too chillingly.

And yes, in the ten-second bursts it took the towers to fall, I knew something about the business of flying planes would be different forever. I just wasn’t sure what it would be.

Fast-forward. It’s hyperbole to speak of the world having been “changed forever” that day. I’m conservative and skeptical when it comes to these things. History is bigger than us. Try to take the long view, even if, all these years on, the dominos haven’t stopped falling. Heck, tens of millions of people died in World War Two — tens of thousands at a time, as the incendiaries rained down over Europe and Japan. A hundred thousand bodies one night in Tokyo alone.

Sure, things are different now. Albeit for reasons we don’t always own up to. I have to say, I’m discouraged — or should that be encouraged? — because more than any “clash of civilizations,” the real and lasting legacy of Mohamed Atta and his henchmen has been something more mundane: tedium.

Think about it. The long lines, the searches and pat-downs, the litany of rules and protocols we’re forced to follow — all this meaningless pomp in the name of security. Of modern life’s many rituals, few are marinated in boredom as much as air travel. “Flying” is what we call it. How misleading. We don’t fly so much as we sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time.

And most distressing of all, we seem to be okay with this. There’s the real legacy of September 11th. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and perhaps that’s true. It isn’t quite what they hoped to win, but they’ve won it nevertheless.

The irony that nobody talks about is that the hijackers’ ability to pull off the 2001 attacks so spectacularly had almost nothing to do with airport security in the first damn place. And none of the measures we see on the concourse today would have kept them from succeeding. I’ve made this point many times, but never have I seen or heard it acknowledged elsewhere.

As conventional wisdom has it, the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto the airplanes. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold: diversions to Beirut or Havana, with hostage negotiations and standoffs.

The presence of boxcutters was merely incidental — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The men could have used knives fashioned from plastic, broken bottles wrapped with tape, or any of a thousand other improvised tools. The only weapon that mattered was the intangible one: the element of surprise. So long as they didn’t chicken out, they were all but guaranteed to succeed.

For a number of reasons, just the opposite is true today. The hijack paradigm was changed forever even before the first of the Twin Towers had dropped to the ground, when the passengers of United 93 realized what was happening and fought back. That element of surprise was no longer a useful device. Hijackers today would face not only an armored cockpit, but also a planeload of people convinced they’re about to die. It’s hard to imagine a terrorist, be it with a boxcutter or a bomb, making it two steps up the aisle without being pummeled. It’s equally hard to imagine that organized groups would be willing to expend valuable resources on a scheme with such a high likelihood of failure.

In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again. Guards paw through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors, screwdrivers. Meanwhile, even a child knows that a lethal implement can be crafted out of virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a shattered first class dinner plate.

And so on.

A September 11th post isn’t anything I’ve looked forward to, and I’m wary of the maudlin sentimentalizing and over-the-top coverage this anniversary brings each year. But something needs to be said, and so here it is. After all, nothing in my lifetime had a more profound effect on air travel than the events of that Tuesday morning twenty-three years ago.

At least until COVID-19 came along.

As the pandemic played out, it was interesting to notice the eerie parallels with September 11th and the ensuing “war on terror.”

Both crises were born of legitimately dangerous circumstances, but quickly became twisted by politics and hysteria. Curiously, this seems to have happened in opposite ways: After the 2001 attacks, it was mostly people on the right who bought into the hype and fear; who saw terrorists around every corner and were willing to sign off on things like the Patriot Act, TSA, the Iraq War, and so forth. Left-leaning people resisted. With COVID, it was left-leaning people who were more fearful and pessimistic, while those on the right advocate for a softer, more laissez-faire approach.

Why the difference? I suspect it’s because people who lean right are more naturally drawn to responses involving power and conflict; going after enemies, seeking revenge, etc. — all the things that came into play after September 11th. The pandemic, on the other hand, centered on concepts like compassion and “saving people.”

Both crises have mostly receded, thankfully. But one of the crucial takeaways, in both instances, was witnessing how, when people are afraid, they’ll quickly adapt to almost anything, including ways of life that are unproductive or harmful.

Just as the virus will stay with us, chronic and endemic, so will terrorism. There may have been, and may still be, a “war on terror,” but there will never be an end of terrorism.

How we live within this reality defines us for the long term. We can do so sensibly, or by waging a ruinously expensive, self-destructive battle with no conceivable end.

 

About the photos:

The picture at the top was taken by the author from the cockpit of a 19-seater in 1994.

The second picture is a watercolor rendition of the same, painted by Julianna Harhay, the daughter of Michael Harhay, a pilot for United Airlines. That is Michael’s arm in the first photo.

 

An earlier version of this essay appears in chapter six of COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL.

Related Stories:

CONSPIRACY NATION
AIRPORT SECURITY IN THE NEW CENTURY

March 14, 2025

TWO THINGS jumped to mind as I watched the footage last week of the American Airlines jet in Denver, its engine on fire, passengers evacuating onto the wing.

The first thing was the recklessness of the people who brought their carry-ons with them as they evacuated. Fewer things are more stupid, or more dangerous, particularly when there’s a fire. We’ve seen this before, and I’m sure we’ll see it again. Airlines and regulators need to come up with something.

Second thing was a wave of consternation. Here we go again, I thought. Jeju Air, Azerbaijan, Washington D.C., Toronto. Now this. Another incident, another round of media hype, another feeding frenzy on social media. Here come the emails asking, “What’s going on?”

Whatever it is, it’s bad enough that, according to airline execs, the demand for air travel is softening. How much of this is economics-related rather than fear-related is hard to quantify, but the CEOs believe the latter is part of it.

This is frustrating, because on the whole flying remains remarkably safe. Much, much safer than it was in decades past.

I don’t mean to downplay recent mishaps too much; the Potomac crash, especially, was tragic, and there’s no denying that aspects of our system need funding and shoring up. But what are we actually dealing with? Are these incidents symptomatic of something dangerously broken? Are they warning signs of catastrophes to come?

I’m not sensing that. At worst, we can see it as a correction. Perhaps what’s surprising isn’t the spate of accidents, but rather how long we’d gone without such a spate. Perhaps we were too lucky for too long. Around two million people travel by air every day of the week, aboard tens of thousands of flights. The idea of perfect safety is foolish.

What the traveling public needs more than anything is a sense of perspective. For that, I recommend a trip through the history books, a dig through the crash chronicles of a generation ago, and the generation before that. Many Americans, younger ones especially, have no knowledge, or no memory, of how bad things used to be. From the dawn of the jet age in the 1950s, through the early 2000s, deadly air disasters were soberingly common, year after year after year.

And I don’t mean engine fires where people lined up on the wing. I’m talking about major accidents with, in many cases, fatalities in the hundreds.

Just how common? In 1985, the worst year on record, there were 27 crashes — an average of one every two weeks. This included two of the deadliest air disasters in history (JAL flight 123 and Air India 182), which occurred within sixty days of each other and killed over eight hundred people. And that’s not counting the incredible hijacking saga of TWA flight 847, which also happened in ’85.

The year 1974 saw nine disasters, including a TWA bombing and an Eastern Airlines crash three days apart. In 1973, when a Delta jet crashed in Boston killing 89 people, the accident was recorded on page two of the New York Times, below the fold. Ten crashes occurred between the fall of 1988 and the fall of 1989, three of them terrorist bombings.

As recently as the year 2000, we saw eleven crashes in which a dozen or more people perished, including the Air France Concorde disaster and Alaska Airlines flight 261, plus a cargo jet crash in California in which a former colleague of mine died.

This doesn’t happen anymore. Primarily through advances in training and technology, we’ve engineered away what used to be the most common causes of accidents. The number of planes in the sky has tripled since the 1980s, while the accident rate has plummeted. The events of the last several weeks, however unfortunate, hardly nudge the big picture data. Neither would another crash — even a big one, knock on wood.

It’s not that we’re spoiled, exactly. But we’ve grown accustomed to the rarity of disaster. And the result is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we’re a lot safer. On the other hand, we’re primed to overreact when something goes wrong.

This is human nature, I suppose. When an engine catches fire, it grabs our attention. Fair enough. What it shouldn’t do, however, is cause you to call off your business trip or cancel your vacation.

 
Photo courtesy of Unsplash

November 3, 2024

THE OTHER DAY I flew an overtime trip. It was four days long. I spent the morning of day one at home, departing in the afternoon. I was on the road for the next two days, then home again by 6 p.m. on day four.

Over that span, I earned more money than I earned in an entire year at my first airline job.

You read correctly: I made in four days what I made in twelve months flying for Northwest Airlink in 1990. That’s not an exaggeration.

Neither is it a boast, or a humblebrag, or a means of suggesting pilots at the major carriers are overpaid. What it underscores, instead, is just how awful it was to work at the regional airlines in the 1990s. Starting salaries were typically under $15,000 a year, and many regionals required pilots to pay for their own training.

The early ’90s were a long time ago, sure. But not that long ago. You can adjust for inflation all you want; the pay was ridiculous, with hostile working conditions to boot.

Luckily that’s not true anymore. The changes were a long time coming, but they came. The prospect of slogging it out for poverty-level wages at shitty companies drove thousands out of the business and scared away an entire generation of would-be aviators. A pilot shortage (surprise!) eventually left the regionals with no choice but to vastly improve pay and benefits.

And so, today, even entry level flyers can make six-figure incomes.

The justification for the lousy pay was always one of thin margins. The regionals made so little, we were told, they simply couldn’t afford to pay their workers beyond a bare minimum. Except now they somehow can, even as airfares have come down. Makes you think.

Salaries at the majors are much improved also, at least compared to the doldrums of the early 2000s. When I came back from furlough in 2007, after five years on the street, sixth-year pay on a Boeing 767 was just over $80 per flight hour (figure 75 or 80 pay-hours in a month). Nowadays you can earn that much flying copilot on a regional jet.

Those of you who remember my column on the website Salon, which ran from 2002 until 2012, will recall my frequent griping about how little pilots were paid. Things are different now.

These changes are fantastic for those starting out. I, on the other hand, was born about thirty years too early. It’s not that I make a bad living by any stretch. It just took a long, long time.

 

Related Story
THE RIGHT SEAT

Paper airplane photo by the author.

July 18, 2024

My custom is to set my alarm an hour or so earlier than our scheduled wake-up. For coffee and Instagram and such.

Having done so this morning, and now with nothing better to mull before the phone rings, it strikes that the name “Half & Half” is both redundant and meaningless.

If a product is half of something, then it’s automatically half of something else, no? A single percentage sum, by itself, should take care of it, obviating any need for a second one. This product should be called “Half.” (Which, admittedly, doesn’t carry much of a ring.)

Further, we ask, “Half & Half” of what, exactly? The name goes out of its way to overstate the obvious, yet fails to inform us what these respective halves consist of. Olive oil? Cranberry juice? Sand? Why the mystery? Indeed, as revealed in the picture above, and despite the kind assurance of ultra-pasteurization, the carton front displays no ingredients whatsoever.

Once again we find ourselves beguiled by the whims and foibles of corporate branding.

Now, in fairness to both mathematics and marketing, the second 50 percent of content could be easily diminished into additional fractions of whatever might compose it. The product could be half of one thing, but smaller amounts of multiple other things. Thus the name “Half & Two Quarters,” or some such.

This makes the whole conversation somewhat semantic (if less fun).

What we also see in the photograph, to our considerable dismay, is one of the more sadly devolved touches of modern carton manufacturing: the plastic screw top.

Those of us of a certain age remember the old-fashioned fold-back carton top. We miss the simplicity once employed to open, then quickly re-seal, a carton of milk or juice or “Half & Half.”

The choreography of the act was more complex than it looked, acquired through habit until performed without thinking, akin to tying one’s shoe: a tear, an unfolding, a bend, a squeeze.

The carton had no separate or moving parts. Rather, it was manipulated through a kind of muscle-memory origami. And when finished pouring, the resultant spout was, even more effortlessly, flipped back and restored to its original shape.

When did the transition to screw-tops begin? I want to say it was the early 1980s.

An inspirational debt is owed here to the author Nicholson Baker. Or vice-versa, perhaps, since this complaint was composed, at least in my head, before I’d read his wonderful book, The Mezzanine — the only other other place, to my knowledge, in which this subject is explored (page 42 in my edition). The book dates to 1986, which gives my timeline credence.

“The radiant idea that you tore apart one of the triangular eaves of the carton,” writes Baker, “using the stiffness of its own glued seam against itself.” The hand-formed, diamond-shaped opening was, “a better pourer than a circular bottle opening, because you could create a very fine stream of milk very simply.”

Indeed. The screw top, barbaric in comparison, with its jagged throw-away pull-ring and propensity to drip and splash, presumably provides more freshness, but at the cost of an almost magically elegant design.

Equal parts curiosity and nostalgia had me attempt the old-style maneuver at home, on the carton shown below. Results were mixed. The basics still work, but the molded circular collar now gets in the way. The adhesive seems different as well. The seams are no longer as tolerant to tearing, neither do they re-fold with as much authority.

WHERE DO flight numbers come from? Do they hold some hidden meaning?

Yes and no. Ordinarily, flights going eastbound are assigned even numbers; those headed westbound get odd numbers. Another habit is giving lower, one- or two-digit numbers to more prestigious, long-distance routes. If there’s a flight 1 in an airline’s timetable, it’s the stuff of London–New York.

Numbers might also be grouped geographically. At United, transpacific flights use three-digit numbers beginning with 8, which is considered a lucky number in some Asian cultures. Four-digit sequences starting with a 3 or higher are, most of the time, indications of a code-share flight.

Technically, a flight number is a combination of numbers and letters, prefaced with the carrier’s two-letter IATA code. Every airline has one of these codes. For Delta, American, and United, it’s DL, AA, and UA, respectively. Lufthansa uses LH; Emirates uese EK. Sometimes it’s alphanumeric, as with JetBlue’s B6.

If you didn’t know about this practice, you probably became familiar with it after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which from the start was referred to as “MH370.” In the United States, we tend to ignore these prefixes, but overseas they are used consistently. In Europe or Asia, the airport departure screen might show, for instance, flights CX105 or TG207. That’s Cathay Pacific and Thai Airways. When filling in your immigration forms, you should use the full designator.

These airline codes are sometimes random or meaningless, but when they do have a meaning it can be fun to decipher. Many are straightforward: BA for British Airways. Aeroflot’s SU comes from “Soviet Union.” Others are more esoteric. For instance, EgyptAir’s choice of MS, which would seem random until you realize the Arabic word for Egypt is “Misr.” Maybe someone can explain why Finnair’s code is AY.

Flight numbers along a given route can remain unchanged for years or even decades. When I was a kid, Lufthansa’s daily departure from Boston to Frankfurt was flight 421; the inbound from Frankfurt was 420 (a reversal of the east/west practice described above). Lufthansa still uses these numbers. In the old days the aircraft was a DC-10 or sometimes a 707. Today it’s a 747-400.

American’s morning departure from Boston to Los Angeles had been flight AA11 as far back as the 1960s. That ended on September 11, 2001. After an incident, one of the first things an airline does is retire the number of the affected flight. I had taken flight 11 once, when I was a freshman in high school. It was a DC-10 at the time.

The longest-surviving flight number might well be Qantas flight QF1. This is the Sydney-London run. Begun in the 1940s along the so-called “Kangaroo route,” the flight would make multiple stopovers along the way. Today it’s a one-stop via Singapore.

What other old numbers are still around? If you know of any good ones, tell us in the comments section.

 

Photos by the author.

December 3, 2020

I WAS IN Madrid the other day and was able to snap the photograph above. This is the old Terminal 2, built in 1954, when the field was known as Barajas Airport. Like many old airport buildings, it instantly evokes another time, another era. I can easily picture an Iberia DC-8, or maybe a Caravelle, parked below the control tower, passengers in hats and suits climbing a set of drive-up stairs.

What I love best, though, is the airport name up on the facade. This was a common flourish in decades past, a nod to the platform signs often seen at railroad stations. The purpose, in this case, isn’t for orientation; obviously the airline passenger knows what city he or she has arrived in. That’s not the point. Rather, it’s a matter of greeting. The thrill of air travel isn’t so much the journey as it is the destination, and like the title frame in the opening credits of a film, this is a way of welcoming the visitor with a bit of drama and flair.

And I’m happy to report that location signs still exist, even at some of the newest and most modern terminals. You’ll find them on the apron side, facing the runways, or on the roadway side where passengers enter and exit the terminal. The latter are perhaps more common — the enormous lettering atop the departure hall at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport being the most dramatic example. But it’s the apron-side marquees that I like the best, the ones glimpsed from the airplane window, adding a touch of excitement as you prepare to disembark.

I always get a picture when I can. Most of my collection is posted below. Reader submissions are welcome, and I’ll add the best of them to the page.