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THE ECHOES OF 9/11 By Joe Brancatelli September 11, 2006 -- The simple fact of the matter is that I slept through 9/11. My frequent-flying wife and I had flown to San Francisco the previous weekend, planned to start our vacation on September 11 and were going to fly to Hawaii the next day. I told my clients and contacts not to call. We had a late dinner on September 10 and didn't want a wake-up call. So I slept in on 9/11 and didn't wake up until about 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time. Unusual for me, I didn't immediately flip on the television or radio. By then, of course, back East, the attacks were over, the Twin Towers had fallen, the Pentagon had been attacked and United Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania. But I knew none of that at 8:45 a.m. Pacific Time when I called a client whose New York headquarters were about two miles north of Ground Zero. "I just wanted to remind you that I'll be out of touch for a couple of days," I started breezily. "How's it going?" "Well," I recall her saying, "Everyone's accounted for. I don't think we've lost anyone." "Geez," I said. "It's not even noon. Been that bad a day?" "You don't know what's happened, do you? Turn on the TV…" The images on the screen made no sense. It must have been the top-of-the-hour update when I heard the words, "The World Trade Center is gone." That I certainly didn't understand and couldn't comprehend. I grabbed my cellphone and speed-dialed a friend, who also happened to be the former editor and publisher of a major science magazine. "What the hell is going on?" I asked "What do they mean the World Trade Center is gone?" "The towers collapsed. They're down," he said. "They're gone. What part of that don't you understand?" I subsequently learned from an E-mail dispatch he wrote several days later that he'd been on a subway train halted before reaching the World Trade Center stop. He wrote a gripping account of coming out of the subway and watching one of the towers fall. I was not only out of touch with the facts, but also oblivious to his intense feelings in those minutes after the towers collapsed. Then I started calling around, trying to do my job and gather facts. But so few of the facts made sense. Multiple hijackings. Massive death. The whereabouts of President Bush and Air Force One unknown and the Vice President in an undisclosed location. The air-travel system grounded. Perhaps a dozen planes still unaccounted for and possibly hijacked. Then the hotel phone rang. A Los Angeles all-news radio station that I often worked with wanted to know if I could help with the coverage. The only thing I remember from the following minutes was reacting angrily when the anchorman said something about the pilots flying their planes into building. "None of us knows what's happened for sure," I recall saying. "But I can assure you that no American pilot would fly his aircraft into a building. The pilots were not in control of these planes." Several hours later, I was on the air with a San Francisco radio station. The anchor stopped our conversation to switch to a live feed from ABC News: World Trade Center 7 had just fallen. When the local anchor returned, he told listeners that "It looks like another subsidiary building has collapsed in New York. Meanwhile, Joe, as you were saying…" I cut him off. "Do you understand that World Trade Center 7 is a 47-story building? Isn't that taller than anything you have here in San Francisco?" "Well," fumbled the anchor, "I think the [Transamerica] Pyramid is…" And then I heard him say, "Oh my god, Oh my god… " Sometime during the morning of September 12, I remembered that my rental car was parked on Pacific Street and should have been moved the day before. I walked down the street to the car and found a ticket on the windshield. It was written at 2:20 p.m. Pacific Time on 9/11, the exact moment that World Trade Center 7 was falling a continent away. That strange duality--life as usual and chaos--led to We Will Fly Again, the column I wrote for biztravel.com on September 12. It was reprinted on many Web sites and newspaper op-ed pages in the days immediately after 9/11. It even made it into a recent journalism textbook. But it would have been a totally different column had I been in New York or Washington or scheduled to fly on 9/11. Sitting in a San Francisco hotel room waiting out cancellations and getting a parking ticket on 9/11 while a 47-story building was falling offered a somewhat ironic perspective. But what really mattered about We Will Fly Again was simply that it existed. I had to talk the folks at biztravel.com into publishing that week. They thought it was "inappropriate" to send out a newsletter so soon after the tragedy. I insisted that the opposite was true: We had a moral obligation to reach out to readers, many of whom, like me, were stuck in a strange place with no idea when or if they would fly again. Business travel is, at base, a lonely thing. It was vitally important that we let fellow travelers know that they were not alone. Meanwhile, it was obvious that we weren't getting to Hawaii or any kind of holiday in the coming days. So my wife and I moved to a hotel near San Francisco Airport. I spent almost all of the next few days alternately reporting and doing television and radio spots. Except for a little day trip into downtown San Mateo. We came across a Middle Eastern place called Sinbad's. The food was superlative--I'm a sucker for great hummus--but what I remember was that the place was festooned inside and out with American flags. From the frightened look in the eyes of the wait staff, I had a feeling that those flags hadn't been there before 9/11 and they were hoping against hope that the flag-waving would help them avoid some of the ugly "reprisals" that had already been reported against Muslims and Arabs elsewhere in the country. And on the way back to our hotel, on an airport access road, my wife leaned out the window, looked up and called out: "It's a plane!" I pulled off to the side of the road and looked. It was, indeed, a passenger aircraft. Things were starting to move again. But the early outlines of what we would eventually call the "new normal" were already taking shape in the emergency Tactical Traveler briefing I wrote on September 13. I had hoped that my next Brancatelli File, scheduled to run on September 20, would begin to address the pain caused by the 9/11 attacks. But it was not to be because the nation's major airlines had begun lobbying for a huge bailout. The Big Six were pressuring both sides of the political spectrum for cash. Gordon Bethune, then chief executive of Continental Airlines, was the first to go public with the demand. On the Saturday after 9/11, his press conference was carried live on television and his approach--layoffs, schedule cuts, demands for a cash bailout and no immediate management sacrifices--became the public posture of the major carriers. The next day, Leo Mullin, then chief executive of Delta Air Lines, made the single most offensive comment of the whole affair. The "airline industry cannot be the first casualty of this war," he said. As I wrote in what became the September 20 column, No Taxation Without Reregulation, Mullin made this crass and callous statement even as real victims of 9/11 were still buried in the rubble. It was unconscionable--and utterable only by an airline executive. Mullin is gone now, tens of millions richer for his disastrous tenure at Delta, but his ilk lives on. Glenn Tilton, who became chief executive of United Airlines in 2002 and has become the airline's largest individual shareholder after the carrier's bankruptcy process, quickly became a devotee of Mullin's oblivious management style. (There's another glimmer of the future in the September 19 edition of The Tactical Traveler. Unlike the Big Six, which cut 20 percent of their schedules, Southwest Airlines resumed 100 percent of its flying when the skies reopened. JetBlue Airlines also resumed virtually all of its scheduled flights. Those carriers became the big "winners" in the next five years. While they have grown their respective market shares in huge gulps, the Big Six have contracted both financially and operationally.) Continued, click here |
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