9/11: American Airlines employees remember

September 11, 2001, started off as an ordinary work day at American Airlines, the world’s largest airline.

Pilot Jesse Evans had taken off from Paris with a Boeing 767-300 full of passengers heading to Chicago. Flight attendant Heidi Gunderson was helping customers stow their luggage in overhead bins on a flight from New York JFK to Los Angeles. Customer service manager Kent Powell was enjoying his morning off before heading in to work the afternoon shift at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C.

The skies were clear, with the sun shining brightly on American’s planes at airports in Boston and Washington, D.C.

Then, American Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower. A half hour later, American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. The crew and passengers on United Flight 93 overtook hijackers and their plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pa.

The day quickly turned chaotic as planes were ordered to land and hearts were filled with grief with the realization that 23 co-workers had died in terrorist attacks.

“I never ever go to work and not think about that day,” said Steve Wade, who was a first officer on an American flight that left Boston around the same time as Flight 11.

In the days, months and years that followed, the aviation industry changed dramatically. The Transportation Security Administration was created to overhaul security at the nation’s airports. Several airlines declared bankruptcy and then merged, leaving thousands of airline workers on furlough or unemployed. Cockpit doors were reinforced with kevlar and hundreds of federal air marshalls were hired to protect passengers and crews.

For American Airlines employees, the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 is a reminder of how their everyday lives were altered. It’s also a time to remember how that day unfolded.

“Even though it’s been 15 years, the emotions and the things that you feel are just as strong for most of us as they were two years after or three years after,” said Gunderson, an American flight attendant who was working a flight that never took off that morning at New York’s JFK Airport. “It’s going to be an emotional day for me. It always will be.”

Tears and panic at JFK

Heidi Gunderson often worked the New York-Los Angeles route. On Sept. 11, after her usual layover, she was anxious to get back home to California.

The Boeing 767-200 was full of passengers and ready to go for its 9 a.m. departure from New York’s JFK airport when the pilot came on and said the flight was delayed because New York’s airspace had closed.

“Several people were on their phones and crying and wanting to get off the airplane,” Gunderson said. “That was the first time I had any indication that there was something wrong.”

A few minutes later, her flight was canceled and passengers were asked to deboard. Some ran up the jetbridge trying to get off the plane while others were in tears trying to collect their carry-on bags. Gunderson still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. When she went back to the crew offices at the terminal, supervisors were telling everyone to leave immediately.

“JFK looked like a madhouse. Every flight that was supposed to go [that morning] and every single passenger was asked to just get out,” Gunderson said.

The taxi line seemingly stretched for miles and people were wandering around, not sure what to do. Gunderson learned that taxis and hotel buses were no longer being allowed to return to the airport and she wasn’t sure she would be able to make it back to her hotel.

“I was literally just outside waiting for another airplane to fall out of the sky,” Gunderson said after she heard about a plane hitting the Pentagon. “I thought, ‘how many more are there?’ It was a frightening feeling.”

Gunderson eventually hopped on a shuttle bus that dropped her in Queens and she walked back to her hotel where she haad spent the previous night.

Feeling alone, Gunderson asked to check the hotel’s guest list of American crew members to see if any fellow flight attendants were still there. Trying to get information on what was happening, Gunderson and other crew members were given a hotel meeting room where they could talk and support each other.

“From our hotel, we could see the smoke. There was so much smoke, it clouded the actual city,” Gunderson said. “We were there, I want to say three days, but it felt like a year.”

Gunderson was able to leave New York on a special charter flight that American operated out of Stewart Airport later that week. Since she had previously scheduled vacation time, she had a couple of weeks off before returning to flying.

“It was difficult, but it was a job that I’ve done for so long that I think I felt more comfortable going back to work as opposed to staying out,” Gunderson said. But her job as a flight attendant changed, as crews became more aware of suspicious activity and were trained to fight back in the event of a possible attack.

“I think we’re always going to be vigilant in a different way than we ever were before this happened,” Gunderson said.

Losing colleagues, customers

While everyone in Washington, D.C., was rushing home, Kent Powell was speeding towards work at Dulles Airport.

“Dulles has the longest runway of any on the East Coast, so we are the diversion capital for anything up and down the mid-Atlantic seaboard,” said Powell, a customer service manager who typically worked the afternoon shift. “So it occurred to me when they closed the air space in New York, I better go in and help.”

Powell was halfway down a Virginia state highway when he pulled over to the side of the road. He recalled that he had personally booked his office’s administrative assistant, M.J. Booth, on Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, so she could attend a credit union conference for American in Las Vegas.

“She didn’t know how to use Sabre [the reservation system] and asked which flight she should take,” Powell said. They pulled up the flight crew list and joked that she would have a great time on Flight 77 since both of them knew the crew.

Even though Dulles had been evacuated, Powell was determined to get to American’s offices.

“I stepped back into our general manager’s office and they all just looked at me ... and all I said was, ‘M.J.?’ and they said yes,” Powell said. A colleague handed him the passenger list and I scanned through it. “I still have that copy,” he said. “I still have it.”

There were 64 passengers and crew on Flight 77 and Powell said they talked about how grateful they were that it was a light load since it was a Tuesday in September. It could have been much worse.

Later that morning, Powell’s supervisor asked him to help open an emergency customer assistance relief center, part of American’s protocol to proactively reach out to families involved in an accident. While setting up that center, Powell took a call from a local Catholic priest who said he was with one of his parishioners, Amy Newton, who believed her husband, Chris, was on Flight 77.

“That morning we didn’t, of course, know for sure which people were on [Flight 77], because we had no positive remains. But we had pulled the final passenger list and we did know that he walked through the electronic gate reader and had no reason to believe he was not on board,” Powell said.

He visited Amy Newton at her home around 12:30 p.m. on Sept. 11 and she asked that their two young children be in the room while Powell talked to her about what American did and did not know at that time. Powell had met Chris Newton several times since he was a frequent traveler on American’s flights out of Dulles.

“It’s something you hope you never had to do as a care team member ... it was very emotional,” said Powell, noting that Chris Newton was one of the nicest guys you would ever want to meet. “They were understandably incredibly upset. She had driven him to the airport and dropped him off curbside.”

In the days following the attacks, Powell kept in contact with Amy Newton, helping with their healing process by taking the family to the gate and jetbridge where Flight 77 departed from Dulles.

For Powell, the pain of losing several colleagues on Flight 77 has become manageable over time. And when he thinks about the time immediately after 9/11, he is able to reflect on some of the good things that happened then.

“I don’t remember buying a lunch for weeks after Sept. 11 because Delta, every airline and their brother, brought us baked casseroles and desserts,” Powell said, remembering how he was overwhelmed by other airline workers’ generosity and compassion. “It was a life saver. It helped underscore that all of us felt the significance of it and anytime there is an incident in this industry, when the chips are down, the competitive lines get dissolved, and it truly becomes one industry.”

Like ‘War of the Worlds’

Steve Wade was the new guy at the Boston pilot base, having only flown out of that city for a couple of weeks.

On the morning of Sept. 11, he met up with his captain and other pilots, along with those working Flight 11, to get flight plans and crew messages as they prepared to head out.

“We taxi out in a conga line, including Flight 11, and we take off to head to San Juan and they take off to go to Los Angeles,” Wade said, recalling the morning routine.

Since his flight path would take the Boeing 757 over the Atlantic Ocean towards Puerto Rico, the pilots were soon out of communication range, relying on long-range radios for any messages they might need from air traffic control. Wade said the first indication something had happened came in a cryptic message from dispatch that said an aircraft had hit the World Trade Center and a flight attendant was hurt. Then a pilot on a KLM flight heading to the U.S. said an airliner had run into the tower.

“I kind of remember writing it off as a fluke, then 15 to 20 minutes later this same KLM pilot said a second plane hit the towers,” Wade said. “We were on this air-to-air frequency and people were in disbelief that this is happening.”

The captain on the flight, who was from New York, decided to use the plane’s A.M. frequency to pick up a radio station in New York.

“It sounded like ‘War off the Worlds,’ you couldn’t understand what was happening,” Wade said, adding that he could see New York off in the distance out of his right side window but he couldn’t see any smoke.

A British Airways pilot later came on the frequency and told them another plane had hit the Pentagon. When they were finally in range of Bermuda, Wade said, they could contact dispatch at American, about an hour and a half into their flight. Dispatchers told them to keep going to San Juan because they might need the aircraft there for a flight the next day.

“When we touched down [in San Juan], the eerie part was the terminal. Every jet bridge was pulled away from the terminal. No traffic. No noise. No anything,” Wade said.

Return to Paris

First Officer Jesse Evans had spent a wonderful 30-hour layover in Paris with his wife and was ready to head back to Chicago.

With a Boeing 767-300 full of passengers, Evans was a couple of hours into the ten-hour flight, about to enter an area where there is no radar coverage and no data links, when the cockpit received a text message from American’s dispatch that said “one of our airplanes hit the World Trade Center.”

“I was angry at dispatch. I thought no one had some measure of decorum...so I sent them a message back and said ‘that’s not funny,’” Evans said. But then he pulled up the status reports on New York’s airports, which indicated they were closed. “For all three airports to be closed in the busiest air space in the world, I knew something terrible had happened.”

Evans and the captain decided to turn around and head for Paris, even though they could have landed in Dublin or London. They didn’t tell the passengers what was happening as they dumped fuel and turned the plane around.

“We did every emergency checklist that we had for any kind of threat, bomb threat, any kind of hazard,” Evans said. “We had no specific threat on our airplane but we simply took every precaution.”

At about 2,000 feet, prior to landing in Paris, Evans said they told the passengers there had been an attack. When they arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport, the plane was met by commandos with machine guns, Evans remembered.

For the next few days, Evans and his wife were stranded in Paris, unsure when they would be able to return to their home in Atlanta where grandparents were watching their young children.

“My lasting impression was how wonderful the French were to us in those days when we were trapped there, unable to get home,” Evans said.

“This is your plane”

Debbie Maitland-Roland needed to drop off some paperwork at the National Transportation Safety Board on Sept. 11.

Although she was an active flight attendant, she also worked with the Association of Professional Flight Attendants accident investigation team. And she had a report that she needed to give to a colleague at the NTSB.

While she was waiting in the lobby, a television was tuned in to the morning news and Maitland-Roland stood and watched, like so many others, as the second plane careened into the World Trade Center.

“Another colleague from the NTSB said, ‘This is your plane. We have to get you downstairs,’” Maitland-Roland said. “I was thinking at the time, this doesn’t make any sense. What I just saw was planes going into the World Trade Center and I’m thinking, why is our [Dulles-based] crew up in New York?”

As federal buildings began to evacuate, Maitland-Roland was told to head home. But since she had taken public transportation to the NTSB, she was stranded. NTSB officials put her in a room with a landline and she spent the next several hours on the phone with APFA headquarters to help coordinate and set up a support center for flight crews that were in D.C.

“Flight 77 was a flight we all flew. I knew the captain. I knew all of the flight attendants. That was our flight,” Maitland-Roland said.

Smooth landing at DFW

It must be luck, pilot Mike Michaelis thought as his early morning flight from Sao Paulo was cleared to land at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.

Usually flights from South America are routed towards Cedar Creek, a navigational fix in Dallas, before heading to land at DFW, Michaelis said. But on Sept. 11, air traffic control told Michaelis’ Boeing 767-300 to head straight for DFW.

“We thought we were going to get our passengers home early. We were going to get home and it’s going to be great,” said Michaelis, who lives in Argyle. They were even given clearance to land on 17R which was typically used for departures only.

As they pulled up to the gate, Michaelis’ pager went off. And then his cell phone started ringing. His wife was calling to find out where he was.

“She said, ‘You don’t know, do you?’ and I said ‘I don’t know what?’” Michaelis said. Walking into the terminal, he and the rest of the flight crew looked up at the television screens that had CNN broadcasting live news footage of the terrorist attacks.

Since Michaelis was an officer at the Allied Pilots Association, he went straight from the airport to the union’s offices in Centreport to help put together a response team and help American locate all of its pilots.

“After flying for almost 9 hours, I then spent the next 24 trying to find out where our crews were,” Michaelis said.

On the mountaintop

Standing on a 14,000-foot peak in Colorado on Sept. 11, Jim Thomas and his three hiking buddies, all commercial pilots, wondered why there were no planes flying.

Thomas, a check airman pilot for American, was celebrating another pilot’s birthday as part of the group’s annual backpacking trip.

“We’re at the top of this mountain taking pictures and one of us looks up and happens to comment that usually we’d see at least one airplane,” Thomas said. “We commented we don’t see a single airplane in the sky and never thought a thing about it.”

For the next few days, with no cell phone reception, the pilots camped in the Colorado wilderness, oblivious to what had happened in New York and Washington, D.C.

“When we started coming down the mountain, we noticed that farm houses had flags flying at half mast and then we started getting cell service and here were all these messages from family members,” Thomas said. Sitting in a hotel room in Denver, the four men saw the video replays of the towers collapsing.

Now, Thomas is managing director of flight standard and training at American. Since the attacks, pilot training includes more security classes, and pilots are given actual scenarios and self-defense training in how to defend the cockpit.

He plans to attend Sunday’s anniversary ceremony at the 9/11 Flight Crew Memorial in Grapevine to remember the victims of the terrorist attacks.

“You look back all these years later and think. what would their families look like today if that had never happened?” Thomas said. “What would be different in their lives? That sticks out more than anything to me.”

This story was originally published September 10, 2016 at 7:41 PM with the headline "9/11: American Airlines employees remember."