I was the director of Kissimmee’s Gateway Airport for nearly two decades, and was at work on Sept. 11, 2001 when a day marked by terrorism utilizing airplanes unfolded. Here are my recollections.
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was getting ready to leave my office on Dyer Boulevard to meet with one of the airport business owners on the Hoagland Avenue side of the airport. Our administrator, Debi Schnitzer, came back into the office and told me a plane had struck one of the twin World Trade Center buildings.
I had been working at the airport for just over a year, after retiring from 22 years in the Air Force. I recalled that during World War II a twin-engine medium B-25 bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building. Heading out, I went down to the pilots lounge at the end of the building where there was a television set. Some transient pilots were looking at the coverage, with obvious concern on their faces, but at the time only the basic fact that one aircraft had hit one building was known.
I got into an airport vehicle to cross the runway. Like myself, a majority of the air traffic controllers were also military veterans, and one of them, a no-nonsense U.S. Navy veteran, was working when I called Ground Control on the radio to cross the runway. He gave me the normal clearance to cross, and I proceeded. When I reported I was off the runway on the other side, he responded with, “TL (my operating initials, or “handle”), a second aircraft has hit the other tower. I think we are at war. “
My first thoughts were that former members of the Russian Soviet military had initiated this unconventional attack. The Berlin Wall had come down a decade earlier to end the Cold War and the Soviet regime, but they were the enemy of my youth and Russia had been in turmoil for most of the 1990s.
Also, thoughts of a good friend from my Air Force days who lived and worked in Manhattan, and of recall back to active military duty, crossed my mind.
I had my meeting, but by mutual consent, it was very abbreviated, and I was headed back to go to the control tower. Before I could leave, the control tower chief called my cell phone, asking me to come to the tower. When I got upstairs, the tower chief, who was also retired from the Navy, told me a third hijacked airliner had crashed at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and that the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered all civil air traffic to land immediately at the closest suitable airport. Cold War-era plans to “turn off’ electronic aviation navigation aids, which could aid “enemy” aircraft in wartime, were going to be implemented once all civil traffic was on the ground. We then heard the report that Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field soon after. We all felt a cold fury at what had happened that morning.
As we know, 9/11 was an unbelievably effective, well-planned terrorist attack. The impact on the aviation system and economy was severe. At Kissimmee, several of our aviation businesses could not restart operations until the end of November. Central Florida’s tourism-based economy was looking down into a dark bottomless hole, with many more questions than answers. When President George W. Bush visited Orlando in December 2001, at first the Secret Service wanted us to plan on parking large vehicles, like dump trucks and garbage trucks, on our runways to physically block their use. Later it was determined that since the president was staying at the J.W. Marriott on John Young Parkway, the airport be kept open for contingencies, but otherwise locked down. I heard the once familiar sound of F-15 and F-16 fighters, rare in Orlando area airspace, once again overhead during the president’s stay.
