Journalists are recollecting this week where they were on the morning of 9/11. For me it's easy: I was where I usually am, in front of my computer terminal, wondering what to write about next. Within a minute, three phone calls answered that question.
The first was from my wife upstairs, telling me to turn on the TV. A plane... wait, make that two planes have crashed into the World Trade Centre.
Next, the duty editor called from the paper, telling me to file a story by 5 pm about two planes crashing into the Twin Towers in New York.
"What's the story? Did the planes collide?"
"They crashed into the towers. That's all I know. Turn on the TV."
While I was making my way to the TV set, the phone rang again. It was my flying partner, David Frid, a pilot with a major airline.
Frid had been at the controls of our single-engine four-seater when ATC (Air Traffic Control) radioed him that Canada's airspace was closed, and all aircraft should land at the nearest suitable airport. In all his years of flying, my partner had never heard such an ATC transmission. It flashed through his mind that it might be a nuclear attack. Being about 20 miles west of CYQA (Muskoka airport), he headed for it. A few minutes later he and his passenger were safely on the ground.
The time was around 9:40 a.m. At the airport no one knew anything. ATC wouldn't answer its landlines. Frid decided to phone me in case I had heard something that might shed some light on why he had to land.
It was Frid's call that made me certain that what was happening in New York was no mere mishap. A collision of airliners over Manhattan, no matter how disastrous, was unlikely to close down Canada's airspace. Also, the airliners had crashed into the twin towers at different times, the first at 8:45 a.m. and the second some 18 minutes later. It had to be sabotage. I turned on the TV. It showed the first blurred shots of a commercial jetliner slamming into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
A few hours after the attack I could file a speculative story. How close was it to what we know today? Let's see.
On the day everybody wondered if the flight crews of Flights AA 11, AA 77, and UA 175 obeyed the hijackers and crashed their jetliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. My airline pilot partner doubted it. He didn't think an air transport pilot could be ordered to crash into a building. Flying into a structure would entail certain death anyway, so pilots would resist. It seemed more likely the hijackers of Flights 11, 77, and 175 incapacitated the flight crews before crashing the planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon -- so that's what I wrote.
But that meant that some of the terrorists must have had at least rudimentary training as pilots. Flying a sophisticated airliner any distance requires a degree of skill, even if the person at the controls wishes only to crash. A Boeing 757 or 767 cannot be steered into a target building by someone who has never flown before -- so that's what I wrote.
The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, might have gone down near Pittsburgh because the hijackers who commandeered it were too inept to fly it. Conversely, the flight crew or passengers may have resisted the terrorists' attempt to crash the aircraft into some target in the Washington area, and lost the aircraft during a struggle -- so that's what I wrote.
Voices in the media, especially in Europe, immediately started warning America not to jump to conclusions about the origin of this infamy. Pundits pointed out that the Oklahoma City bombing was at first falsely attributed to Arab or Muslim terrorists. Still, it was possible to make one observation. The 9/11 attacks were not only ignominious and merciless, but suicidal. They not only targeted innocent civilians but entailed certain death for the perpetrators themselves. While ignominious and merciless terrorists abound in many cultures, in recent history suicidal or "kamikaze" terrorists have been produced only by a few. As the likelihood of the 9/11 terrorists being of Japanese, Sikh or Tamil origin was remote, this left Muslims.
So that's what I wrote, adding only one thing for the September 12, 2001, issue of the National Post. "The world had fundamentally changed since yesterday."
© 2006 George Jonas
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