Twenty-five years later, I have finally tried to put these memories into words. This is not an attempt to tell the entire story of September 11. It is simply what I witnessed, what people close to me endured, and what the aviation community meant to me in the years that followed. I share it to remember the people behind the names, and because some days never truly become the past.

Even at this length, this is only an outline. The story deserves several pages in a book, where the people, relationships, and moments can be given the space they deserve.

________

Still feels like yesterday.

Every year when September 11 approaches, I am struck by how little distance time has created. More than two decades have passed, yet I can still feel the building shake, hear the sirens, and see the black smoke rising from the Pentagon.

In September 2001, I was living at Courthouse Plaza in Arlington, Virginia, and working for American Airlines. I had originally been hired by TWA, and we were going through the American acquisition. During an impromptu gathering at the DCA base, I met many of the senior captains, including Captain Chic Burlingame. Chic was the consummate professional, and his wife, Sherry, was a doll. I arrived home late on September 10 after a four-day trip, so my wife at the time, Leah, let me sleep in the following morning. Leah was an accident investigator with the NTSB.

I had no idea what was unfolding in New York when I walked into the kitchen and began pouring myself a cup of coffee. Without warning, our building shook violently, almost like an earthquake. The first explanation my mind offered was one of the manhole explosions that had been reported in Georgetown during the previous months, but that made no sense. Then I heard the sirens, and my immediate thought was that an airplane had crashed. I ran upstairs to the observation deck and saw black smoke billowing from the Pentagon. At first, I assumed a USAir flight had gone down. Fighters appeared overhead, and helicopters rushed along the National Mall and up the Potomac. Other residents began joining me and told me what had happened in New York. I stayed there for the rest of the day, watching a world that had changed in the space of a morning. With the Metro closed and the streets gridlocked, Leah and several other NTSB personnel walked from L’Enfant Plaza to our building. Near sunset, we stood together and watched Air Force One land at Andrews in the distance.

In the days that followed, what I had witnessed from afar became Leah’s workplace. She spent two days at the Pentagon, crawling through wreckage inside the fifth ring and in areas below ground as part of the investigation. She then spent four weeks working at Ground Zero and Fresh Kills on Staten Island. This was not something we experienced only through television. It entered our home, our work, our friendships, and eventually our dreams. I was furloughed two weeks after the attacks, but one of my clearest memories from that difficult period is an extraordinary act of kindness by the management of Courthouse Plaza. When the time came for Chic’s interment at Arlington National Cemetery, they approached me and said, “You are our American Airlines pilot, and we want to help with your colleague’s burial.” They offered furnished rooms, free of charge, to American employees traveling to Arlington for the service. I posted their offer on an American pilot message board called Ask & Answer. The vice president of Flight Operations saw it and sent the information to every pilot in the system. My phone began ringing with expressions of gratitude. His message also mentioned that the offer had come through a furloughed TWA pilot, which made several of my former TWA colleagues proud. Sherry loved hearing that story.

On September 11, 2002, I was one of the pilots selected to attend Project Phoenix, the ceremony marking the completion of the Pentagon’s reconstruction. President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and many others were there. Several of the photographs accompanying this post are from that day. During the ceremony, Sherry and I had a heartfelt conversation. When she learned that I had come from TWA, she told me she had also been with TWA before joining American. Anyone who was part of TWA understands the connection we discovered in that moment. It is a special bond that never really leaves us. Sherry invited me to join a group traveling to Culpeper, Virginia, to help build a memorial for Ken and Jennifer Lewis, the husband-and-wife flight attendant team aboard American Airlines Flight 77.

The years that followed repeatedly reminded me that the aviation community remembers its own. Lt. Col. John Cotter and the Griffins of Fresno’s 144th Fighter Wing welcomed me with a camaraderie I have never forgotten. The unit flew F-16s at the time, and many of its pilots had flown Combat Air Patrol missions over Washington. They unofficially made me a Griffin, with a little good-natured hazing included. John, I remain proud of that unofficial connection and grateful for the way the Griffins welcomed me. American demonstrated that same spirit more than a decade later when it began hiring pilots again. The APA and company made sure that American Eagle pilot Tom McGuinness was its first hire. Tom’s father, First Officer Thomas McGuinness, had been aboard Flight 11 when it struck the North Tower. It was a quiet but deeply meaningful way for American to honor one of its fallen crew members and his family. My own recall to American did not come until February 2013. During those years, I first hauled freight for an operator in Texas and then spent eight wonderful years at Flexjet. It was some of the most enjoyable flying I have ever done, with stellar crews and memorable owners whose stories deserve a post of their own.

For years after 9/11, I had nightmares that I was aboard Flight 77 with Chic with a much different outcome that anyone raised in Texas would truly understand. Again, a much better story for the pages of a book.

Perhaps that explains why I have no patience for claims that a missile struck the Pentagon. I felt the impact from my home and saw the smoke rising from the building. Leah physically crawled through the wreckage as an NTSB investigator. For her, the evidence was not something viewed on a computer screen. She crawled through it. Such claims dismiss the work of investigators and dishonor the people whose lives were taken. September 11 is not an internet puzzle to me. It is the sound of sirens, the smoke rising from the Pentagon, my wife and her colleagues walking home through a paralyzed city, and Air Force One returning near sunset. It is Chic’s grave at Arlington, Sherry’s loss, and the memorial built for Ken and Jennifer. But it is also the generosity of people who offered rooms to grieving airline employees, a phone filled with messages of gratitude, the enduring bond between people from TWA, the welcome extended by the Griffins, and an airline remembering a fallen first officer by opening its doors to his son. I remember Chic. I remember Ken and Jennifer. I remember the crews, families, investigators, and everyone who carried an unimaginable burden after that day. It still feels like yesterday, and I will never forget.