To all who serve or served, and their families: deepest gratitude for your service and sacrifice.
On 9/11/01 wife and I were flying United from Hawaii, bound for Denver. Over Nevada, the Captain PAed a terse announcement that the flight was being rerouted due to an emergency. Utterly silent flight attendants hurriedly picked up the box lunches being served. The nav map on the small headrest screen before me showed a U turn in the flight path, flight was heading back to Vegas. Passengers returning to the mainland from island vacations wondered about the abrupt change of flight plan, with no knowledge of the seriousness of what had occurred. Nobody knew at the time, but the flight crew had been informed of the facts, and all had lost colleagues in New Your, the Pentagon and Shanksville. Our last words from the Captain were that passengers should check for updates at the United ticket counter.
Vegas airport was chaos with serious armed military presence. Nobody knew the full extent of what had happened. As we scrambled for alternative transportation to Colorado, the car rental desks were not allowing rentals. Ditto for trains and buses. The atmosphere was otherworldly, paranoid, shocked, frustrated, angry, laid over a relentless chatter from slot machines throughout the airport. Endless chants of "Wheel of Fortune," and the soundtrack to my jangled memory of those hours. The airlines were mum about future flights. After 3 hours of trying to escape and getting nowhere, the United staff informed us that they had arranged lodging for their stranded passengers. Eventually all passengers from our light were shuttled by van to a hotel and casino called Sam's Town. Our van driver gave us the first facts of the day, "some planes crashed into buildings in NYC." Impossible to believe.
Next 3 days were a blur of using our daily meal voucher from United at the hotel's buffet, walking a few blocks to Denny's for brunch, reaching out to family. My father offered to drive from Denver to Vegas to pick us up. Our instructions from United were to watch local tv news for information about the airport reopening, and to be prepared to leave with short notice. Watching the news for those 3 days was beyond unsettling, we must have seen the towers fall 200 times, while the text crawling across the bottom of the screen reminded us that airports remained closed and no travel was possible. We started shopping for a used car to buy in Vegas and sell when we returned to Colorado.
On the third afternoon we got a call from the front desk to be packed and on the airport shuttle van in 5 minutes. No further details. We stuffed suitcases, sat on them to get closed, and hustled to the curb in front of the hotel lobby. The van appears, a dozen of us climb in, and cruise through empty streets to the near-vacant airport. United informed us they were trying to find a crew to fly a plane from Vegas to Denver, and sent us down the concourse to the departure gate. Echoes of suitcase wheels clacking along empty floors, and the constant clamor of those same slots, "Wheel of Fortune." Departure screens still had flight info from 9/11. Cinnabon and the tiny bars on the concourse were dark and empty.
After 3 hours of noncommital updates from the frantic gate agent who was constantly on the phone, and 2 false alarms to prepare to board the plane, the jetway moved out from the departure gate to the door of the big United 777. There were no boarding passes to check. Onboard, the flight crew of 7 ghost-pale flight attendants encouraged us to enjoy first class, they would be serving anything we wanted on the short flight to DIA. Some of the attendants interacted with passengers, telling of friends and family lost in the crashes. The others sat in stunned silence or sobbed quietly. I sat by a port window to see the empty runways and airspace as we took wing. The sun was setting behind our tail, long shadows and illuminated towns below us. Darkness fell before we came over the Rockies.
