A day we will never forget.

As a former flight attendant(I just left in Dec 05) I see September 11th from a different perspective. Obviously I see the whole traumatic picture, but at the moment it happened I was thinking from a flight crew perspective. As this is the moment in our generation that we will never forget what we were doing at that moment, I too will never forget the immediate sense of loss I felt when I watched the second plane hit the second tower live.
I was not flying that week, I was in KC taking care of my godson Jack. He was two weeks old, my dearest friend Karen (Jack's mom) was with her mother in ICU as her mother recovered from having surgery to remove her cancer that had returned. I had been up a lot that night with Jack, and had just gotten him as well as myself back to sleep when the phone rang. When I answered all I could hear was...Turn on the TV, we just heard that a plane hit the towers in NY. Well being very tired, but being based in NYC for half of my career, I knew that could not be possible. Manhattan in general is not in the flight path of any of the NY airports. I had been based in NY when the bombings took place back in the 90's, I really assumed that was what had happened. Karen had no access to a TV in the ICU, she just begged me to turn the TV on to see what had happened. When I got to the TODAY Show, and saw what I saw, I just could not believe my eyes. But I still thought it had to have been a small plane. Again, the tip of Manhattan is not in the flight path. It was only a few minutes later as I was assuring her that it was an accident, and that it had to be a small plane, that I watched what I will never be able to erase. That dark flying shadow headed straight for the second tower. It was at that moment I knew it was a commercial airliner, and I knew this was not an accident. Being in a state of extreme fatigue, and pure shock at what I was watching, I just had a complete and total meltdown. I hung up on Karen, and just started dialing numbers of some of my closest friends that I knew where flying that day, and were NYC based. I truly felt like I had just witnessed my friends being killed on live television. You could not see the tail on that airplane, and all they could tell you was that the flight had departed Boston in route to LA. I knew that we (DAL) had an 8:00 departure to LA from Boston-I knew this, because I had flown that trip just a few months prior. Later we would find out that it was said that DAL had not been the target of this wrath because that flight historically departed late each day. It may be the one time our on-time performance (or lack thereof) had actually spared us of the direct hit.
Please don't assume that I was only focused on the people who were on-board the planes. I knew that many people had just been killed, but for those hours and days that followed I just kept reliving what I knew had probably transpired on-board those planes. We have been coached, and quizzed, and taught step by step what to do in the event you are hijacked. I knew that the crew had cooperated, and had followed instructions that had been compiled over years from previous hijackings. The crew on-board those flights were not prepared for the ill that lie ahead. In the past you just did as they asked, you would land somewhere, demands would be made etc etc...My only hope is that hopefully Flight 93(Shanksville, PA) was the only one that actually were aware of what was happening. The sheer terror of knowing what was happening is almost more than I can bare. As I sat glued to the TV, and the phone(as everyone was calling me to make sure I was not flying that day) I was hearing more and more about the crews that were working those flights. Most of which were on what we call turn arounds. Which is out and back in the same day, no suitcase required, I will be home for dinner and homework. That just crushed me thinking that some probably dropped kids at school and then headed to work for their turnaround, and planned to be home before bedtime. I thought of the flight attendant that had called in sick that morning, and was replaced by a reserve. How horrified you would be by your fate that day.
I didn't have to return to work until the following week. I happened to be flying a trip that month that laid over in DC, so the rest of the month I flew a variety of trips, none of which included NYC, or DC. I surprisingly was very calm when I went to work. I remember laying over in Albuquerque, and D calling me when I got to the hotel to make sure I was fine. He asked me if I had felt nervous on the flight. Funny, I wasn't, but I also only had 7 passengers(yes, 7 you heard me right) and 3 of those were employees. The weeks that followed were just weird. People were being so nice to us (rather rare in our occupation), people really came together. For something so horrific where we saw the absolute worst in people, it really bound us together, and we saw the absolute best in people.
In the five years since this tragedy, so much has changed in the world of aviation. So many of my colleagues lost their jobs,so many left because the stress of that uncertainity of that enviroment was more than they could take, we can't fly without the stress of the airport experience, now we can't can't even take toothpaste, or shampoo. I have just learned recently that uniformed flight crew is exempt from this policy. Which is great, because I was thinking if I had not left last year, I would be leaving now if I can't bring my own toiletries (I was thinking there are some seriously smelly, non shampooed, sweaters on their teeth flight attendants working the friendly skies right now-ugh)
As we remember this day in our history, my heart goes out to all of the families that have lost a loved one. I often think of the people while they may have not lost someone, they have lost a part of their soul because they witnessed this tragedy first hand-can't even imagine living that experience over and over again in my mind.
The question arises often are we safer now, than we were then?? Yes, is the answer from my aviation perspective. Not because we can't bring shampoo or box cutters on board, but because we have been educated. We will never sit passively by and let this happen again if we can help it.