From my Dispatch Office, we saw it happen. At first we said, look at that a-hole in a Cessna that hit the WTC....ugh....
as that hour slowly progressed, and we were grounding our fleet, planes all over the world at that time. the DO told us not to tell the crew members what was going on. We all looked at each other and told every plane that was in the air what happened. The Towers fell and the last flight I was contacting was flying from FRA-HKG. He was just over Tehran. My fellow co-workers stood behind me and said tell him to take a dive!! We proceeded to land in DXB, the only save place we believed in the Middle Eastern Region.
Those next few days in NY were so eerily quiet, as we had no air traffic until Friday. I remember the road blocks and my car being searched everyday.
On a side note, the last spouse to read the names yesterday, the one who made the comments about how she hopes their grandchildren do not have to grow up in a world where someday they will have to go through something like this, was a fellow TWA employee. Her husband, Paul Zios, worked in TWA CREW SKED and when CCS moved to STL, he quit and went to work for American Express Travel. God Speed PZ.
as that hour slowly progressed, and we were grounding our fleet, planes all over the world at that time. the DO told us not to tell the crew members what was going on. We all looked at each other and told every plane that was in the air what happened. The Towers fell and the last flight I was contacting was flying from FRA-HKG. He was just over Tehran. My fellow co-workers stood behind me and said tell him to take a dive!! We proceeded to land in DXB, the only save place we believed in the Middle Eastern Region.
Those next few days in NY were so eerily quiet, as we had no air traffic until Friday. I remember the road blocks and my car being searched everyday.
On a side note, the last spouse to read the names yesterday, the one who made the comments about how she hopes their grandchildren do not have to grow up in a world where someday they will have to go through something like this, was a fellow TWA employee. Her husband, Paul Zios, worked in TWA CREW SKED and when CCS moved to STL, he quit and went to work for American Express Travel. God Speed PZ.