09/11/2026
That day, 25 years ago, was a traumatic day for all of us.
I was based at SFO at the time and had been called out the day before to fly out of OAK as an “extra” on a flight to DFW with a Dallas-based crew. From there, I continued on to Calgary with another DFW crew, where we spent the night and were scheduled to fly back to Dallas the next morning. Because I was an extra on the trip, I was flying with crews from another base and didn’t know any of them.
That morning in Calgary, I had just gone through security and was walking past Tim Hortons when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. It was happening right there on the television screen. Everyone gathered around that screen stood in stunned silence, broken only by gasps of disbelief. Just ahead of me were the pilots who were supposed to take us back to DFW. They, too, stood frozen, watching what none of us could quite comprehend.
And then their training kicked in. We were quickly taken down to the operations area, where crews from several flights gathered as everyone tried to understand what was happening and what came next. Eventually, we were driven back to the same hotel we had left only hours before. Thankfully, we were able to return to the rooms we had just checked out of. But we returned to those rooms in a completely different world than the one we had left that morning.
That was the Tuesday that changed the world.
We remained at that hotel until Saturday, when flights finally began moving again and we were able to make our way home. Home to so much unknown. Home aboard an aircraft that many were suddenly afraid to step onto. Home to unimaginable devastation, grief, fear, and uncertainty.
Twenty-five years later, I can still picture that television screen in Calgary. I can still remember the silence, the gasps, and the faces of people trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. And I remember the strange feeling of walking back into that same hotel room knowing that, although the room hadn’t changed at all, everything outside of it had.
September 11, 2001. A Tuesday morning when the world we knew changed forever.
