The Kindness of Strangers
The story of Charles Strohmer’s experience the morning of 9/11 and the days immediately following.
The Kindness of Strangers
Heaven on earth – at an Air Force base
by Charles Strohmer
Four hours out of London, flying uneventfully through florescent blue sky six miles above the Atlantic, the passengers aboard Delta Flight 59 were digesting their meals, quietly absorbed in laptops, reading novels, or drowsily captive to that vespertine atmosphere created on planes when the movies are running. Other than departing Gatwick 45 minutes late, so far the only bother could now be heard in hushed buzz of passengers asking why all the video screens had just gone blank. “The movies should be back on in a few minutes,” an air hostess said over the intercom. “A computer needs re-booting. It happens. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Yawn. Passengers stretched, ordered drinks, queued for toilets. Someone across the aisle from me lifted his porthole shade and broke the spell of counterfeit evening. I looked and was overwhelmed. The bright blue evanescence stretched into forever. I once heard a pilot call it “severe clear.” It hurt your eyes to gaze at that boundless horizon. Twenty more minutes passed. People fidgeted. Five hours to go before 3.40pm touchdown in Atlanta. The Boeing 777 droned on.
Suddenly everyone’s attention focused on the Texas drawl coming from the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. May I have your attention. Your serious attention.” The dreaded words. Worst nightmares sprung from the fuselage, the overhead compartment, the unconscious — wherever you had stowed them before boarding. A kind of holy moment spread through cabin. We’re going down. No one spoke. No one dared.
It seems much longer than a millisecond before Captain William’s steady but troubled drawl continued: “There’s been a major incident in the United States and all air space throughout the nation has been closed. All planes in the air in the United States are being directed to land at the nearest airports, and all international flights into the U.S. are being diverted. We are okay. I repeat. We are okay. But we cannot land in the U.S. We will be landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia in about two hours. We can’t give you any more information at this time. Please be patient and bear with us. We will have more details for you when we get on the ground. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Like synchronized swimmers, passengers turned to face their seat-neighbors. Whispers arose. What do you think it is? Who knows? Maybe that announcement was just a ploy and we’re really going down? Must have been a huge earthquake? No? A nuclear bomb, then? Maybe the air traffic control system has failed? Does the captain even know what’s going on?
None of these events seemed likely to me. Even if a nuclear catastrophe had occurred in one part of the country, why had all the airports been closed? What had happened? I had to know. Knowing would at least beat back the worst-case-scenario self-talk I was battling. I quickly calculated to Eastern Time and concluded that my wife would be in class with her first-graders. But how could I be sure? What had happened? And where? Who had been effected? Was I even going to get home?
Reign it in, Strohmer. Someone must know. Coming down the aisle toward me was a hostess whom I had spoken with earlier and had made a connection. I was traveling alone, and there weren’t many other passengers in the area where I was seated, in a aisle seat a few rows back of first class. I decided I would take advantage of that privacy now. Our eyes met but I deliberately remained seated, hoping she would stop when I gently sought to flag her down. She stopped and crouched to listen. “I know you can’t tell me what happened, even if you know,” I whispered, “and I’m not asking you to. But can you at least tell me, does the crew know what’s happened?” She nodded discreetly, stood, and then continued her on errand. Well, that was something. It was the first of many comforting gestures the next four days.
Delta Flight 59 became the penultimate of forty-two planeloads of international air travelers permitted safe harbor at Halifax International before the tarmac ran out of wing space. As we circled before landing, I was surprised to see the asphalt service road filled with cars, vans, and pickups filled with on-lookers, who had queued to watch the landings like bystanders congregating to stare at a blazing house fire. Well, they were. It wasn’t just the striking sight of forty-two huge international, commercial jets that had brought them out. They knew what had happened. We still did not why we had been grounded.
Taxiing to our place in the queue, far from the terminal, we eased past the staring congregation until Captain Williams brought the 777 to gently to a halt. We heard the mike cue. The captain he immediately thanked us for our patient cooperation and provided what sketchy details of the attack were available to him. “Hopefully,” he concluded, “they’ll re-open U.S. airspace to get these international flights to their destinations. So maybe we’ll be able to get out of here in a few hours.” When the crew began circulating, we asked a thousand questions, but the the newly arrived flight crews knew little. It would be nearly twenty-four hours after the attacks before our imaginations would be seared by television images of flying machines, twisted I-beams, and charred bodies crashing, falling, and billowing in the explosive chemistry of terror, dust, and loss.
Two long, perfectly executed lines of 747s, 767s, 777s, Air Buses, and L1011s were now parked side-by-side on the tarmac. None would be flying anything for the foreseeable future except their carriers’ logos on their tails. Ten thousand stranded passengers — a small town, and all the problems that come with it. The scene had been repeated across Canada, from Newfoundland to Vancouver. Many trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights had been ordered back to their departure cities. Across America, that the extreme sudden workout demanded of thousands of air traffic controllers went without incident is astonishing. The FAA had ordered some 5,000 civilian planes to be landed immediately so that the military could isolate any rogue planes still in the air. Within four minutes, 700 planes had been landed. Nearly 3,000 within the next hour. All 5,000 had been safely guided to the ground in under two hours. An impressive impromptu performance, never once rehearsed in aviation history.
Now free to mill about the entire plane – a gracious gesture itself – I found a spot to stand unobtrusively near the open cockpit door to listen to the scratchy, AM radio signal coming out of Halifax, a source of constant news about the attacks, ninety percent of it still rumor. But there were stories in this cockpit, and I decided to chat up the pilots when they were free. “Why did you make the kind of announcement over the Atlantic?” I asked Captain Williams. “Why not just tell us what had happened?” He didn’t hedge. While the videos were off (there had been no computer hiccup), he and his co-pilot had discussed what language to use. “We’ve got almost sixty years’ experience between us,” he told me. “Personally, we’ve never been in this kind of a situation, but colleagues who have been have told us that, in the air, some passengers may panic when they hear the words ‘terrorist attack’ or ‘hijacking’, so we talked for a long time about the right words to describe the urgency but not panic anyone.”
We had now been on the ground a couple hours and flight attendants had been arriving at the cockpit with reports from the cabin. Snacks and water were running low, it was getting stuffy, a couple infants needed baby formula, some passengers wanted a smoke, others needed fresh air. Still squeezed into my spot near the cockpit, I listened to nearly sixty years of experience quickly process each problem as it arose come to wise decisions. The Halifax ground crew was notified about snacks, bottled water, and infant formula. The rear starboard door would be opened for smokers. “But for those of you who need to smoke,” Captain Williams announced, “please take turns and don’t crowd the area. And try to keep the smoke from filtering into the cabin.” The want of fresh air was solved when the front starboard door was opened to admit supplies. “Let’s leave that door open for a while after the ground crew leaves,” Williams told a hostess. Such gestures, especially access to the pilots, made a world of difference in our social microcosm. They defused building tensions and made the confines bearable. I later learned that crews on some of the other carriers had not been as wise.
There was still the matter of reaching my wife. I gave up my post near the cockpit and looked for someone who might lend me a phone. But it was still pointless. Those with phones were wearing down their fingerprints punching numbers robotically every few minutes gambling against a busy signal. Very few won, those hours. But there were countless other stories, and near my seat I began talking with a friendly couple who, apparently, had no phone. They introduced themselves as Robert and Georgia Matthews, from Memphis. A Christian minister, he explained that he had been in London for the opening ceremonies of a colleague’s church. As I began to explain that I’d been traveling in England on a speaking trip, we heard the mike suddenly cue – everyone had become acute to that sound. Captain Williams announced that the FAA had decided not to reopen U.S. airspace today. “We might be here for another day,” he said.
The Matthews and I were digesting this development when Robert’s trouser pocket suddenly began beeping. His daughter in Memphis had been playing phone robotics herself and had finally beat the odds. Voilà! A connection. Passengers around us were astounded. After he finished talking to his daughter, she took my wife’s number and promised to get hold of her with news that I was okay and where I was. An hour later she got through to us on the plane to say she had been able to reach my wife.
Blessedly, our flight was half full, which made the seventeen hours we spent on board more tolerable. Well past midnight I copped three empty seats side-by-side at the very rear and tried to sleep. Around 3am, we were quickly deplaned on to the runway, shuttled to the terminal, hustled through customs, and immediately driven ten miles in yellow school buses to Shearwater, a Canadian Air Force Base, where we wo0uld be “guests” of Canada. It was a word used by the animated politician who met the group I was with at the school bus outside the terminal. He didn’t seem like he wished he were home in a warm bed. He gave a warm Canadian welcome to “our good neighbors from the south” and promised with many promises that we would be well-looked-after. We were. But questions about how long we’d be your guests were met with we’re taking it a day at a time.
Legends in their own time, forty-two winged ghost towns now waited on the tarmac, the topic of talk radio, press coverage, and conversations in every Halifax-Dartmouth home. The Shearwater encampment numbered about 750 stranded passengers – two Delta flights besides ours, two British Air, and one partying Air Tours group from Scotland filled with vacationers to Florida. The remaining ten thousand had been housed across the area in schools and homes and in what remained of hotel rooms not occupied by tourists. The families that had queued in their cars and vans along the access road were not there just to gawk. Our time as guests of Canada would become the subject of the PBS documentary “Stranded Yanks,” which aired during the one-year anniversary of 9/11.
