9/11: The Week That Felt Like A Month

Like many others, Steve Brown started his workday on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as usual. By the early afternoon, Americans across the nation picked their kids up from school, retreating to the unassured safety of their homes. Brown’s responsibilities, however, prevented such a luxury. As the FAA’s associate administrator for air traffic services, Brown—and his team—were met with the monumental task of securing the safety of the National Airspace System (NAS). This was two years before Brown was to join the National Business Aviation Association and ultimately become COO there.

The typical workday began with direct reports from management teams regarding daily operations. A cacophony of beeping pagers interrupted this routine, signaling the beginning of a national emergency for which no protocol was prepared.

The first strike was met with widespread confusion—perhaps an accident or medical emergency was to blame. Once the second tower was hit, the threat became exceedingly apparent.

“It was at that point that I, the administrator, and the deputy administrator went into a secured room called a SCIF,” Brown said. “We were on a video teleconference, a secure link, with Vice President Cheney at the White House, [Transportation] Secretary [Norm] Mineta, and all of the other cabinet agencies.”

On that call, Brown’s team was tasked with securing the airborne inventory—every single aircraft currently in flight within the NAS.

“The operating assumption at the time was that there were additional attackers on additional aircraft,” he said. “We didn’t know how many, but we made the assumption that there could be many. So, the idea was to get aircraft on the ground to mitigate the risk to the public and to the transportation system of the nation.”

As Brown recalls, the entire airborne inventory was grounded within roughly two and a half hours, including a healthy share of aircraft flying over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. For one of the world’s largest national airspaces, this was exceptionally fast. Considering the multitude of diverted international flights, communication between nations became critical. According to Brown, that cooperation should be remembered as heroic.

“We have an air traffic control system that, in many ways, is interoperable with the Canadians as our closest and largest neighbor,” he said. “That’s because of international agreements, but it’s also because of the close, bilateral cooperation between Canada and the United States. So, the commonality made teamwork, in a crisis at the moment, much smoother and much more predictable.”

By around 11:30 a.m., the airborne inventory was grounded, and the likelihood of subsequent attacks had reduced dramatically, but there was no way to determine if the attack had concluded, Brown said. By that time, only he and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld remained on the secure teleconference call.

“Once we got there, both he and I felt a sense of relief over that, but we didn’t know about potential people who had not been activated.”

Brown’s objective to ground the airborne inventory was completed, but thousands of travelers were now stranded in cities across North America.

“All of a sudden, Halifax Airport had 12,000 people sitting on airplanes on the runways and the taxiways,” Brown said. “They found out toward the end of the day that they had no idea how long they were going to be there—the airplanes, or the crews, or the passengers.”

The city of Halifax, like several other municipalities across the continent, urged the public to help shelter stranded travelers who couldn’t return home.

“A lot of passengers went to the closest rental car place at the airport and rented a car to drive home,” he said. “But there weren’t enough rental cars for everybody. So, citizens were taking care of citizens.”

Over the next three days, Brown’s priority shifted to screening airport infrastructure, aircraft, passengers, and their luggage. Under direction from the White House, the National Guard was deployed to airports across the U.S. to help with this process. Simultaneously, flights that had been diverted to other countries underwent similar security procedures, carried out by their respective law enforcement entities.

In the weeks that followed, the normalcy of public transit did not return. The general public in the U.S. and abroad now possessed a pervasive anxiety around air travel, and the FAA’s goal involved restoring the public’s faith in the country’s ability to keep travelers safe.

“You understand the human reticence to reengage and travel in the same old way. The entire industry was involved in both establishing new methods and building up the confidence that we travel in public,” Brown said. “The reality is that our national economy and the economy of the world are dependent upon people moving around doing business. And even if you set aside the economy, the well-being of humans, in a significant way, is dependent upon connecting with other people.”

Given the unprecedented nature of the attacks, there was no preexisting protocol for shutting down the air traffic control system. According to Brown, the U.S. government never contemplated the need to close it, but for him, that was the easy part.

The hard part, Brown said, was determining how to reopen it. So, Brown became the lead advocate for reopening the system, proposing a restart as early as the morning after the attacks. The solution Brown and his team proposed came in the form of an incremental strategy.

“Given all the resources we had and how quickly we could work on it, I’m proud of the fact that we had it substantially restarted that week. But to me, that week felt like a month, because it took a lot of argumentation and a lot of presentations,” he said.

Brown’s audience included the National Security Council, FBI, CIA, and Department of Defense. The proposal started with IFR-capable aircraft, according to Brown, which covered commercial and business aviation flights. However, there was an immediate need for certain VFR flights to resume.

Of all the proposals Brown made to the National Security Council, one of the first was to restart organ transplant flights, completed with a wide variety of aircraft.

Additionally, Brown proposed the restart of flights in rural Alaska, particularly for women in the final months of their pregnancy, to fly to regional clinics to safely give birth, given that many rural villages lacked the appropriate medical facilities.

“Those were pretty low-threat flights from a terrorist point of view,” he said. “And the benefit far exceeded the risk, obviously to the mothers and the newborns.”

As the days passed, the need for cargo and commercial flights to resume heightened significantly.

“Pretty soon, if that’s not happening, your manufacturing plants are closing down, and people are getting laid off,” he said. “There’s a whole structure of transportation that supports our economy. That isn’t necessarily top of mind, but if it’s not happening for a couple of days, it’s a real problem.”

By the eighth day after the attacks, Brown’s confidence in the safety of the NAS had returned to a high level, thanks in large part to the National Guard’s assistance with enhanced security measures at airports across the country. Within months, the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA would assume that role across the nation.

After 25 years, the work has continued and has evidently ensured the safety of millions of passengers, pilots, and crew. While some travelers may deem the sometimes arduous procedure of TSA screenings as “security theater,” Brown acknowledges that discontent and posits a rebuttal.

“I’d say: ‘Well, I guess you don’t think there’s a threat.’ Clearly, the vast majority of people still think there’s a threat that we need to be cognizant of and do something appropriate to determine,” he said. “I hope people would agree and accept the fact that over 25 years, it’s evolved. We’re using technology more than ever before to detect things, and we certainly have developed ways to pre-qualify people and expedite screening in ways that weren’t occurring immediately after 9/11.

“I’m retired now [Brown retired from NBAA in 2022], but my successors, all across the aviation industry, are as committed as they ever were to improving the system every day. Making it stronger, safer, and more secure. That is the ethic that pervades the system, and nobody’s resting on their success, I assure you. They’re alert and focused every day and building a more robust system every day, so that bodes well for the future.”