The south pool at the September 11 Memorial in New York which includes the names of the victims killed at the World Trade Center’s south tower and on Flights 175, 77, and 93. Photo Credit: Nadia Eimandoust at Wikimedia.

September 11th was a beautiful fall morning. “Severe Clear” as the pilots say—no clouds, no haze, visibility all the way to the horizon. It began as an ordinary day and within minutes became unlike anything this country had ever known.

Before that morning, civil aviation was the sound and the symbol of commerce. We knew with certainty what it did. It built economies. It stitched the world together. It carried people home. On September 11th, the terrorists took those instruments of commerce and turned them into weapons of hate.

The day began with a meeting with Secretary Norm Mineta at DOT headquarters. The meeting had barely begun when the Chief of Staff came through the door to tell us an aircraft had struck the World Trade Center. Our first reaction was the human one—a terrible accident, a small plane, a pilot in trouble.

Within seconds came word of two possible hijackings.

In that instant, it was no longer an accident, it was a coordinated attack.

In the chaotic midst of those early moments, our responsibility was clear: protect the traveling public, support the air traffic controllers making split-second decisions on incomplete information, and coordinate with countless partners across government and across the industry. The White House stood up a secure teleconference to manage the crisis. Information changed by the minute—some of it uncertain, all of it urgent—and every decision had to balance speed against safety.

At 9:42, five minutes after the Pentagon was struck, an order went out to every aircraft flying over the United States: land. Immediately. The direction was straightforward—contact your company, find the nearest suitable airport, get the airplane on the ground. Get your passengers to safety. Nothing like it had ever been issued in the history of American aviation.

It is worth pausing on the enormity of that moment.

There were roughly 4,500 aircraft in the air. Beyond the disruption across U.S. airspace, more than 100 transatlantic flights were turned toward small airfields in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and elsewhere in Canada—towns that took in hundreds of strangers and fed and housed them for days.

All the while there were reports of some eleven aircraft either off course or out of communication, any one of which might have been the next weapon.

To put 4,500 aircraft on the ground, in places they were never meant to go, at the very moment the military was trying to get airborne—and to do it without a single accident—remains one of the most remarkable operational feats in the history of flight.

In the face of horrific tragedy, the aviation community responded with professionalism, discipline and intention.

The controllers understood the enormity of what was unfolding and acted on it. Facilities in Boston, New York, and Washington halted departures even before the national order ever came.

The men and women of the FAA—some with family at the Pentagon, no one knowing whether another attack was minutes away—stayed at their positions and did the work in front of them. Airline dispatchers found airports for crews who had never planned to see them. Airport directors opened ramps and gates with no idea who was coming or for how long. Flight crews made calm announcements to frightened passengers in the face of their own fear.

Each of them knew to keep focused on the mission.

Twenty-five years later, we remember the 2,977 who did not come home. We remember the passengers of Flight 93, who in perhaps 40 minutes gathered what they knew, understood what it meant and mounted the first counterattack of a new kind of war—a decision made by ordinary people, without orders, at the cost of everything.

And we remember what aviation refused to become. For a few hours on a September morning, our airplanes were made into weapons. They did not stay weapons. The system came back. The gates reopened and civil aviation returned to being what it has always been at its best — not the sound of commerce alone, but the symbol of people coming together — and that remains the enduring promise of aviation.

The Arlington National Cemetery memorial, shown above, dedicated to the victims of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. Photo source: Tim1965 at Wikimedia.

Flag flying over the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania with the visitor center in background. Photo credit: Calstanhope at Wikimedia.