In the first plane to land after Flight 587
We came down in view of two crash sites and surrounded by thousands of ghosts.
By P. Smith
Nov. 14, 2001 | NEW YORK -- Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, world-renowned for security and convenience, features an unguarded observation deck and a bicycle path that follows the contours of the runways and taxiways. The airport's railway station lies along the north-south line linking Amsterdam with Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and beyond. The station sits not at some outlying transfer point, but within the terminal building itself, a 30-second escalator ride from the ticket counters and arrival halls.
Yesterday, at 10 in the morning, I was clearing immigration at Schiphol. There were no long lines, no soldiers, no ransacking of carry-ons -- just the smooth and orderly flow of passengers through no fewer than three security checkpoints in an atmosphere of cool, confident, European efficiency. Three times I passed through a metal detector -- my luggage was pulled quickly beneath an X-ray machine while the magnetic strip of my passport was swiped for verification. Down below, I knew, suitcases were being sniffed, X-rayed and pressurized. Nobody asked about nail clippers, files, or scissors. Total elapsed time from check-in desk to departure concourse? About six minutes.
At the departure gate, I assured an anxious traveler that all was safe and secure. "I feel safer flying from Europe than I would from Chicago or St. Louis," I told him. Next to me on the Boeing 767 sat a young Kuwaiti businessman.
An hour prior to landing at Kennedy Airport in New York, the captain made an announcement. I knew it was something important because the graying commander spoke not in a disconnected drawl from the cockpit, but while standing at the forward bulkhead, the P.A. phone in his hand, eye-to-eye with the passengers.
"I'm afraid I have some unfortunate news," he announced. My initial thought was, "Not again." On the chaotic morning of Sept. 11, I had been airborne as well, deadheading from Boston's Logan Airport, my plane eventually diverted to Charleston, S.C. From an aisle seat I had looked through the window and watched American Flight 11 roar down Logan's Runway 09.
Holding out his hand in a gesture of reassurance, the captain went on to explain there had been some kind of crash near JFK, and our flight would be redirected to Hartford, Conn. The result of this turned the business class cabin into a hive of anxious conjecture. People whispered, assumed the worst, left their coffee untouched.
Descending in the airspace around Hartford, we suddenly lurched skyward again and were informed that New York had reopened and was accepting traffic. We headed south across Long Island Sound and made our approach to Runway 31L, necks craning, passengers peering across from aisle seats to search out a crash site. And there it was, though I don't think most people saw it: a distant mist of gray smoke, like a tiny, isolated fog bank against the clear blue afternoon.
The plane had gone down in the Belle Harbor section of Rockaway, a skinny stretch of neighborhood merely a few blocks wide, not unlike the Florida intercoastal. On one side of Rockaway is the open Atlantic, on the other is the huge marshy basin known as Jamaica Bay. The islands of this bay comprise a wildlife refuge and something called the Gateway National Recreation Area, at the northeast corner of which rest the runways of Kennedy Airport. As a pilot based at JFK, I once saw a pelican resting in the grass along a taxiway.
In 10 years of commercial flying I have never seen a crash site before. Now, without even the need to shift my gaze, I could see two of them: the smoldering wreckage of the American A300, and in a straight line to the west, 15 miles away, the vacated chunk of sky that was once the World Trade Center.
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