Blue Skies

A very pregnant flight attendant pulled an overnight bag on its rollers toward a podium on the other side of the concourse.

“Now, there’s something else you wouldn’t have seen twenty-five years ago,” Dixie pointed out. “In fact,” she said, looking Nikki up and down, “it would’ve seemed pretty unladylike to ask to fly the plane.”

“My God, she looks ready to pop!”

“She told a little fib about her due date. She can’t afford to go on maternity leave, she needs the overtime. Her husband was activated reserve—Navy—gone to Kuwait. The family took a huge pay cut.”

Almost everything about the industry had changed, all right. Back in the glamour days there was no real competition. Enter deregulation of the airline industry and the entrance of low-fare carriers. The large and established airlines found it increasingly difficult to compete. The new entrants, often nonunion start-ups, had low costs, but the big guys had been around long enough so that with every union contract, the cost of labor went up, then up, then up some more. The cost of fuel kept rising, but competitive pricing meant ticket prices plummeted, and the business traveler took advantage, went global.

Before long the big airlines were making almost half their profit from the last-minute business traveler whose company paid the premium price. As for the rest of the travelers, they were no longer just the well-to-do. After deregulation it was cheaper to fly from New York City to Miami for the weekend than to go to a good restaurant and see a Broadway musical. It was frequently more expensive to travel by bus. Now the people waiting to board the airplanes were not wearing their hats and gloves, politely waiting for their flight, but clad in beach clothes or ragged jeans, complaining loudly about the degradation of the service.

The major airlines were losing millions a year, a month, some losing millions a day as they tried to compete with the start-ups. The start-ups would fail and disappear, but that did not put the money back in the coffers of the legacy carriers, and another start-up would appear with bargain-basement tickets, starting the whole process all over again.

Then the unfathomable happened.

Everyone remembered where they were that morning. Buck was hosing down tarmac outside the largest hangar at Burgess Aviation when one of the young maintenance techs came running, yelling for him to come to the office and see the TV. Carlisle was in New York on an overnight, due to fly out later that day. Dixie was in D.C., on the treadmill in the hotel’s fitness center, watching CNN. At first, she thought she was seeing an Aries plane and she ran to the nearest phone and called Aries dispatch.

And Nikki was in Boston, sitting in the cockpit of an Aries 767, full of passengers, ready to push back. She was turned around in her seat, talking to a Delta pilot who was hitching a ride on an Aries jump seat.

An operations agent came aboard, stuck her head in the cockpit and said, “Did you hear what happened? An airplane hit the World Trade Center.”

“What kind of airplane?” Nikki asked.

“A big airplane. Like a 737 or something.”

“Whoa. How do you get that far off course?”

She shrugged. “Sit tight till the airport clears us,” the agent said, and left.

Less than a minute passed when her first officer said, “Did you hear that? They closed the airport.”

Nikki looked outside. “Why?” It was a beautiful morning. The sky was crystal clear.

Some other pilot at the airport keyed his mike and asked why the airport had been closed.

“The airport is closed for reasons of national security,” came the reply.

The deafening silence that followed lasted for perhaps two full minutes. Alarm filled the air like static.

The operations agent came back a few minutes later. Her face had bleached so white that her lips were indistinguishable from her flesh. “Another plane flew into the second tower. Another big one.”

“Holy Jesus,” the copilot muttered.

“They’re saying the airplanes are U.S. passenger planes. Hijacked,” the agent said. She was visibly trembling.

The next announcement ordered all planes back to the gates. Passengers were deplaned, pilots and cabin crews were informed there had been several hijackings from Northeast airports and flights were canceled pending investigation. The airport was swiftly evacuated.

The unprecedented response was that every aircraft in the United States was grounded for several days. Nikki learned she had been sitting next to one of the planes that had been hijacked out of Boston.

That morning, trying to reach the kids on her cell phone, she couldn’t get a signal. When she did get through, she found that the kids were with Buck, terrified for her safety because they couldn’t reach her.

Her first reaction, like the rest of the world’s, was shock and horror. But she had a bigger mission—she had a plane to get out of Boston and a crew that was shaken and needed her leadership.

They were put in a hotel where they sat glued to televisions, watching an unbelievable drama happening not very far away. Most of her crew didn’t have enough money for days of meals and incidentals, so Nikki covered them. It didn’t take long for the passengers to disappear from the airport to find alternative means of transportation. Some of them would never be back.

“Mama, I don’t want you to fly!” April had wailed into the phone.

“April, flying is what I do, what I’ve always done, and no madman from an angry country is going to drive me away from it. But I promise you I’ll be taking extra precautions.”

“But what if it was you?”

“But it wasn’t, April. We have to be strong now. Everyone in the U.S. has to be brave and strong now.”

Days later Nikki and her copilot flew an empty plane back to Phoenix. He had missed the birth of his first child. One of the flight attendants was sick as a dog all the way home, and the minute they landed she quit. When the industry was flying again, Aries canceled the majority of their flights, as did every airline in the industry; they flew approximately thirty percent of their schedule, and those flights were not half-full. Even the business traveler stayed home. When companies started sending their people on business trips again, a sagging economy necessitated prudence—they bought bargain fares, purchasing cheap, nonrefundable tickets in advance.

Nikki, her family, her friends and the rest of the country were consumed by pain and sorrow and anger that seemed to have no end.

Aries furloughed a fourth of its workforce in the first month after 9/11, then levied ten-to thirty-percent pay cuts across the board. Most of the other airlines did the same. Two small airlines simply ceased operations in that first week after the terrorist attacks, unable to sustain the losses.

Industrywide, the financial loss reached fifteen billion in that first year. The government came across with five billion in relief, but the bankruptcy filings of seven airlines proved it would not be adequate. Only a very small percentage of the ten-billion-dollar loan package approved by Congress reached a couple of airlines.

A year later the passenger-load factors were still not quite fifty percent of what they had been before 9/11. Dozens of airplanes, from puddle jumpers to huge jets, sat in storage, parked, unused. Their owners, the lessors that airlines leased the planes from, began laying off personnel and filing for Chapter Eleven protection, as well.

The average passenger didn’t notice empty planes, missing planes or deserted airports; to Joe Six-pack it appeared business as usual, because airlines combined flights and canceled flights. The 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. flights to Philly became one flight, and it was almost full, and so on. And there was the hub-and-spoke operation—all the planes converged on the airline’s hub several times a day and the passengers would deplane, filling up the airport, and reboard their connecting flight. These convergences were called “banks.” Phoenix was Aries’s hub—everything went through Phoenix, then out again, like the spokes of a bike wheel. In between banks you could fire a cannon through the deserted airport concourses, something the average traveler never saw.

Stricter security measures were put into place, but Nikki had no illusions about their effectiveness. She thought the airlines’ greatest security assets were the passengers—they would never let a plane be taken over again.

And then the country went to war, determined to cripple, if not end, terrorism at its roots. Pain and strife and economic troubles spread wider.

Four small to moderately sized airlines shut down in the first year, and in the second year at least three huge airlines that had been around forever teetered on the brink of failure. Nikki’s airline limped along, but had lost several hundred million and flirted with filing for bankruptcy protection.

Nikki was left with two overwhelming conclusions about her work and her world. One: we are no longer safe. And two: we must carry on.

When Nikki took her flight out of Phoenix, Dixie was still waiting for her inbound flight to arrive. She tapped her foot and crossed her fingers. Her trip had better not cancel; she had big plans for her layover. A sexy red teddy and a nice bottle of wine were tucked away in her suitcase, and she also had a very expensive man’s watch wrapped in silver paper—much more money than she should spend, especially with all the recent pay cuts. But this was a very special man, and it was his birthday.

Branch Darnell, a pilot with Aries, was turning forty-seven, though Dixie didn’t think he looked a day over thirty-five. He did have those sexy little crinkles at the corners of his eyes, but that was as much from his year-round tan as age. They’d been seeing each other for six months, and she couldn’t help but think he was The One. At first she’d held off letting herself think that, but she was more convinced of it every day. Over the years Dixie had had quite a few love affairs, way too many of them with pilots, but this time felt different. It had the feel of permanence.

Branch was a Texan, and Dixie couldn’t help but have a soft spot for the Longhorns. He commuted from San Antonio and had all but moved in with her in Phoenix when he came to town to fly. Every week, more and more of his belongings appeared in her closet and bathroom. She was senior enough to hold just about any flying line she wanted, and tried to bid his schedule so she could spend the night with him on layovers. The drawback was that he wasn’t senior, and the lines he was awarded were usually awful—short hops, crappy layovers, working weekends. Branch was a retired air force colonel and had only been flying commercially for three years; he was still a first officer and not even a senior one. Dixie ended up working a lot harder than she had to just be able to spend time with him.

Fortunately tonight was a rarity—a long New York City layover. A nice birthday present in itself.

There was one minor complication—Branch wasn’t divorced yet. He was separated, though, and when the divorce was complete, which he had warned her wouldn’t be real fast, he wasn’t going to relocate to Phoenix for a few years. There were still a couple of kids at home. So it wasn’t perfect, but it was damn close.

Nikki was worried. “I don’t know, Dixie. He’s got that look. Like he’s been around.”

“Well, darlin’, he’s not the only one,” Dixie had replied with a laugh.

“It’s different with you,” Nikki said.