GROUNDING OF PLANES ON 11TH SEPTEMBER 2001

A FULL GROUND STOP

By 9:30 in the morning on September 11, 2001, it had become clear to officials at the Federal Aviation Administration that something was horribly wrong. Unfortunately, they did not know exactly what. They knew that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center's North and South Towers and that at least one other plane, American Airlines Flight 77, had likely been hijacked as well. An official listening in on some of the hijackers' cockpit conversations had heard someone say "We have some planes," but no one knew exactly how many planes the terrorists had. Moreover, no one at the FAA had ever had to contend with a multiple-airplane hijacking. The last one, 31 years earlier, had ended when Palestinian gunmen blew up three foreign airplanes in the Jordanian desert. They did not know what to do, so they did what they could: They ordered a full ground stop of all the airplanes in the United States.

Monitors at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport indicate all flights have been cancelled by the FAA, who have applied security measures. Image by © GREENBLATT BILL/CORBIS SYGMA

A nationwide ground stop -- where no commercial, military or private airliner is allowed to take off and all planes in the air are required to land as soon as safely possible -- was unprecedented. The FAA had previously implemented mini-stops for specific airports, cities or regions because of weather or safety concerns, but to intervene in air traffic on such a wide scale was unheard-of. On its own and before the FAA got involved on the morning of the hijackings, the president of American Airlines had ordered the groundings of all American and American Eagle planes on the East Coast; shortly afterward, when he learned that United Airlines was also missing a plane, he halted American service nationwide. United executives quickly followed suit.

CLEARING THE SKIES

After the FAA declared its ground stop, it had to figure out what to do with all the planes that were already in the air. It sent notices to pilots, called NOTAMS, instructing them to find the nearest airport and land their planes as quickly as possible. As a result, Southwest Airlines sent planes to Denver, an airport it never used, and huge JetBlue jets bound for New York City landed in tiny airports in upstate New York.

At 10:31 a.m., FAA Administrator Jane Garvey sent a message to all international flights headed to the United States  Turn around or land someplace else. That someplace else, in most cases, was Canada. Garvey worked with officials at NAVCanada, the semi-private organization in charge of Canadian air traffic, to devise a plan. Four hundred planes were already high above the Atlantic on their way to the United States. About 200 of those were not yet halfway across the ocean, so they turned around and headed back to Europe; the others were redirected. Many of these (38 flights, carrying about 6,600 people) landed at the Gander Airport in Nova Scotia. Others, instructed to stay away from Canada's largest cities, landed in Deer Lake, St. John, Goose Bay, Moncton, Mirabal and other towns. Some of these planes had to dump fuel into the ocean so they would be light enough to land; others, by contrast, were running low on fuel and caused a panic by telling NAVCanada controllers that they, too, had been hijacked. That way, their pilots thought, they would get landing priority. At the same time, 34 diverted planes from Asia were landing in Vancouver. By about 6 p.m. EST, the skies were finally clear.

FLYING WITH NEW RULES

On September 12, the FAA slowly began to lift the ground stop. Planes that had been rerouted the day before were allowed to continue to their final destinations. Military and law-enforcement flights had resumed the day before, along with, according to Time magazine, "some flights that the FAA cannot reveal that were already airborne". In general, though, the stop remained in effect until the FAA could come up with a new set of safety rules and regulations. The rules, which Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta announced at 2 a.m. on September 13, prohibited (among other things):

• knives, box cutters and other sharp objects on planes or in airports
• curbside or online check-in
• passing through security or going to a gate without a paper boarding pass

Photo © Peter Guttman

By September 14, 424 of 455 airports in the United States met the new standards, including all three of the major airports in the New York area (JFK, LaGuardia and Newark). Boston's Logan International Airport and Washington's Reagan National Airport remained closed -- Logan until the September 15 and Reagan, according to an FAA directive, "temporarily, indefinitely." It finally reopened on October 4. Even by the next week, air traffic was still not back to normal: crop dusters and other agricultural planes could fly but training flights were still banned, as were flights towing banners, sightseeing planes and traffic and news helicopters. Foreign airlines could depart from U.S. airports but not fly into them. A minor scandal erupted when it emerged that more than 100 wealthy Saudis, including members of Osama bin Laden's family, had been whisked out of the country before international flights were technically allowed to resume.

A NEW KIND OF NORMALCY

By the end of October, air travel in the United States had begun to settle into a new kind of normalcy. The ground stop had cost airlines a lot of money and the new security measures meant longer waits at airports, but thanks to the FAA, the skies had been cleared safely and efficiently.