The Day world Changed

By Capt. G.A. Fernando

gafplane@sltnet.lk

On September 11, 2001 I was in command of an Airbus A340-300, flying from Seoul, South Korea, to San Francisco, USA. My First Officer (FO) was of Indian origin, while my relief captain was Australian. Our departure from Seoul was delayed by about one hour because of a mechanical problem. We eventually dispatched ourselves with just one non-vital defect, which was the direct communication link with our company’s base in Singapore. We were perfectly justified and ‘legal’ in taking off despite this defect because the ‘glitch’ was deemed acceptable in accordance with the Minimum Equipment List (MEL), a published listing of equipment faults which, depending on their severity, either permitted us to continue flying or, in the case of more serious defects, demanded that we remain grounded until the problem is fixed. We were scheduled to arrive in San Francisco on the same day that we left South Korea, because we were crossing the International Date Line en route.

Our flight was quite routine to begin with. About four hours into the flight it was my turn to take a break. The augmenting captain sat in my seat and I went to the passenger cabin to rest for a while. As I was dozing off, I was interrupted by a message from the relief captain asking me to return to the flight deck (cockpit) as there was a problem. The pilots had been told by San Francisco that there had been a crash at one of the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center and that US air traffic controllers were only accepting flights inbound to the USA, while all outbound flights had been grounded. As the pilot-in-command, I sat in the cockpit auxiliary jump seat. After a short while, we received another message on our High Frequency (HF) Selective Calling System (SELCAL) from San Francisco stating that a second aircraft had crashed into the other tower, and that the whole of US airspace was now closed to all air traffic. They also wanted to know what our intentions were under the circumstances.

On long flights over the surface of the earth, for example over the Pacific Ocean, we fly what are known as Great Circle tracks, i.e. the shortest distance between two points on a sphere. Pilots must fly a series of headings to achieve this track because of the ever-changing convergence of the lines of longitude. When it is projected onto a flat map, the Great Circle track is shown as a curve and concave towards the equator. So our direct flight to San Francisco would take us close to Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada.

After a short discussion with the other crewmembers, there was no doubt of our preferred destination in this suddenly changed situation. It would be Vancouver. Meanwhile, our company was unable to contact us because of our unserviceable communications system. So we were left to our own devices. By now we had passed our Point of No Return (PNR). This is a point in time and on our flight path where we have no option but to proceed without turning back to our departure point as we don’t have enough fuel to return. When we communicated our intentions to San Francisco, they wanted to know whether we needed to call anyone to facilitate our arrival at Vancouver, and gave us a discreet frequency to speak on. My First Officer was now looking for all the telephone numbers we had to call. When we called the person at the new frequency we were given, even before we could give her the relevant numbers, she would say “Stand by” and patch us on in next to no time. Apparently they had all the important telephone numbers we required on file – for just such a contingency!

The next step for us was what were we going to tell the 300 or so passengers? They were still sleeping, blissfully oblivious to the drama taking place on the flight deck – and in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. We didn’t know much either. Eventually we decided to tell our passengers that we were informed that US airspace was closed, but without giving them a reason.

We arrived over Vancouver after about ten hours of flying time. We were the last to land. Soon after we landed, Canadian airspace was also closed to all traffic. The entire airport area was clogged with airliners from the USA. The procedure was for us to disembark our passengers at the terminal building and then the aircraft would be towed to an isolated spot where baggage would be carefully unloaded, in case there were explosive devices within. We were number 34 in sequence. It eventually took us eight hours to reach the terminal building and disembark our passengers. Throughout, we had to keep our engines running to provide electricity to our galleys so that at least tea and coffee could be prepared for the passengers.

But another problem manifested itself. Our generators, which supply electrical power to the airplane, are cooled by the fuel in the wings, and after about seven hours of taxiing, although the ambient temperature was 16 degrees Celsius, the fuel temperature in our wing tanks reached an unacceptable 48 degrees Celsius! So we had to shut down one or more of the engines. Meanwhile the Vancouver Airport manager was going from aircraft to aircraft; without boarding the airplanes lined up in a taxiing queue, he plugged a headset into the socket normally used by ground engineers to communicate with the pilots before and after departure, and asked if we needed any additional supplies such as water.

To relieve the boredom and tension, the control tower passed us a frequency of a local radio station which gave us a ball-by-ball description of the unfortunate events that had transpired on that fateful day. The news of the actual events unfolding was broken to our cabin crewmembers and passengers only during the last hour before reaching our parking position, when use of cell phones was also permitted. But even our crew did not realise the gravity of the situation until we finally reached the sanctuary of the terminal building and saw the footage on TV screens. Naturally, many of the crewmembers were visibly upset. The Canadian Air Line Pilots’ Association (CALPA) had organised a room with tea, coffee, and biscuits, and free call facilities for all aircrews.

After a two-day wait in Vancouver we were asked to fly our passengers out to San Francisco. We were the first foreign airline to land in San Francisco after the airspace closure. Another day’s wait in San Francisco and then back to Seoul. While waiting for our transport at the hotel on the day of departure in San Francisco, a middle-aged lady approached us and said, “You must be afraid to fly now”. I couldn’t help but tell her that I came from a country called Sri Lanka, and that the USA never gave a damn about the separatist war that had been raging in Sri Lanka for over two decades, and that in a way I was glad that the USA would now realise that no country is immune to the spectre of terrorism. Later, my Australian colleague told me that I had voiced my point of view rather too strongly. But I countered by ‘educating’ him about Adele Balasingham (nee Wilby) and her role in promoting terrorism against the people of Sri Lanka. He was shocked to learn about the evil deeds of his fellow-Australian!