Flying on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and a funny/touching look back at Y2K

This guest blog was filed by Petti Fong, the Star's Vancouver/West Coast bureau chief...

"Are you nervous?" I asked  the passenger ahead of me in the line-up to check in for the flight to Gatwick from Vancouver.

An hour later after we had taken off, I ask the same question to the passenger in the seat beside me. Both times, they separately eyed me warily and answered the same: "Why?"

 
Like them, it hadn't dawned on me traveling on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that the day should be anything other than the new normal.

A decade and a day before September 11, 2001, none of us had ever thought twice about bringing in water bottles past security checks or wearing only slip-on shoes for traveling much less know by sight what a 100 ml bottle size would look like.

"It's just part of our routine now isn't it when we travel?" said the woman beside me in the waiting lounge at YVR. "The tenth anniversary wasn't what I thought about when I booked my ticket. It was just another day but not really, is it?"

Airports around the world have poured in billions of dollars in heightened security and passengers have become accustomed to long waits. At YVR alone, $200 million have been spent since 9/11.

All the now normal  security reminded me of another non-memorable flight.

My assignment on the turn of the millennium was to be in the air at the stroke of midnight. A reporter had been assigned full-time to monitor what all the different agencies were doing in preparation for Y2K for a whole year leading up to December 31, 1999.

Every reporter in the newsroom had to be stationed in a specific location to report on what was going to happen at the dawn of the new millennium. As everyone knows the front pages on January 1, 2000 were all about how nothing happened.

But that night, up in the air, as my flight departed around 8 pm New York time bound for Vancouver, there was still the hope that the new millennium would arrive with a bang.

I had three tries at it up in the air. We passed through Newfoundland's midnight. Nothing happened. Then eastern standard time and we were still flying, and somewhere over South Dakota when we hit mountain standard time, I knew it was time to call my editor with the bad news.

"Dan, it's me," I said in my first ever phone call from an airplane.

The disappointment was clear from his sigh even before he spoke.

"Shit. Fong's alive. We don't have a front page."

I filed my story by fax line. Interviewed the seven passengers on board that 747. Like the passengers I talked to earlier this week on 9/11 2011, most of them hadn't thought much about the potential perils of Y2K.

After each stroke of midnight, the flight attendants came out with free champagne and they, like the rest of us, looked happy and hokey in our 2000 sparkly fake glasses. We toasted each other and circulated around that big empty airplane like we were at a cocktail party.

Then about an hour before we landed, one of the flight attendants leaned over and said the pilot wanted me to join them as we descended into Vancouver. I made my way into the unlocked cockpit and strapped into the seats behind the two pilots.

We would land at 1150 pm and I would find waiting at the airport, nothing. An empty airport with just one guy pushing a mop. We wished each other a happy new year and we both watched the clock turn to an uneventful 12:02 am.

But in those minutes between 11 pm and midnight at the beginning of a new millennium, there was still the possibility, as we sat in the cockpit and saw the lights of Vancouver spread its glow over the dark night that something terribly wrong could occur.

It didn't then and we had no idea how much worse it would be on a date when nothing bad was expected to happen.

I think back to that flight on December 31, 1999 when everyone thought the turn of the clock would cause our banking systems to crash, trains would stop running and planes fall out of the sky and remember just how bright those lights were as we came down to the ground.

Comments

[JonGabel@ kahuna healing]

The 9/11 bombing made me realize one thing that no matter how great of a country you are there will always be a threat. What happened before should I guess never be forgotten and should always be remembered so as we won't allow any second pass allowing risk or potential danger to set in. Life is so precious that some people take it as a toy thing. I pray for all of the people who had been affected with this painful event especially to all Filipino people who was just painfully making a living and was affected by this along with all the thousands of people who died that day. May you rest peacefully with God.