9/11: 20 years later, a reporter remembers a day of chaos at Wichita’s airport
The day the planes hit the Twin Towers, I was on my way to cover the first trial of local strippers being prosecuted under Wichita’s newly minted anti-nudity ordinance.
I was just pulling into the courthouse parking garage when the cell phone (a Wichita Eagle pool phone I’d checked out and somehow never returned) rang in my pocket.
It was my editor.
He briefly explained the situation in New York and said, “We need you to get over to the airport right away.”
My advance story on the stripper trial had been front page news that morning and I thought for sure the actual trial would be even bigger.
But something in his voice said, “don’t argue.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
The word that best describes the airport that day was chaos.
The Federal Aviation Administration had closed U.S. airspace and planes across the country were ordered to land at the nearest airport.
Because of Wichita’s location, the very definition of “flyover country,” ours was the nearest airport for more than a dozen transcontinental flights carrying hundreds of passengers.
To avert panic in the air, all the pilots had told anyone was that they were making an unscheduled stop in Wichita, Kansas — that and the weather report.
The panic hit when the bewildered passengers walked out of the jetways and found out the real reason for their diversion.
Bear in mind, this was the pre-smartphone era, when all cell phones did was take and make calls. The mobile Internet hadn’t been invented yet.
Starved for news, jostling knots of dozens of people crowded around a few small TVs in the airport bar to try to catch a glimpse of what was going on.
Moans and shouts went up whenever there was a new revelation, which brought more to crowd around the small screens.
Men and women, alone or in couples, sat on the floor in the corners and along the corridor walls, weeping and praying.
At times, I thought the situation was on the verge of riot.
A significant number of stranded passengers appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, including about 100 Jewish people from an El Al flight that had originated in Tel Aviv.
Just about anyone with a darker complexion and facial hair was getting some very nasty side glances from some of the people they’d been sharing the skies with minutes before.
Then, the voice of Mayor Bob Knight came over the loudspeakers.
I can’t quote exactly what he said (newspaper reporters seldom carried recorders back then), but in his usual slow-roll delivery style, it went something like this:
I’m Bob Knight. I’m the mayor of Wichita. I realize that you don’t want to be here. But we’re going to do everything we can to make your stay here is as comfortable as possible. We have made arrangements with our local hotels to take you in. We have diverted our entire fleet of city buses to the airport to pick you up. The buses should start arriving in a few minutes outside the terminal.
I’ve covered city governments from here to California for nearly 40 years and it was the best performance I’ve ever seen by a mayor in a crisis.
It was like a blanket of calm descended over the concourse.
People were staring up at the speakers in the ceiling while Bob was speaking, tears streaming down their cheeks and murmuring, “Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you.”
The majority of diverted passengers picked up their carry-ons and went outside to wait for the buses. Others formed up into small groups of three or four strangers and went to try to rent cars, intent on carpooling home, wherever that might be.
I spent a lot of my day with two people who pretty much summed up the experience.
There was Roland Dionne of Washington, a retired military intelligence officer who still had some unspecified connection to the Pentagon. He’d parked his car there that morning, thinking that would be a safe place, and shuttled to Reagan National Airport for a flight to Lake Tahoe.
And there was Melissa Smith of Voorhees, N.J., an insurance company vice president who thought she was going to San Diego for a business meeting that day. She alternated between tears of grief for dozens of friends and former co-workers who were on the 99th and 100th floors of the World Trade Center North Tower — exactly where the plane struck — and tears of joy that her newlywed husband had quit his job there two weeks before the attack.
They didn’t know each other, but Dionne, who had noticed the young woman’s distress, comforted her and helped her get settled into a motel.
He had military base privileges and went to McConnell Air Force Base to see if he could get a bed in bachelor officer quarters and maybe a military flight back to Washington. He was turned away at the gate by airmen in full battle gear.
Many of the passengers from the El Al flight were orthodox Jews and kept kosher. But Wichita didn’t have any kosher restaurants and still doesn’t.
They subsisted on packaged food from the Walmart, until someone found out that a local restaurateur kept a kosher kitchen at home and was able to make them some hot meals.
Late in the day, the city’s spokeswoman notified us that the airport was instituting a policy of “calm searches” of all vehicles entering the parking area — the first foreshadowing of where we are today, with a new airport designed around security, where shoeless and beltless passengers get X-rayed alongside their luggage.
“What do you mean by ‘calm search?’” I asked.
“It’s just a calm, voluntary search,” she replied.
“What if you don’t volunteer?”
“Then you can’t come to the airport.”
“What’s voluntary about that?”
She never answered my question.
And I never did find out what happened to the strippers.
This story was originally published September 11, 2021 at 4:09 AM with the headline "9/11: 20 years later, a reporter remembers a day of chaos at Wichita’s airport."
