Today marks 25 years since the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that claimed the lives of thousands of people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa.
News Center 7’s John Bedell talked to a retired air traffic controller who was working on September 11 and even communicated with Air Force One that afternoon.
So many people remember airports across the country, like Dayton International, getting shut down for two days after the attacks.
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Todd Yeary has 13 years’ experience as an air traffic controller and worked at what he said was the busiest air traffic control center in the world on Sept. 11.
“First thing I remember is just how clear it was. I remember distinctly, it was an unusually blue sky and no clouds,” Yeary said.
He was working at Chicago Center, an air traffic control center responsible for the airspace in an entire region of the country. He came into work early to help after two planes hit the World Trade Center.
Yeary remembers how tight security was at the gate in suburban Chicago.
“I put my government ID outside the window because there’s an actual Aurora police officers with an assault weapon standing in the middle of the street. Show the ID, he let me through, I stopped the car, and he actually swept the vehicle to make sure that there was no contraband or explosives on the car. That’s when you knew this was a much different day,” Yeary said.
He was one of the air traffic controllers who got to work shutting down the airspace nationally- communicating with pilots in their region of the Midwest, and that included ordering airline pilots to the nearest airport to land.
Then early afternoon on Sept. 11, Yeary remembers communicating with Air Force One as it was moving the president quickly.
After hours of chaos, Yeary remembers the eerie stillness that followed on Sept. 11.
“When you look at a full room of radar scopes, and they’re basically all empty, it was telling that this was a different moment, and we just did not know how different it would be and for how long,” he said.
President George W. Bush was flying to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland when he was coming through Yeary’s airspace to address the country that night.
He said that when you had military aircraft questioning other military aircraft in that situation, he just recounted for us, was an indication of how quickly they were moving the president on Sept. 11.
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