‘Why Wasn’t It Me?’

HARRISONBURG— After 10 years, American Airlines Capt. Bill Cheng still lives with a question that has haunted him since Sept. 11, 2001.
 
“Why wasn’t it me?”

 Cheng was scheduled to co-pilot his normal route on the day of the attacks: American Airlines Flight 77 from Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport.

In late August 2001, though, the Mount Jackson resident decided he would take Sept. 11 off to prepare for a trip — a decision that saved his life.

Cheng, who was a first officer for American in 2001, is still trying to make sense of the horrific events of 10 years ago that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

Flight AA 77

Cheng had co-piloted Flight 77 alongside Capt. Charles “Chic” Burlingame on Sept. 9 and Sept. 10 seamlessly.

The next day, a Tuesday, the flight took off as usual from Dulles at 8:20 a.m. About 30 minutes later, hijackers took over the plane, turned it back toward Washington, D.C., and flew it into the Pentagon at 530 mph, killing all 64 people on board and 125 Pentagon employees.

As calls poured into Ramsey Lovin’s phone on the morning of the attacks, the then 38-year-old American Airlines captain tried to put himself in the shoes of the pilots. Lovin, of Harrisonburg, also had co-piloted Flight 77 and had flown with Burlingame less than two weeks earlier.

“I certainly did not expect this type of an attack where they were only interested in taking over the airplane to crash it. It was, in a lot of ways, the perfect crime,” Lovin said. “We went through extensive training for the situation of a hijacking, but our training was simply not prepared to deal with this kind of a threat.”

Within two weeks of the attack, both Cheng and Lovin were back in the air. But the heartache from missing the co-workers and friends whom they had frequently flown beside was palpable.

“Ever since then, I think of Chic Burlingame a lot,” Cheng said. “Why not me and how come Chic was there? That kind of questioning goes on. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that there is no real answer.”

Gary Bliss, director of performance assessments and root cause analyses in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, also lost close friends when American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. on Sept. 11.

“I did have to attend a few funerals. The people whose funerals I attended, were, of course, better than me; more capable,” said Bliss, 56, who grew up in Lynchburg. “There were just some huge losses in human capital.”

Bliss’ sister, Weyers Cave resident Deborah Fordham, panicked when she heard on the radio that a plane had hit the Pentagon.

“I pulled over to the side of the road [and] I just burst into tears,” Fordham said. “I stayed there for a couple of minutes and I prayed, then I pulled myself together. I knew my brother was OK, I just knew it.”

Bliss, who was in the outermost ring of the Pentagon when the plane hit, did not hear or feel a thing. His most memorable moment came the morning following the attacks.

Pentagon employees were given the option of coming to work the next day despite the fact that the building was still on fire.

“I can remember that Wednesday morning pulling into my numbered parking space and seeing orange flames shooting out of a window and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m actually reporting to work in an actively burning building,’” Bliss said. “I was not a hero, but what was heroic was that [thousands] of people went back to work in a burning building. … We didn’t get much work done, but we weren’t going to let [the terrorists] win.”

‘Covered In Dust’

Within two hours of David Reynolds arriving at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the train he had taken to work that morning was buried.

Reynolds, who would later become a news reporter for the Daily News-Record and live in Harrisonburg from 2004 to 2007, was 26 years old and working in New York City’s financial district in 2001. Every morning, he boarded the Port Authority Trans-Hudson train, got off at the World Trade Center and walked about seven blocks to his office building at 90 Broad St.

Frail blue smoke hovering in the underground station around 8:45 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11 garnered little more than sideways looks from bustling New Yorkers on their morning commute.

Next to an escalator that led up into the World Trade Center, somebody started shouting.

“This is the real thing, get out of here, get out of here.”

Reynolds was unfazed by the warning and followed his normal route through a mall on the lower level of the center.

Everything was deserted.

“I walked by myself down this hall. There was a guy holding the door for me,” Reynolds said. As he stepped outside, he looked up to see the North Tower of the World Trade Center with gray smoke billowing out of it.

As he continued walking to work, he heard the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

“You heard this massive explosion. … I guess it went basically right over us. It shook the floor after it hit. Cabs, everybody just started driving fast, walking fast, and then things just went back to normal.”

Reynolds made it to work, where a co-worker pulled up CNN.com on his computer.

“[He] showed me this picture of this big black spot on the screen, and I was like, ‘What the hell is that?’ He [said], ‘That’s us.’ All of lower Manhattan was covered in dust,” Reynolds said.

Armed with moist paper towels to protect their lungs from the smoggy, smoky air, Reynolds and his co-workers left their Broad Street office and walked out onto the deserted street.

“It’s strange how much dust there was; it was like walking on the moon,” he recalled.

Another Harrisonburg resident, Gregory Speck, was at his second home in New York’s Central Park West on the morning of the attacks. Speck, now 58, recalls the scene as Lower Manhattan was evacuated and a massive crowd made its way toward Central Park.

“All of my doormen were crying, everybody was whimpering and sobbing,” he said. “It looked like a parade coming up Central Park West. … [Everyone] looked like they had been sprayed with mortar mix or something. Everybody was hugging strangers and crying and wondering if it was the end of the world, and saying to themselves, ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.’”

Rebuilding

In the weeks and months following the attack, Reynolds said the city was like a living cemetery. People placed memorials on corners and held vigils on the streets.

“I remember the next time I went through the city … as soon as we started walking out [of the subway station], you started seeing all those little ‘missing’ signs,” he said. “Eight-and-a-half-by-11 paper with scanned pictures of people holding their dogs or with their kids. … [Family members] were holding onto the belief that they would find someone.”

With the evidence of the attacks all around them, New Yorkers picked up the pieces and began to rebuild. About a week and a half after the attacks, Reynolds was once again on his way to work on an underground train.

“The people on the train were going about their business and then it gets to Chambers Street [in the financial district] and one other stop and the vents on the train shut off,” Reynolds said. “All of a sudden everybody was very quiet, it was like going under a cemetery.”

Shortly thereafter, the train pulled up to the Wall Street Station.

“The driver usually just said, ‘Wall Street station,’” Reynolds said. “But the guy says, ‘Wall Street station, still the financial capital of the free world.’ Everybody just went nuts and started clapping and cheering.”

Contact Emily Sharrer at 574-6286 or esharrer@dnronline.com