Smoke continues to billow from the remains of the World Trade Center as Continental Express planes sit at the closed Newark, New Jersey Airport 12 September 2001 in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. One of the hijacked planes departed the Newark Airport and later crashed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Tannen Maury | AFP | Getty Images
More than a fifth of the U.S. population is too young to remember what air travel was like before Sept. 11, 2001.
Passengers’ loved ones used to be able to greet and bid them farewell at the gate. Travelers weren’t required to take off their shoes and belts or remove liquids from carry-on luggage before going through checkpoints, let alone wait in long security lines. It was years before airlines charged passengers to check their bags or select a seat, though average domestic fares are cheaper today.
The entire industry, from airport security to flight attendant training to even the number of airlines in existence, was reshaped by the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history. That clear, blue morning in late summer, 19 hijackers turned four Boeing jetliners — two American Airlines and two United Airlines planes —into missiles. They crashed two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in a field in southern Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attack.
Cars sit outside Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), which is closed because of the air attacks on New York and Washington, DC, September 11, 2001, in Los Angeles, CA.
David McNew | Getty Images
Industry shock
Commercial flights were halted for several days. Airline executives pondered the industry’s future.
“We immediately grounded all our airplanes,” said David Neeleman, founder and then-CEO of JetBlue Airways, at that point a new carrier that debuted 19 months before 9/11. “We had planes landing in the Carolinas, Kansas. Our CFO was at the printer. He was proofing the prospectus for our IPO.”
Cancelled…