9/11 Rememberances

Like all people, I remember exactly what I was doing this day 7 years ago when the four planes were hijacked.

I worked for Spartan Travel at the time in the Haslett office. I was sitting in my office when Kriste, our accounting person, received a telephone call from her husband about a plane hitting the WTC. I headed to our main office in East Lansing to get more information and to help out. Being the agency's Worldspan pro, I had to perform a queue roll in Worldspan to capture all of our clients' reservations that were scheduled to fly that day. Someone else did the same in Apollo, our main GDS. I recall sitting in Dana's office, our Director of Operations, and going through each record to determine where our clients were. Most of our clients made it to their gateway city, before being grounded. However, my stomach fell as the PNR for my favorite client came up on the screen. He left early that morning on Northwest Airline's first flight for Washington D.C. I saw that he landed in D.C., but knew nothing else. I tried reaching him on his cell phone to no avail. I advised our receptionist to interrupt me no matter what I was doing if he called. He finally called and I remember the receptionist paging me and saying, "Brenda, Ed's on line so-and-so." That was the best page I ever heard. Ed had been in a meeting not too far from the Pentagon when that plane hit. I spoke with him several times during the day and he described what D.C. was like--eerily quiet. I finally secured a rental car for him to drive home the next day.

I also remember the countless times we met in the board room to gather around the T.V. to get the lasted news. Hoping that ATC could get the rest of the planes grounded and praying the WTC was the only target. It was not.

We were fortunate not to have had any clients on any of the four flights, but I recall having clients stranded all over the world. Several were on international flights that got grounded in Canada. We also had three employees that were in Dallas for training. They ended up driving back to Michigan.

9/11 changed this world and changed the travel industry. The agency suffered a major financial hit and we all took days off without pay to help. The financial stress continued for years after and the agency was finally bought out by Passageways Travel. That ended Spartan Travel, which was founded by Bert and Jean Hamilton in the 1960's. Quite frankly, Spartan was the best place I ever worked and I miss Spartan Travel.