Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-09-11 - 10:28 a.m.

Those Pilots

My father was a pilot.

He flew for TWA.

Today I think about the pilots of those United and American flights.

Whenever there was a crash, whenever there was a hijacking, we watched the television. Whose plane was it? If it wasn't TWA, we were relieved. Even though we knew it was someone else's father, someone else's family. It wasn't us.

But this is somehow us. It's all of us.

It wasn't American crews or United crews that flew those planes into buildings. Those pilots and co-pilots and engineers were dead in those cockpits when those planes made that final approach.

I wonder about the plane that went down in Somerset. That one may have been piloted by a United pilot. If he knew, if he knew that his aircraft was no longer a passenger transport but now a missile destined to kill as many as possible, he would have put his plane down in the water, in a field, anywhere. He would have killed his passengers and crew, if he had to.

I know something of airline pilots and their sense of responsibility. And I know my father, who would have stayed cool, who would have thought through it, who would have made calm and rational decisions, and who would have flown that plane straight into the ground.

If they gave him the chance to.

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