Indiana Open Wheel - Fourteen Years ago Today

A day I will never forget. I was at work when my boss came into my office saying he's heard about a plane crash in NY. We both headed to our demo room (We built the Satellites and Network for DirecTV) and where we had several TV’s setup. We got in there just about 5 minutes before the second plane hit. By this time we all knew it was not an accident and that this was something far more sinister. We got the other TV’s up and had three running on each of the major news networks. We also had a PC in the room connected to a Washington DC radio news station. I turned that on just a minute before they reported a bomb had gone off at the Pentagon. The reports did not know at this time it was a plane. By this time the room was filling up with others from work, reports starting coming in about other plane in route to be crashed. Phone service was a mess as you could not get a line out to anyone. My wife was in a high rise in Baltimore and I wanted her out of there, I also was trying to find out about her brother and his wife who worked in Manhattan.

More reports started coming in about other plane crashes and that some were still heading for DC. We were located about 30 miles west of DC in a large Satellite Communication center that was a NOC (Network Operation Center) for North America and a backup for Western Europe. The thought crossed my mind that we could be a target as well. I remembered that we had a program that tracked all commercial air flights and I brought that system on line next to monitor flights. I watched as one by one the green dots the represented each Airline flight landed and the skies over America cleared.

I finally got in touch with my wife and she had just spoken to her bother. He and his wife were OK and were trying to get out of downtown Manhattan. All office buildings in Baltimore over 5 floors were ordered to be evacuated and she was on her way to pick up our son from daycare.

More details were coming in about the Pentagon and Shanksville, and speculation about other flights set to crash started to stop. Later that afternoon I stepped outside just as a pair of F-16’s passed low overhead. You knew going forward that life as we knew it before would have to change.