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Paul Schattauer (1961)
I wanted to tell the story of my 9/11 experience on 9/11 but Irma decided I did not need electricty. Power is back now and other then lots of leaves and stricks and a blown over butterfly bush, the 70 mph winds did no damage. My day on 9/11 began in Paris at our hotel as my crew gathered at pickup time to take our bus to Charles DeGaule airport. Everything was normal, pretty day, full airplane, destination Atlanta. My cockpit and cabin crew consisted of two copilots and 11 flight attendants. I conducted the standard security briefing on the bus, password, cockpit acess, acountability (mine) problem solving, general stuff, see something say something. Flight time, weather, to be announced on the airplane before boarding. Take off climb and cruise uneventful til we were about 100 miles West of Ireland and things started to go sideways. A United Airlines flight called ATC (airtraffic control) and said they needed to return to Dublin because their company had requested that they do so. That is unheard of. I sent a satellite message to Delta flight control asking for information and got no response, again, unheard of. A few minutes later ATC broadcast "all flights are required to return to point of origin due to terrorist activity in the United States". I was stunned. Every morning about 600 flights leave Europe (and that part of the world) for the US and that part of the world just as every evening in the West 600 flights go back. You don't just break out of the pack and turn around. I called ATC and said we need a clearance as to direction of turn and and coast (back in) fix. They began issuing clearances and fixes. We turned and began evaluating what was happening. We tried contacting Delta and got no response, I found out later that was deliberate. We had a SAT phone, one of only 5 airplanes in the fleet that had one, so we tried calling our wives. The circuits were busy (really?) but one of my copilots got his wife and she said "the towers are down and Washington is smoking" and he lost the connection. I made an announcement to the passengers giving them all the information I had at that time (without the towers and the smoking stuff). I then told the senior flight attendant to reassign the male flight attendants to work the area closest to the cockpit and briefed them to protect the cockpit and advise me of any threat. I ordered a drink cart to be placed in the cockpit and shoved up against the cockpit door. My second copilot was now in the cockpit. I told him to get the crash axe (a very nasty weapon) and disable anyone who breached the cockpit over the drink cart. The flight back to Paris was uneventful, no flight plan but we were handed off from one radar facility to the next. The station manager had tears in his eyes when we arrived at the gate, he had no idea we were safe until we showed up. Getting back to our hotel and watching those airplanes hitting the buildings again and again was a truly awful day. There are worse places than Paris to spend three days in limbo. The flight home went over New York and was eerie. Normally the radio goes constantly, that day we were the only flight in the air.....and you could still see the smoke.
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