I Was on a Plane the Morning of 9/11

Twenty-five years ago, I boarded an early-morning flight from New York’s LaGuardia to Chicago. It was a routine flight on an ordinary Tuesday.

By the time we landed, nothing was ordinary.

Instead of taking us to a gate, the pilot taxied the plane to a remote section of O’Hare. His voice was shaking when he came over the PA. The FAA had declared a national emergency and ordered every aircraft in the country to land immediately. Information was scarce, he said, but something had happened at the World Trade Center in New York.

We were free to use our cell phones, but that didn’t help much. Cellular networks in 2001 were primitive by today’s standards and quickly became overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of people trying to call at once.

The woman sitting next to me was desperately trying to reach her husband. He worked in one of the towers.

I tried calling home. Fast busy. My office. Fast busy. Eventually, I reached my assistant, Michelle. She was watching television and told me what the rest of the country was beginning to understand.

At home, my young children were sent home from school early. They asked my wife if Daddy was dead.

When we were finally allowed off the plane, thousands of people rushed toward pay phones and television monitors. The woman beside me still hadn’t reached anyone. I gave her my Hertz reservation number because someone was coming to pick me up.

I never learned whether she got a car or what happened to her husband.

That unfinished story has stayed with me. It was part of the terrible uncertainty of that September morning. So many calls that wouldn’t go through. So many questions with no answers.

Our Milwaukee manager, Tom Joerres, drove to O’Hare and found me. On the way back to Milwaukee, we listened to the radio. Many Chicago stations were carrying television news while others were trying to figure out what to say and do.

Radio stations, then and now, are highly structured. Clocks, formats, commercial breaks, music rotations, prepared bits, and familiar benchmarks provide an architecture for every hour. On September 11, none of it mattered.

Air personalities across America were pulled out of their comfort zone.

The jokes and comedy bits that powered morning radio no longer fit. Neither did contests, celebrity gossip, or “Almost Impossible Trivia.” Advertising felt intrusive, and songs that had sounded harmless the day before suddenly carried different meanings. Music alone was inadequate.

There was no format for this.

But there was an audience searching for information, reassurance, and the sound of another person trying to understand the same incomprehensible thing.

In Milwaukee, our top morning show on The Hog, Bob and Brian, instinctively understood. They knew it was about news, phones, and comfort. They opened the microphones and let people talk.

The best broadcasters across the country did the same. They stopped performing for their listeners and started being present with them.

Once again, radio became the town square.

At the time, I was Executive Vice President and Group Program Director for Saga Communications, a company I co-founded. Saga had nearly 100 stations in 21 markets, and I was responsible for our on-air content, brand strategy, and talent development.

I began making lists and conducting conference calls with our stations. We needed to remove songs that could sound insensitive, suspend commercials, and find dependable news coverage for the FM stations. We needed to take calls and listen carefully. I told our teams: Don’t pretend to have answers you don’t have.

More than anything, our people needed permission to abandon the formula and respond as human beings.

I wrote a memo called It’s a New Morning in America. The title was not meant as a statement of optimism. It was an acknowledgment that the country had awakened to something fundamentally different—and that radio had a different responsibility in that new morning.

Several days later, air travel was still at a standstill. Tom eventually found what seemed like the last available rental car in Milwaukee, and I began the long drive home. Through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, I listened to radio stations. I thought about what we needed to do next and joined conference calls along the way.

Market after market, I heard broadcasters searching for the right tone. Some found it immediately, while others struggled. Beneath it all was the recognition that the normal playbook could not meet the moment.

Then I reached the George Washington Bridge connecting New Jersey to New York..

From there, I could see smoke rising from Lower Manhattan.

What had happened had been real on the airplane. It was real on the television monitors at O’Hare, in the frightened voice of the woman beside me, in every phone call, and through every mile of the drive home.

But seeing that smoke was different.

When I finally made it home, my children were waiting at the end of our driveway. Days later, they set up a table selling lemonade and cookies to raise money for the people affected by 9/11. They found their own small way to contribute.

Twenty-five years later, I still think about the way people reached for one another in the midst of an unimaginable day. Local radio, at its best, understood that instinct too.

As we remember September 11, we honor all that was lost and the countless ways people found to help. That lesson feels especially meaningful now, as artificial intelligence begins to reshape nearly everything we create, hear and experience.

Technology can give us new tools. Templates can give us structure. But neither can replace judgment, empathy or human connection.

On September 11, when the format disappeared, humanity took its place.