Thousands of stories will be shared today, on the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. All of them serve as poignant reminders of one of the darkest days in U.S. history, harrowing snapshots from a mosaic that goes some way to painting a full picture as to the sheer scale of loss and destruction that was wrought when four commercial airplanes were hijacked.
A pilot who was scheduled to fly the first of those hijacked airliners on that fateful day 25 years ago has recalled the “shocking” moment he realized just how close he had come to being a victim of the World Trade Center attacks.
Captain Steve Scheibner had packed his suitcase on the morning of September 11, 2001, and was waiting for a call to confirm his assignment to fly American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles.
Flight 11 would infamously become the first hijacked plane to crash into the Twin Towers.
Only, Steve Scheibner wasn’t on it. The confirmation call never came, and so Captain Tom McGuinness took the seat Steve had been waiting to fill. Tom was just 42 years old, with a wife and two children.
Steve, who had formerly served as a Navy pilot, ultimately watched the 9/11 terror attacks unfold on a small television in his boss’s office.
It wasn’t until 9pm that evening that he realized Flight 11 was the flight he was scheduled to captain that morning.
Via his YouTube channel, Captain Steeeve, he recalled: “I thought, ‘I probably know the pilots and the flight attendants that were on that first airplane that was hijacked out of Boston because I’ve flown with everybody out of Boston.
“So, I went back to the computer and tried to bring up the manifest [flight schedule] with all the names on it of the flight.
“And when I did, it brought up the manifest and it was the exact same that I had seen the day before, where my name was on the trip.”
He went on: “Except this time they had erased all of the names from the trip and all it said on the manifest was ‘sequence failed continuity’.”
That phrase, Steve explained, is used when a flight hasn’t reached its intended destination.
“It was just shocking,” he said.
“I was just staring at the screen thinking, ‘that plane that got hijacked was the one I packed my bags for, I was supposed to be on it.”
Steve remembered the moment his wife came around the corner, and he told her: “Remember I told you I was going to Los Angeles today? That was the first aeroplane that got hijacked this morning.”
The two embraced and held each other for a time, with Steve recalling that it’s “hard to describe that moment”.
Steve and his wife waited a year before telling their children that he was originally supposed to be captaining Flight 11.
Marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Steve and his family have established a fundraiser to send 15 children on life-changing “wish trips”.
“We’re raising $150,000 for Make-A-Wish Eastern North Carolina,” the family stated.
Close to 3,000 people lost their lives on September 11, 2001, with thousands more believed to have suffered health issues and died of illnesses related to the rescue and stablization efforts in the days and weeks following.
Today, we remember them all.
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