25 Years After 9/11: Port Authority Airport Leaders Made A Critical Call

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — The following article is reposted courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Find out how to post announcements or events to your local Patch site.

It was a quiet, clear Tuesday morning, but Warren Kroeppel already had a lot on his mind.

First on his agenda was a staff meeting. Early plans were coming together for the redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport, where he'd been serving as general manager for the past year, and he was working to get airlines on board. There was another matter on the calendar too: he was due to get married in five days.

He was on his way into the airport, rounding a bend near Shea Stadium, when that major life event suddenly felt miniscule.

“I actually saw the second plane hit the tower,” he recalled. “I saw the fireball.”

He still remembers Sept. 11, 2001, as what pilots like himself call a CAVU day – clear and visibility unlimited. Within minutes, he ordered LaGuardia shut down. His counterparts at John F. Kennedy International (JFK) and Newark International (EWR) airports, Al Graser and Sue Baer, made the same call at around the same time.

Twenty-five years later, Kroeppel and Graser remember the uncertainty and the grief, but most prominently recall how much they leaned on each other and those around them to work through the questions that followed — some of them about the airports, some of them far more personal — in the days ahead.

Every gate onto the LaGuardia airfield that wasn't a hardened entrance was ordered shut. Trucks were pulled across roadways to block access to the fueling facilities. At JFK, Graser's staff worked airline by airline, terminal by terminal, guiding planes back to their gates, unloading passengers, and sending them home by whatever means they could find.

“Nobody knew what was going on,” Graser recalled. “The question was, could there be other hijackings that were in process or potentially could happen?”

The Federal Aviation Administration was arriving at its own version of that same uncertainty in real time. At 9:06 a.m., it grounded all flights due to depart toward New York, Boston, Washington and Cleveland. Forty minutes later came the unprecedented order: shut down all American airspace. Roughly 4,500 aircraft landed within the hour.

At the time, it was standard practice for one airport general manager to call the others as a courtesy whenever a shutdown was imminent, and Kroeppel remembers reaching Baer at Newark. She told him a closure was coming there too, though she was already absorbed by another piece of information: one of the hijacked planes, United 93, had taken off from her airport that morning.

“She was upset,” Kroeppel recalled. “She couldn’t believe it had happened there.”

What followed that morning was a kind of ominous tranquility that neither Kroeppel nor Graser has fully shaken.

“I'm walking across the parking lot in front of the Marine Air Terminal, and I remember realizing I was hearing birds chirping,” Kroeppel said. “No aircraft moving, no engines running, no cars. Then I get into the police building and there's all our guys putting on their bulletproof vests and pulling out the M16s.”

The same stillness had settled over JFK. “It was very eerie,” Graser said. “It was so quiet and peaceful, but you just kept seeing smoke coming from the Trade Center site.”

Both airports had members of their Port Authority police command respond to Lower Manhattan. By the end of that day, PAPD had lost 37 officers.

It would be hours before Kroeppel could reach his fiancée, a station manager for Continental Airlines at JFK, to make sure she was safe. When they finally spoke that evening, the wedding they'd spent months planning suddenly felt like a distant memory. They began thinking about postponing the celebration.

Graser was concerned about his daughter, a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., near another target that day. His family was likewise concerned for him, knowing he frequently attended meetings at the World Trade Center. They reconnected that evening once phone lines opened up again.

“The worst was starting to find out the Port Authority staff who were killed,” Graser said, “and immediately knowing the ones you knew well.” In total, 84 Port Authority employees died on Sept. 11, 2001. Dozens of funerals followed over the next several weeks, with senior Port Authority staff attending as many as they could out of respect.

The airports themselves stayed closed, waiting on federal guidance for what a restart, and the new layer of security behind it, would look like. All three airports partially reopened on Thursday, with a fuller restart on Friday. Even inside that holding pattern, Kroeppel remembers his maintenance staff finding a use for the silence: with LaGuardia closed, the staff re-striped the parking lots.

“These guys were incredible,” he said. “Always thinking about the right thing to do, always worried about everybody else.”

Baer opened Newark's administration building to the families of Port Authority employees who were missing and staffed the phones herself, answering anguished calls from families searching for loved ones.

“We hit bottom on 9/11,” she told author Tom Murphy for his 2006 book, “Reclaiming the Sky.” “That was as hard as it got. Every day, you figured something else out.”

Asked how she got through it, her answer was simpler: “When you're hurting, find something you can do for someone else, and do it.”

Baer would go on to become an agency and industry legend, as the first woman to run all three of the agency’s major airports, and the first woman to serve as the Port Authority’s aviation director. She passed away in 2016.

A quarter century later, both Kroeppel and Graser still tend to skip the anniversary coverage. “I've given up listening to the bells and everything,” Graser said, “because it's too traumatic.”

Kroeppel doesn't watch it either, though the staff who lived through that week together haven't let go of each other, reconnecting through simple but meaningful texts each year: “thinking about you today.”

For the 25^th anniversary of the attacks this year, he and his wife, Karen, have somewhere else to be. They’re marking their own 25^th anniversary: their marriage, with a trip planned to mark the occasion.

The couple had indeed seriously contemplated postponing the big celebration. After all, most of their out-of-town guests had no way to make the journey with the airspace shut down. But Kroeppel reconsidered his second thoughts after a conversation with Baer.

“We had a quiet moment on the phone on Wednesday, taking a break from the chaos, and I mentioned we were thinking about just doing something small and moving the big dinner sometime later,” he said. “She said, ‘Damn it, Warren, I'm not going to let you guys do that. I'm coming there and I'm going to drag you guys to the dinner.’”

On Sept. 16, Baer showed up for the wedding at the church in Forest Hills, Queens. So did Graser. Outside, neighbors gathered on the sidewalk to watch the couple emerge, drawn to a group still capable of expressing joy, at least on this one city corner.

“Somebody said, ‘I'm glad to see that life is continuing,’” Kroeppel remembered. “It's reassuring.”

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