On the morning of September 11, 2001, Maura Dwyer was a passenger on US Airways Flight 29, bound for Los Angeles out of Baltimore, when federal authorities ordered every plane in American skies to land immediately. Her flight was one of three commercial jets that ended up diverted to Garden City Regional Airport in southwest Kansas, a small facility that had never handled anything like this before. Twenty-five years later, Dwyer is going back.
Dwyer was one of 78 passengers aboard the Baltimore-to-Los Angeles flight, according to The Baltimore Banner, which first reported on her decision to return to Dodge City for the 25th anniversary memorial service. Her return is a full circle moment for a woman who, for years, could not bring herself to think about the Kansas town that took her and dozens of other strangers in.
Garden City Regional Airport, where Flight 29 touched down, was at the time the only control tower within 200 miles, according to TMCnet. Controllers there suddenly found themselves absorbing passengers from three diverted jets, including a United Airlines jet and an Air Canada jet, after Kansas City air traffic control alerted the tower to prepare for inbound commercial airliners it had never been built to handle. The order to land came at 9:42 a.m. Eastern time, when FAA National Operations Manager Ben Sliney ordered the first-ever unplanned shutdown of U.S. airspace, forcing all 4,500 planes then airborne over the country to land at the nearest available airport under a modified and partially implemented version of the SCATANA emergency plan, as described on Wikipedia.
Fear, Then an Outpouring of Kindness
The landing was not greeted calmly. Garden City police called in SWAT after the diverted flights arrived, and local law enforcement initially feared the diverted passengers might be terrorists, according to an account from James Hawkins referenced in the original report. As a precaution, airline staff and security personnel removed all metal eating utensils from the aircraft.
The attacks also brought aviation security into sharper focus.
What followed, however, was a small-town rescue mission. US Airways staffers Leslie Henry Riederer and Jill Mitchell arranged for the passengers to stay together in nearby Dodge City rather than scatter across the region. The Dodge City community stepped in with lodging, transportation, meals and activities for the stranded travelers, while Dodge City Community College opened a computer lab and phone bank so passengers could reach loved ones. Three Marchel sisters sang a one-of-a-kind arrangement of the national anthem, and the Boot Hill Museum staged an impromptu gunfight reenactment to lift spirits.
The passengers stayed in Dodge City, according to the Banner's reporting.
A Long Delay Before Gratitude Could Take Hold
Passengers eventually left Dodge City. The passengers' stay in Dodge City lasted several days.
For Dwyer, the warmth of that week sat alongside something far heavier: on the same day her flight was grounded, she learned the World Trade Center had been attacked and destroyed, a building where her close friend Danielle Kousoulis worked. Kousoulis, a vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower, spent her final cellphone call ending the conversation with her boyfriend so that panicked colleagues around her could use the phone to reach their own families, according to CBS News.
A Recent Burial Renewed the Grief
A family scholarship fund honoring Kousoulis continues her legacy.
Dwyer is returning to Kansas 25 years later. The memorial in Dodge City's Wright Park was dedicated on September 11, 2002, and includes two 110-inch Twin Tower replicas, a 1,200-pound piece of steel recovered from Ground Zero, Pentagon limestone, and a piece of Pennsylvania sandstone from the United Flight 93 crash site, according to KansasTravel.org.
