Business Standard looks at how civil aviation, telecoms, technology and insurance sectors changed after the terror attack on America.
“On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, I was flying back to Washington on Swissair Flight 128, returning home from a routine international bankers’ meeting in Switzerland…” writes the then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in the introduction to his book The Age of Turbulence. He goes on to say how his chief of security who escorted him on trips abroad broke the news of the two planes being flown into the World Trade Center. “I must have had a quizzical look on my face because he (the security chief) added, ‘I’m not joking’,” writes Greenspan. The pilot announced ‘returning to Zurich’, without informing the reason behind it to the passengers except the Fed chairman.
“The phones on the seats immediately became jammed, and I couldn’t get through to the ground... So, with no way to know how events were developing, I had nothing to do but think for the next three and a half hours,” writes Greenspan, going on to say how his immediate concern was for his wife Andrea, who was NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent in Washington.
A call to his wife after touchdown in Zurich brought relief for the chairman. “Just tell me quickly what’s happening there,” Greenspan writes, saying his wife was “holding the cell phone to one ear, while the special-events producer in New York was on her earpiece in the other ear, almost shouting, ‘…Are you ready?’ All she had time to say was ‘Listen up’. With that, she put the open cell phone on her lap and addressed the cameras. I heard exactly what America was hearing at that point…”
(Courtesy, The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan)