Friends,
My final excursion into my radio archives before the release tomorrow of The Man Who Challenged Empire will approach 9/11 from an entirely different—and fascinating—perspective.
My guest is Rebecca Roth, who spent over thirty years as a flight attendant with a major American airline, including her final decade as a purser—the senior cabin-crew position. She later wrote the bestselling 9/11 novel Methodical Illusion.
Rebecca’s perspective fascinated me precisely because it was so different from those of the engineers, physicists and pilots I had interviewed. She examined the events aboard the four aircraft through the eyes of someone who had spent three decades living inside the procedures, protocols, chain of command, and practical realities of commercial airline operations. What particularly arrested my attention was the sheer number of anomalies she identified in the reported actions of the eight pilots and thirty-three cabin-crew members—instances which, in her assessment, departed dramatically from the standard procedures she had known throughout her career.
It is an extraordinarily accessible perspective because it requires no knowledge of structural engineering, metallurgy, physics, or aerodynamics. These are the mundane, real-world details of what airline crews are trained to do when something goes terribly wrong aboard an aircraft—and Rebecca asks whether the accounts we were given make sense when measured against that experience.
Our scheduled two-hour interview rather spectacularly failed to observe its own flight plan. We finally landed somewhere around the four-hour mark. 😄
Rebecca and I subsequently became friends, and when a second printing of Methodical Illusion was being prepared, she did me the considerable honor of asking me to write its Foreword.
Here’s Ms. Rebecca Roth…