Here's an Advance Preview of the Travel Show Interviews for Sunday, September 11

As I've already noted, the 10th anniversary of the tragic events of September 11 falls on a Sunday, September 11, 2011, which happens to be the day of the weekly radio program that my daughter and I present on a network of approximately 120 stations ( www.wor710.com ). We shall be devoting that entire program to topics associated with that anniversary, and yesterday afternoon we conducted four recorded interviews on the impact of September 11 on travel.

We began with Scott Mayerowitz, aviation reporter for the Associated Press, who recently traveled on a dozen test flights totalling 8,000 miles, to interview typical passengers about the state of aviation over the ten years since September 11.

Their responses, according to him, were rather depressing. What had once been a pleasant, high-spirited, and even adventurous experience -- that of flying from city to city -- has become, over the past 10 years, a time of anxiety, stress and incivility. From the moment that passengers appear at airports a required two hours in advance, until they pass through T.S.A. security, to when they cram themselves into overcrowded flights and deal with other stressed-out passengers and crew, they react to air travel as they would to a schoolroom test -- they dislike it.

Oddly, according to Mayerowitz, Americans fail to appreciate the few improvements in air travel since 9/11 -- the video screens on the backs of airline seats, the Wi-Fi on an increasing number of flights, a definite improvement in airport food, and most important, a 20% decline in airfares since 9/11. Not a single person mentioned the last-named development. And yet, Mayerowitz says, even with the luggage fees and other distasteful charges that airlines have imposed upon us, the cost to passengers of air transportation is 20% less than it was on 9/11.

If passengers are having a hard time with air travel, airlines have it worse. It took them three years after 9/11 to recover the passenger numbers they were enjoying as of 9/11 -- substantial numbers of people required those three years to overcome their fear of flying, creating three years of heavy losses for the airlines. Adding the losses they then incurred to the same starting with the recession of late 2007 and onward, airlines have had seven loss years out of the last ten.

Following Scott Mayerowitz, we interviewed the marketing director of the National September 11 Memorial (Kim Wright), which will open on Sunday September 11 for families of the victims, and will then, starting Monday September 12 and thereafter, be open to those members of the public who have used the internet to obtain free-of-charge passes. The memorial consists, she pointed out, of a large plaza surrounding the two recessed reflecting pools where the twin towers once stood. Each pool, she pointed out, will receive a downpour from the two largest man-made waterfalls ever constructed. Adjoining the reflecting pools: walls containing the engraved names of the nearly 3,000 victims of September 11 -- office workers in the twin towers and first responders, the police and firefighters who rushed into the buildings to save their inhabitants.

Approximately a year from September 11, 2011, the underground museum of the Memorial area will open "in the fall of 2012," according to Wright. She would not be more specific than that.

Four hi-jacked passenger airplanes made up the attack on America on September 11, 2011. Two of them flew into the towers of the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one other -- United Airlines Flight 93 -- was meant (by the hi-jackers) to fly to Washington, D.C., to crash into either the Capitol or the White House. It originated in Newark, was bound for San Francisco, carried 40 persons in passengers and crew, and attempted to turn around over southwestern Pennsylvania to steer a course for the nation's capital. It was then that heroic passengers rushed the hi-jackers, apparently burst into the cockpit to grapple with hi-jackers flying the plane, and then died with other passengers, crew and hi-jackers when the plane dived into the ground -- an open field which our next interview subject, the Acting Superintendent of the National Flight 93 Memorial, called "The Field of Honor."

According to him, the National Flight 93 Memorial operated by the National Parks Service (as contrasted with the National September 11 Memorial in New York City, which will be operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), will open a day before September 11, and can be visited by the public without further need for a pass or ticket. It will consists of various new roads built through the site and leading up to and along the Field of Honor, which is flanked by a marble memorial containing the names of the 40 passengers and crew who died on Flight 93, but had fought back to prevent the plane from being used as a flying bomb against public buildings of the U.S. capital.

What is opening now at the National Flight 93 Memorial is only "Phase 1" of the project. Construction has commenced on a visitors' center to open in a couple of years, which will serve as a museum of Flight 93, its passengers, their heroic conduct, and the resulting tragedy.

We finally interviewed an official of the Air Transport Association on the status of the security measures that have been put in place at American airports ever since 9/11. He was hopeful that various measures now being studied -- especially a biometric "trusted flyers" I.D. that will permit qualified persons to avoid T.S.A. procedures when they appear at airports to board flights. His interview, as well as the three I have summarized above, was of course far more detailed than I have space to relate in this space.

I hope you'll tune in on September 11. If your own area doesn't have a radio station carrying the program, you can hear it streamed live on the internet at www.wor710.com from noon to 2pm, Eastern Standard Time. And if you aren't able to hear it at that time, you can access it later, by podcast, appearing on the same website.

And if you have a relevant comment to add about the impact of 9/11 on travel, please contact us (via a comment to this blog) and tell us how we can reach you. We will be playing interviews throughout the two hours of our program, and we hope that every such statement will be both useful and appropriate to the occasion.