By Niall O'Keeffe, Managing Editor, Flight InternationalWhen that second plane hit, I was watching live images on a TV screen in a murky American-jazz-themed bar in Manila, to which I'd travelled to profile Lufthansa Technik Philippines. A band was onstage - Manila is 12 hours ahead of New York - but they quickly abandoned their instruments to find out what was so distracting their audience.
As we struggled to process the news that this was not a freak accident but a planned atrocity, one of my hosts rushed outside to phone an New York-based relative - who, it turned out, was safe, but had visited the World Trade Center the day before, for a work meeting.
Inevitably, I spent most of the night watching 24-hour news in my hotel room. When I stepped into the lift the following morning, a French tourist asked, in faltering English, if I'd seen what was happening in New York. He seemed to be hoping that he'd just had a bad dream.
An eerie atmosphere prevailed during my day of interviews at Lufthansa Technik. One interviewee was an alumnus of an Ivy League university, and had lost friends in the attacks. Another briefly excused himself to cancel a holiday in San Francisco.
'Filipino Time Saves Lives'. So ran a headline in a local newspaper. Filipinos are famously unpunctual, and many New York-based ex-pats were en route to jobs in the World Trade Center when the aircraft struck. Being late, that morning, saved their lives.
Later on in my stay, Manila was swept by a rumour that a pilot arrested at the city's airport had turned out to be the victim of an identity theft perpetrated by a 9/11 hijacker.
The Philippines is a country you have to pay to leave, but I was hardly in a mood to complain as I passed through the airport at the end of my visit. Naturally enough, strict security was in place. It was a taste of things to come.
I was lucky enough not be detained, though the guard who inspected my bag seemed disgusted by my possession of a JG Ballard novel with a woman in a cocktail dress on its cover. "Nice book," he said sarcastically as he handed it back to me.
I'd become an aviation journalist six months before 9/11. Overnight, I found myself reporting a lot more bad news, to a much more interested audience. For the next couple of years, everyone in the industry - my then-colleagues and I included - seemed very obviously on the brink of losing their jobs. Many did lose them. But it seemed tasteless to worry too much, or indulge in self-pity, since others had lost so much more.
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