He was sound asleep, after getting to his home in Vancouver late the previous night from his job as a pilot for Delta Airlines.
Some time around 6 a.m. Pacific Time, his phone rang. Turn on the TV, he was told.
“The death. The horrors of the towers on fire. Then the collapsing,” John Ley recalled. “It broke my heart.”
Almost immediately, he went to work.
No, he was not flying anywhere, not with U.S. airspace shut down by the Federal Aviation Administration. Instead, he and colleagues brainstormed on how to help crews and passengers all over the world, as well as come up with ways to protect passengers, crewmembers, and airplanes in the future.
Today, many know John Ley as a representative of the 18th district in the Washington state legislature.
Not many know that Ley was instrumental in changes made to the airline industry, changes that have become the norm today, 25 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
At the time, he was a leader of the Delta pilots union. There were Delta crews all over the world, many who were stuck, unable to fly into American airspace.
“There are some amazing stories from some of our crews that diverted into Newfoundland. How can we help care for them? How can we work with the federal government to ultimately reopen the skies so we can bring these people back home?”
Not just them, but the passengers, too.
“So they can be reunited with their loved ones,” Ley said.
Soon enough, Ley’s attention turned to safety and security.
He volunteered to be part of a 10-person committee, made up of pilots. Their goal was how to protect airplanes, to protect passengers from having to deal with this again. They came up with a white paper with dozens of suggestions. That report was presented to then Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.
Some of those ideas were put into practice, Ley said. That included the Known Crewmember ID system used in airports today, as well as new ways to screen passengers.
Ley and colleagues also worked with Boeing and Airbus to bring about more secure cockpit doors, “to keep bad people out,” Ley said.
“I was very much a part of that component of the security of our airplanes after the fact,” he said.
Yet, another new safety protocol did not come from pilots, the industry, nor the government. It was simply the actions of the passengers themselves.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings were something from the 1960s and into the 1970s, with a few major cases in the 1980s, as well. Many planes that were hijacked landed safely, with the passengers and crew then held hostage during a negotiating period.
No one, at the time, was thinking that a hijacked plane would become the tool for destruction.
Not anymore.
“The horrors of 9/11 changed the mindset of our passengers forever,” Ley said.
For the pilots and flight attendants, they now have another ally up in the air with them.
“If a flight attendant screams for help, the passengers are going to take action and come to their assistance,” Ley said. “In the long run, that’s a good thing.”
We are all inspired, Ley said, by the passengers on United Flight 93, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
“They said, ‘No more, We will take action,’” Ley said.
Another thing that Ley worked on was getting the federal government to allow pilots, if they go through training, to carry a firearm into the cockpit for domestic flights.
Ley, himself, went through that training. There were specific rules on how to carry the weapon, how it is locked up, when it can be unlocked.
It is a deterrent.
“The bad guys know we can carry. Somebody has to worry about that as an obstacle, too,” Ley said.
After flying for Delta for 31-and-a-half years, Ley retired in June of 2020. His last assignment was Seattle to Honolulu and back.
“An unbelievable privilege,” he said of flying.
“Are you kidding? I get to do this today?”
Every anniversary of Sept. 11 hits hard for many Americans, especially those who work or worked in aviation.
“My heart aches for those crew members who died in the four airplanes and mostly for the passengers,” Ley said. “We never thought in a million years that an airplane would be used as a weapon, a missile, a bomb. Sadly, that’s the new reality.”
He recalls a repeated statement during his military days: Pray for peace, but prepare for war.
He is grateful for the first responders in New York who ran into the buildings, and he is grateful for the passengers on Flight 93 who fought the terrorists.
John Ley also takes pride in that while he was employed by Delta, the work he and his colleagues performed in the aftermath of Sept. 11 helped every pilot, every airline.
“In a sense, I’m proud of what we were able to do … to be part of offering well thought-out ways in responding to the threats, what procedures we could change,” Ley said.
“You have to think the unthinkable and have your guard up.”
