Remembrance

Pilot Tom Heidenberger's life was shattered when his flight attendant wife was killed on 9/11, but his efforts to ensure that she and other Flight 77 victims are not forgotten have pushed him through his grief

By Kathleen Wheaton

In October 2006, Capt. Thomas Heidenberger of Chevy Chase flew one of his last transcontinental flights as a pilot for US Airways. As his plane climbed out of Los Angeles, he looked down at the mountains and deserts of the Southwest, the landscape that he and his wife, Michele, had often talked about exploring via RV when they retired.

It was a cloudless fall morning, much like the September day five years earlier when Michele, 52, was the senior flight attendant on Los Angeles-bound American Airlines Flight 77. That plane was commandeered by terrorists and crashed into the Pentagon.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Heidenberger has single-handedly guided his and Michele’s two children toward adulthood. Thomas, 20, is a junior at the University of Scranton, and Alison, 26, recently was married. Heidenberger has also trained Jameson, the yellow Lab puppy that Michele gave him as a birthday present in 2000.

Heidenberger has reached out to relatives of other Flight 77 victims, and has become a member of the Pentagon Memorial Fund steering committee. He has testified before Congress in favor of allowing pilots to carry handguns in the cockpit—partly to assuage his children’s fears after he resumed flying in October of 2001. In addition, he has grown accustomed to front-page stories in the newspaper that hark back to the day Michele was killed: stories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, of suspected terrorists being held at Guantánamo Bay, and of midterm elections.

“There’s no getting away from that day,” he says. “Yet, almost six years later, I look at the side door where Michele always used to come in and think she’s going to come walking in.”

As Heidenberger flew across the desert on that October morning last year, he was nearing 60 and retirement. It was troubling him that the Pentagon Memorial Fund had raised less than $12 million of the $32 million needed to build and maintain the memorial. The Pentagon ceded land for the memorial site, but $22 million is needed for construction, plus an additional $10 million to establish an endowment for the memorial’s upkeep.

Most of the dozens of memorials scattered around Washington—including those to the Vietnam and Korean Wars, as well as the new World War II Memorial on the Mall—were built with private funds. History may be written by its victors, but memorials teach a different but equally important lesson: “They tell the story of what was lost,” Heidenberger says.

Heidenberger fears that the 33 employees of United Airlines and American Airlines who lost their lives on 9/11 are slowly being forgotten. “People remember the policemen and the firemen, but the 33 crew members were the first responders,” he says. “They fought with the hijackers to take back the airplanes. The flight attendants did what they were trained to do in reassuring the passengers, even though they most likely knew the end was near.”

Although Heidenberger wasn’t personally acquainted with all 33 crew members, he is certain how they behaved. In flight school, he listened to plenty of cockpit voice recorders and heard crews speak calmly as certain disaster loomed. “These guys, they know they’re going in. They’re in dire straits, and they say, ‘We’ll see you in a couple of minutes.’ No big deal. Otherwise, it’s mayhem in the back.”

A Love Story
Tall, blue-eyed and sun-tanned, with the half-regal, half-military bearing that seems particular to pilots, Heidenberger appears to illustrate his own assertion that some people are “born to fly” —although he stumbled upon the profession after an attractive, dark-haired flight attendant named Michele MacDonald walked into Butch McGuire’s, the bar he was tending in Chicago in 1972. “I asked her out, and she said no,” he says with an air of pride at her choosiness. “But I was persistent.”

Heidenberger kept at it until Michele agreed not only to go out with him, but to move with him to Bethany Beach in Delaware, where his parents had a place. They were married in October of 1973. He got a job in construction; she commuted from the tiny airstrip in Salisbury to work at Friendship International Airport, now Baltimore/Washington International Airport. One day, after dropping off Michele for her commuter flight, he was hanging around the gate talking to a couple of Allegheny Airlines pilots he’d befriended. The pilots invited him to accompany them on a training run to Baltimore.

“I’m sitting right behind these two guys, between the seats, thinking, ‘this looks pretty cool. I guess I could learn to fly.’ ” They landed at Friendship Airport and strolled through the terminal building until they found Michele, who was waiting for her flight to board. She asked them what they were doing there.

“We came here for a cup of coffee,” Heidenberger told her, but in his mind, “it was like Albert Einstein or Graham Bell and Watson—the light went on. I suddenly knew what I wanted to do. But if it weren’t for Michele’s support, I wouldn’t have gotten into aviation. Who knows where I’d be now?” he says, glancing around the spacious kitchen of his Chevy Chase house. Shelves and windowsills are crammed with framed photos of a good-looking family on vacation. “I’d be one of the homeless people.”

Michele grew up in an airline family. Her father, Richard MacDonald, was an American Airlines executive in Hartford, Conn. “My husband was so proud of her when she got her wings,” Michele’s mother, Mary, recalls.

Janet Mills roomed with Michele in “stewardess school,” as it was called in 1970, and describes a Hogwarts-like atmosphere where young women from small towns across the country were delighted to find themselves among kindred spirits.  Years later, after Mills was injured in turbulence and had to stop flying, she says she realized that airline people were different from others: “They’re fearless, they have a spirit of adventure, they’re at home in the world. They live every day as if it were their last.”

Mills still bristles at the notion of flight attendants as glorified waitresses. “In the ’80s, they trained us to dismantle bombs. They knew something was coming. We learned to talk in code—‘everything is calm in the cabin’ was a tipoff to the crew,” Mills recalls.

The two women shared an apartment in Chicago, where, Mills says, “beautiful Michele had more suitors than she had time for. She seemed to have a charmed life. I hadn’t known any Catholics before and I was impressed by the fact that she went to church every day.” When Michele met Heidenberger, Mills says, “I could clearly see she’d found her Mr. Right. She totally believed in Tom and all of his dreams, all of which became reality.”

Heidenberger signed up for flying lessons with a Salisbury company called Bay Land Aviation, and in a month he had his pilot’s license. Six months later he was an instructor. “I don’t mean to be boastful,” he says, “but I had some uncanny ability.” In an easygoing, pre-9/11 world, he built up flying hours by taking Michele from Salisbury to Washington National Airport when she changed her home base, in a borrowed, single-engine plane, and dropping her off at her gate. He eventually was hired as a commuter pilot at $500 a month, but good salaries and job security were with the airlines, so in May of 1978, he put on a coat and tie and drove to the headquarters of Piedmont Airlines in Winston-Salem, N.C. He was told that the chief pilot was too busy to see him. “That’s all right,” Heidenberger recalls saying. “I’ve got a book and I’ll wait.”

Several hours later, the chief pilot agreed to meet him, and, after an interview, sent him to personnel, a room that was wall-to-wall filing cabinets. “Are all these filled with job applications?” Heidenberger asked.

“Yes, there are 30,000,” the secretary told him.

“So,” Heidenberger recalls, “I’m thinking I’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell.”

Heidenberger then overheard the secretary saying she was unable to contact a new hire for a training class the following Monday. He urged her to give him the spot. That night, Piedmont sent him a telegram offering him the flying job.

For Heidenberger, living on the Eastern Shore, working at a career he loved, and being able to spend several days a month hanging out with Michele was a perfect life. Almost a decade later, Michele decided it was time to have a family, and Heidenberger agreed that the best place for that was Chevy Chase, where he’d grown up and attended Bethesda’s Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School and Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Wheaton. Their first child, Alison, was born in 1981.

 “When you have a relationship for almost 10 years, and here comes a third party, you go, ‘oh-oh—I’m no longer the center and focus of her attention,’” Heidenberger says. “But Alison turns out to be a daddy’s girl. And then here comes Sonny Boy—Thomas, an awful lot like his dad.”

They were children who thought flying was the only way to go: “We’d drive up to the mountains to go skiing, and they’d be clamoring in the back seat, ‘We could have flown! Look, Dad! We just passed an airport!’ ”

Tragedy
Alison’s 20th birthday was Sept. 10, 2001. The family celebrated on the harbor in Baltimore, where she was studying at Loyola College. That night, Heidenberger recalls, 14-year-old Thomas slept restlessly and kept coming into his parents’ room to check that both were there. Dawn came, and Michele hurried to Dulles International Airport to catch her flight to Los Angeles, calling home from the gate to make sure everyone was up and that Thomas’ school lunch was packed.

Heidenberger had the day off. He was sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle when a neighbor phoned and told him to turn on the television. American Airlines Flight 77 had just crashed into the Pentagon. Heidenberger wasn’t sure Flight 77 was Michele’s, and neither his own employer US Airways, nor American Airlines, would confirm that she was aboard. Desperate, he called the home of CIA Director George Tenet, whose wife, Stephanie, was an old friend of Michele’s—their sons were both freshmen at Gonzaga College High School. Heidenberger asked Stephanie if she could call her husband to see if he had any information about Michele. Tenet told Stephanie that he’d just seen Michele’s name on the Flight 77 manifest. Stephanie drove to the Heidenbergers’ house to break the news to Tom. After she left, Heidenberger says, “I lay down on the rug in the dining room beside Jameson and just howled.”

Heidenberger called his brother and asked him to pick up Thomas at school and to keep him away from the TV and the radio. He called Alison’s roommates in Baltimore with similar instructions, and asked his sister-in-law to drive up and bring her home.

“I knew telling my kids their mother had been killed would be the hardest thing I’d ever do,” Heidenberger says, “but I did—they heard it from me.”

At Michele’s funeral, hundreds of uniformed airline employees—pilots, flight attendants, ticket counter agents and maintenance workers—lined up outside Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Bethesda to pay their respects. Heidenberger thought he would be too overcome with emotion to walk past them, but a priest advised him to focus on the back of his vestments and to follow him in the procession.

Although Alison returned to college and Heidenberger went back to work almost immediately, the following months were a blur of grief. Heidenberger asked Thomas and Alison if they wanted to sell the house and move somewhere else. They were adamant that they wanted to stay in their home, but Thomas was anxious about his father continuing to fly, especially when those flights involved nights away from home. “I said, ‘If I don’t, the people who killed your mother will have won,’ ” Heidenberger says, adding: “If it weren’t for cell phones, I don’t know what I would have done.” He arranged with US Airways to fly only day flights out of Washington, and he called Thomas to reassure him after he completed each leg of every trip. His son wanted to know, each time, if there had been a federal air marshal onboard: “Sometimes there wasn’t,” Heidenberger says, “and I’d lie through my teeth.”

Heidenberger says he thought he was “doing pretty good” by Christmas of 2001. That is until he fetched the plastic bins full of decorations and brought them upstairs. “I peel off [a] lid and what’s on top is Michele’s stocking,” he says. “And that’s when I lost it. I walked around the house for about an hour, sobbing.”

The family was touched by the thousands of cards and letters that arrived from strangers in the aftermath of the attack, including a box of 48 gifts for Thomas and Alison, one for each of the 24 days of the Advent/Christmas season. “When you come in contact with generosity like that, you want to demonstrate that you can keep going,” Heidenberger says.

At the same time, however, the notion of being figures in a historic event, of their mourning being public mourning, was and is distressing to Thomas and Alison. So, on the anniversary of Sept. 11, the family avoids public commemorations. They go to Mass and spend the day together.

Remembering
“No offense, but I felt harassed to death by the press,” says Sheri Burlingame, a former flight attendant and friend of Michele’s whose husband, Charles, was the captain of Flight 77. Two years after the attack she was still coming home to TV cameras on her front lawn, so she left her house in Oak Hill, Va., and moved to Tennessee to be near her two adult sons.

Over time, the families have become media savvy. When there was resistance at the Pentagon to locating a memorial on the actual crash site, they knew where to turn: “It was not the story the Pentagon wanted on the front page of the [Washington] Post,” Heidenberger says.

In 2006, Heidenberger approached Burlingame with an idea that had occurred to him as he flew across the desert—a 33-day, cross-country bike ride to commemorate the 33 airline workers who died on 9/11 and to raise money for the memorial. She was on board at once. “I knew I couldn’t keep up with Tom on a bike,” she laughs, “but I drive big vehicles, so I volunteered to follow behind in an RV.”

Burlingame describes Heidenberger as “tough, very smart, and someone who’d give you his shirt.” His dry wit helped ease the grim reality that she and the other Flight 77 family members faced.

For Heidenberger, “the little bike ride,” dubbed The Airline Ride Across America, quickly turned into a national media event. On April 2, 2007, he set off from Playa del Rey, Calif., along with American Airlines pilots Mark Clark and Paul Guttenberg, United Airlines pilot Rob Zettel and pilot Bob McGee of US Airways, who had known Tom and Michele before 9/11.  Over the 33 days it took to bike to the Pentagon—each day was dedicated to one of the airline employees who died—other riders joined them for a stretch or stopped the group to make donations.

Heidenberger recalls a couple who waited in the heat of the Arizona desert for hours to cheer them on, and a Texas rancher who invited them to Easter dinner at his spread. The people he met along the way, he says, “wanted to help, wanted to be supportive, and had no idea the money for the memorials isn’t there.”

The Airline Ride Across America raised $200,000—two-thirds of the $300,000 Heidenberger had hoped for. But he decided to divide the money equally among three memorial funds—those for United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—in recognition of the even-handedness fate revealed on that day: “It knew no ethnicity or age or gender—everyone was equal,” Heidenberger says.

It still amazes Heidenberger that the group of people he has come to know so well with the Pentagon Memorial Fund were brought together by the fate of having relatives on Flight 77. “We wonder if we’ll continue to get together,” he says of the close-knit group that has been meeting regularly since the days after 9/11. “We wonder how it will feel to have accomplished our goal.”

Of the three memorials, the Pentagon effort is closest to completion. Less than half of the estimated $32 million needed has been raised, but the memorial is slated to open to the public in the fall of 2008. The nearly two-acre park will feature 184 lighted reflecting pools—59 for the victims on Flight 77 and 125 for each Pentagon employee killed in the attack. Beside each pool will be a cantilevered bench suggesting the shape of an airplane wing, engraved with a victim’s name. Planted among the pools will be paper bark maples that turn fiery red in the fall. Thomas and Alison have never been to the site.

“I don’t want it to be my legacy,” Heidenberger says of the memorial and his efforts to bring it about.

What, then, is his legacy?

Heidenberger answers promptly.

“Almost thirty years of a good and happy marriage,” he says. “Then the bottom’s yanked out from that, and it’s me and the kids. I’m here for them. Then they’re going off, doing all right, and I’m flying solo. You get the sense that, OK, this is as good as it’s going to get and here I am in a rocking chair.”

He pauses and smiles slightly. “And then, about a year and a half ago, I met somebody.”

That somebody is a neighbor who’d gone through a divorce. Heidenberger sent her a note suggesting that they walk their dogs together. The first walk didn’t go well: Heidenberger’s yellow Lab bit her dog, requiring $800 in vet bills. Suddenly, the presence of a cairn terrier sleeping peacefully beside Jameson on the kitchen floor is explained.

Of the terrier’s owner, Julia Muskie, Heidenberger says, “Not everybody’s going to step up to the plate and walk into all this. It says a lot about her.”

“Tom is always asking me if I am ‘sure I want to do this,’ i.e. get involved with a man and a family with so much tragedy in their lives and who have struggled to cope over these past few years,” Muskie writes later in an e-mail. “I never hesitate in letting him know that I am in for the long haul, and have no doubts whatsoever.”

Asked if he will marry again, Heidenberger says “most likely” three times, as if reciting a charm. He says Muskie gets along well with his kids but that they would lose certain financial benefits if he were to remarry, so that aspect must be sorted out first.

Then Heidenberger repeats the phrase he has used throughout our interviews in reference to meeting Michele, persuading her to marry him, realizing he was born to fly, talking his way into an airline job and discovering that he was a devoted father: Lucky me.

Heidenberger asks the one question a reporter wouldn’t think to ask him: “How’d I get so lucky?”

For information about making a donation to the Pentagon Memorial Fund please go to www.pentagonmemorial.net.

Kathleen Wheaton lives in Bethesda and has written for the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner, Town & Country, Smithsonian and other publications.