I had an uncle who worked for Delta for over 30 years, and I know from many years of talking with him that anytime there is a crash or any emergency, the entire airline grieves for weeks. My uncle was at DFW when there was a big crash in the early 1980s and it was like a death in the family to him. A woman who goes to my church is an American flight attendant and was best friends with one of the attendants on Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon. She is devastated.
People do not realize how hard ONE plane crash is for airline employees. It is almost impossible to fathom how devastated everyone at United and American must be, to lose two planes with all their crew and pasengers, the on top of that knowing that their planes were used as bombs to kill thousands. If the terrorists had only managed to crash four U.S. commercial airliners into the ground in one day, it would have been the most horrible thing to ever happen here.