My brother, father, and mother and I took off from Regan Airport at 8:05 am that morning. We were going to leave out of Dulles, but something came up and we switched airports.
Our flight landed about 2 hr early, just after 9 am. no one said a thing, except prepare for landing. No one knew why, but we all knew we weren't "there" yet. When we landed, we sat out on the tarmac in an unknown airport and watched them push planes away from the terminal. Finally, after about an hour we slowly pulled into one of the many many open jet ways and the pilot came on - I'll never forget what he said, just because the whole thing was so odd - "Due to an airport emergency, please disembark the plane and leave the airport immediately. You will not be able to claim your luggage." We all thought a couple of taxiing planes had run into each other. For some reason, that was the conclusion we all were drawn to. When we got into the airport, we found out we were in Minneapolis-St. Paul and we were greeted by FBI agents, who escorted us through an empty airport, all TVs were off and no one said anything. It was incredibly surreal. I've been in the Seattle airport at 2 am, and it wasn't this eerily empty and terrifyingly still. Many of the passengers started to cry, we didn't even know why, but we knew crying was appropriate. We got escorted to the baggage claim area, where everyone was - there were so many people you couldn't move. People kept figuring out how to turn on TV monitors and we'd watch and/or hear snippets of news until some security person would come and turn it off.

Three days later when I was finally flying home, I flew on the friendliest and most old-fashioned American flight. All of the people on the flight were immediate friends, we talked about our lives and families and fears.