Two Interesting Emails

[Trader]

Received two different emails both of which are below.

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I just got back from Amsterdam and brought several NWA crew members with me who were at the Oberoi Hotel when the terrorists attacked. Here is an account from one of our NWA Captains:

Dateline Mumbai; I was lucky. Just two hours separated me from a life altering event.

Yes I was there. My flight was on approach to BOM when the first terrorist attacks took place. Our ETA to the Oberoi/Trident hotel was about 90mins later. The outbound crew was scheduled to be in the lobby about 20 mins after the first attack at the hotel (10:30pm).

My crew spent 6hrs on the aircraft before being relocated to one of the airport hotels. In retrospect, NWA should have gotten us there immediately. We were the crew who would fly out of BOM. Being off duty on the aircraft is not resting, and I correctly guestimated how most of the decision process was going to play out over the next 12hrs. We were eating into what would be a 48hr period with (in my case) just 4hrs of sleep. I thought my day couldn't get much worse.

At this moment, I'm on a flight from BOM-AMS. My crewmembers are all safe, and we have nine of eleven of the crew who were at the Oberoi/Trident. Sadly, a pilot and FA are still at the Oberoi, holed up in their rooms. NWA hired two different civilian extraction teams to get them out of the hotel safely ... you know, expats - challenge/response passwords & all that James Bond stuff ... That may have worked initially; but the hotel was locked down by the local military (to the exclusion of those rescue teams) and that simply provided the terrorists time to reorganize, take hostages, and prepare for a long standoff.

Flashback to Oberoi hotel. Some stories from that unfortunate crew follow: (Apparently, a well built hotel muffles sound more than you might think ..... )

F/A exits the elevator in the lobby of the Trident. The terrorists (probably) just gunned their way through the lobby, into a connecting hallway to the Oberoi (their primary target). Bodies and pools of blood everywhere. The two girls at the front desk, Bellman, and Doorman all killed in the initial attack. All other people in the lobby were either shot/killed or helped the injured out of the hotel. The FA returned to his room then followed a housecleaner out through a (sort of) hidden stairway into the relative safety of the street. I later found out the hotel manager, who lives in the hotel with his wife and children, were all killed in the initial attack. That may point to an insider helping the terrorists.

Another F/A goes to the elevator to head down to the lobby. Doors open and the interior of the car was splattered in blood. She returned to her room and got a few other F/A's and left that floor via the emergency exit. Once out on the exposed outer stairway, the fire door locked behind them. If they ran into trouble down below, without another exit strategy, they'd be truly screwed. Near the bottom, they heard a lot of commotion beyond a set of double doors. They were potentially stuck in a real bad situation. They backed up a bit, laid down and played possum (wouldn't have worked - no blood). A few minutes later a police team came up to their position and escorted them to the relative safety of a nearby parking garage.

A male Chinese F/A was trying to escape the hotel following a hotel employee through a different pitch black service stairway. He opened a door to a short hallway leading into the lobby. Shell casings and damage littered the floor. He started into the lobby and came face to face with one of the armed terrorists. Fortunately, he was not in uniform, and wearing a European style black leather jacket.. He didn't fit the victim profile. He turned around, back through the hallway ... got out alive.

That crew eventually spent about 9hrs on an ascending ramp at a concrete parking structure about two blocks from the hotel. The F/O on the scene separated that crew from perhaps 300 other confused civilians. Automatic weapon fire and hand grenade explosions permeated the restless night. They were able to keep in touch with NWA security via an international cell phone. They got on a charter bus about 9am, and were transported to the hotel where my crew was located.

I'm now in AMS. I'll be on a flight to civilization in another 3hrs. The two crewmembers stuck in the BOM hotel are still OK, but ... still waiting to be rescued ... along with Lufthansa and Air France crews.

The above was a quick summary of what happened last night. I could get into a Lot more detail. But right now, there's a shower with my name in it.

NUMBER TWO

Dear Friends:

For those of you who don't know, I was on a layover at the Oberoi Trident hotel in Mumbai when the attacks occurred there last Wednesday night. Some of my memory of some of this is sketchy but here's what I remember.

Had a great, uneventful layover...the usual, massage, lunch at Trishna etc. Napped from about six pm to 9 pm. I received my 9:50 pm wakeup call from reception, reminding me of my 10:50 pm pickup time.

I left my room for the lobby about 10:35 and saw one of my flight attendants standing at the elevator bank. He said the elevators for some reason weren't working and that his calls from the house phone adjacent to them was going unanswered. My initial reaction was Oh God, am I going to have to carry all my bags down stairs???

I was heading back to my room to try calling from my room's phone when we heard a tremendous explosion that shook the building. We were on the 18th floor, and unaware of what was happening in the lobby and outside the hotel. I ran to my room and dialed reception, and again, no answer. I went back out into the hallway to see what we were going to decide to do when we heard another huge explosion followed by very loud screams.

At first I thought that an elevator had fallen as the screams seemed to come from the elevator shafts. Suddenly doors in the hallway were opening and heads were sticking out wondering what was going on. All of a sudden a young woman comes out and starts banging on other doors in the hallway screaming that the hotel was being attacked. Apparently she saw it on TV. My coworker and I ran into my room and turned on the television and on one of the local channels it was being reported that there were "firings" outside of some hotels. It was running across the bottom of the screen but the TV still had regular programming on. I wasn't sure what they meant by firings, but I couldn't help but wonder if that is what the explosions were. Everyone was confused about what to do, but my coworker said he was going to go down the stairway adjacent to the elevators to see if it was safe to get out. He was turned back by hotel staff several flights down. By this time I had that hall crowd of people in my room watching the news on TV that attacks were being carried out at several locations in the city.

All of a sudden one of the women who was a Lufthansa flight attendant got a call on her PDA and screamed that the hotel was on fire and we had to get out. Although we didn't know it at the time, it was actually the Taj Hotel on fire. But we decided to head down the stairs. Instinctively, I grabbed my passport, crew badge, wallet, and cash, and locked my luggage in my room. Some of the women were crying but it was orderly going down.

Strangely nobody from above followed the 16 of us. We made it to the pool level which is on the rooftop of the third floor, but the all the glass doors to the outside areas were locked. That floor also has banquet and meeting rooms and we found all the doors locked. Inside the ladies room the towels are cloth, so we grabbed a bunch of them and wet them in case we had to breathe through smoke. But we hadn't smelled any if the hotel was indeed on fire.

We were trying to figure out where to go at that point when we encountered a hotel security guard. He WHISPERED (which began to scare me even more) for us to stay there as there was an "incident" in the lobby. We cut through a linen tied to the insides of large bronze handles of the doors to one of the banquet rooms. He told us to be very very quiet, and to stay there until someone came to get us. He also told us to stay on the floor. We were in that room for over an hour, and several of the Lufthansa crewmembers with us had PDA's, and were getting information from outside sources, so we learned the situation was not good. Eventually hiding in the dark there, we barricaded the door with a large table and waited.....then we heard voices. My heart I swear stopped for a few seconds. We were all on the floor holding hands, praying, some were crying softly etc....

Turned out to be that same security man. He was like he was sent from heaven. He said there were men here to help us evacuate. There were about a half dozen guys in camo with large automatic rifles. We were then led through a long set of offices, storage areas etc, until eventually we came out into a mezzanine level in the lobby through the hotel's business center. There was a Van Cleef and Arpels store and a Brioni mens clothing store and all the windows were shattered, as were all the windows to the outside. Apparently grenades had been thrown in some lobby areas. There was glass EVERYWHERE! They told us to stay closely together, and QUIETLY but quickly follow them. But every time we encountered a turn in the hallway, or an open area, they halted us and the military guys aimed their rifles in all directions. We had to descend a large staircase into the open main lobby of the hotel, and RUN past the front desk, the concierge, and out the main doors. There was not ONE window intact, there was blood everywhere, and the restaurant called Opium Den next to the elevators had at least a dozen bullet holes in the glass. Apparently several people were killed there. Everywhere we stepped there was glass.....on the furniture, the carpeting, the marble floors...everywhere. There were also NO people....anywhere. The huge glass doors to the main entrance were reduced to about six inches deep of glass pieces similar to a windshield break. It wasn't like sheet glass.

It was weird.So we didn't have to open any doors to get out. We were halted in the entrance area and the rifle men repositioned. That was perhaps the most terrifying part. Not knowing where the bad guys with guns and grenades were, or if we were going to get shot from someplace or somebody that was hiding. We ran across the street and up about three blocks to a movie theater complex's parking ramp where we were in the company of several hundred people....guests and hotel staff both. We got there at around 12:30-1:00 am. We found our two first officers, and one of them had an international use cell phone that ended up being our lifeline. We were on the phone with the state department, headquarters in MSP, and several others so our exact location could be known and monitored. Since the whole area had been cordoned off, there was no traffic movement so we ended up there until dawn, when after a very confusing and chaotic shifting of groups, we finally got a private bus company to shuttle us from outside the locked-down area to a destination which changed three times enroute. It was to a hotel near the airport where we eventually met up with the crew that brought our outbound plane "in". It was pretty much carte blanche with meals, expenses, and phone calls to family, etc.

Exhaustion was setting in, as were emotions, and I didn't sleep that whole day but a shower made all the difference. EVERY sound outside my room sent the adrenaline pumping. At that point we were missing flight attendant ----- -----, and our captain, --- ----. The state dept. assured us they were in contact with them every half hour even though they were still trapped inside the Oberoi. About 5:30 pm, we got calls saying they were evacuating us out of India, and to be in the lobby at 6:05 pm. We finally took off without --- and ----- at 8 pm, and landed in Amsterdam at around 3:30 am. It is about a nine hour flight, but I slept the whole way. We supposedly had 15 people in coach and only WE were seated in first class.

Thank God those seats lie flat. We were met in Amsterdam by several KLM managers, grief counselors, and clergy of about six different faiths. That was good, as it turned out, one of our flight attendants was in the lobby when the shootings took place and saw several people killed. Another had actually called an elevator to her floor and found it empty, but with a pool of blood on the floor, so she ran back to her room.

We were all given emergency clothing kits of underwear, socks, and KLM sweatshirt and sweatpants, along with amenity kits of basic sundries, at least to get us home. Since we were given the option of staying in Amsterdam to rest, counsel, have clothing purchased for us, or whatever, and fly home the next day, or to continue on to our home cities. Out of the nine of MY crewmembers, and the 11 crewmembers who landed in Mumbai about the time this started, only two chose to stay.

They also said a large group of reporters was waiting for us to exit, so we were sent off the property a different way, to a hotel nearby for a four hour layover until the first flight to Detroit departed, thank God. I was OUT that entire flight as well. A glass of wine and a xanax works wonders! We were then met in Detroit by several NWA senior management personnel and Employee Assistance Program psychologists. We were quickly and quietly expedited through customs and immigration and offered the chance to talk to anybody we wished, but my flight was leaving for Milwaukee in 40 minutes so I had to decline. Turns out that crew to Milwaukee had been told of my presence and they went out of their way to make me comfortable, as did the crews of every flight that got me home. As a matter of fact, I have never seen such kindness and compassion extended to us, like it was by everybody we encountered, from hotel staffs to Airport and airline personnel. It was truly extraordinary. Some processed it differently, and at different times, but I finally broke when I learned that ----- and --- had finally been released unharmed and were preparing to board a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt before catching the NWA flight to Detroit from there.

We left Mumbai with little more than the clothes on our backs, but Detroit inflight has been in touch, and they said they will replace EVERYTHING we lost, and at full monetary value, no questions asked, or receipts required. They have also dropped most of my December schedule with pay. I lost my TravelPro luggage, garment bag, laptop, cell phone, ipod, Nikon camera, skype phone. clothing, leather coat, uniform pieces etc, but I came out of there unharmed, and with my LIFE, which is what mattered most.

Since I sat in row 1 on my flight to Milwaukee, I was first off the plane. ------ met me at the end of the jetway and burst into tears, which turned on the water for me too. Then the gate agent started in, and I think everybody in the gate area waiting to depart was wondering what the hell had just happened. lol It was only when ------ offered up "let me help you with your bags" (I had ONE small plastic bag with a handle), did the laughter emerge through the tears. Outside of security in Milwaukee we were met by ------- and -----, and ---- and ---. I wanted to get home and up to the farm to be with -----, but I agreed, thankfully to stop over at Amelia's by the airport for a bloody mary. MAN, that tasted good! Special thanks go out to you guys......that small gesture did NOT go unappreciated! So tonight I'm able to finally sit here at my desktop PC and finally get back to you. Thanks for understanding.

I am using an extra cell phone of -----'s until mine can be replaced. The number is: ----------. I hope to have my old number tomorrow, if I have time to get to the Sprint store.... I'm in no rush. It was sort of nice to not have to answer a phone for a couple days.

There is so much more, but that's pretty much how I spent my Thanksgiving.

I will spend a few days getting some of this leg work done, but hope to talk to you all soon. God Bless.....

[AME]

I always find it interesting what people focus on during times of great stress, like in the first one, even though they just escaped with their life he was focusing on his rest time., and in the second one after describing a harrowing tale he went into great detail about how the company was going to replace all the stuff he left behind.

It's amazing how the mind works sometimes, during times of great stress it tends to focus on mundane everyday tasks as a coping mechanism.