Finding Out Last: A Deaf Traveler's Experience on 9/11

The plane landed hard and fast. No explanation appeared anywhere. I looked around and saw passengers with panicked faces, some crying. I tapped a stranger on the shoulder and wrote on a piece of paper asking what was going on. He wrote back: plane delayed, accident in New York. That was it. I still didn't understand the scale of what had happened. It wasn't until I found a television in the terminal that I saw the towers fall. My husband worked in a federal building in Washington, D.C. I used a small pager to reach a coworker there, because that was the only way I could.

Hours later, I made my way to a car rental counter. The man looked at my reservation and asked if I knew where I was. I told him Minneapolis. He wrote to me and said no, Grand Rapids, Michigan. The plane had been rerouted. Every hearing passenger around me had known for hours. 

I eventually got a bus to a hotel and stayed for three days before renting a car and driving home.

The core problem was not just the chaos of that day. It was that every critical update, the landing, the reroute, the instructions from staff, was communicated through audio. Nothing appeared on a screen. Without visual communication tools, I had to chase down every piece of information myself.

Airlines have improved in some ways. On a recent flight I notified staff I was Deaf upon boarding, and a flight attendant was assigned to my area and checked in with me directly. It was the best experience I had in 25 years. But captioned announcements are still rare. Gate changes still go up as audio only. I have missed flights because of it.

What I want is straightforward: captions on screens, visual alerts for gate and flight changes, and staff who know how to communicate with Deaf passengers. Not every Deaf traveler communicates the same way. But all of us deserve to know where we are.