September 14th 2001 - LHR to San Francisco. A nearly empty 747 where the crew told everyone to pick a row as theres so few people you can have a seat anywhere. Calm and uneventful. When we took off, there was no way to get back from Miami (or departure point) but they had 3 weeks to sort it all out.
Arrived in Miami 3 weeks laer, and it wasnt ready. We got an upgrade to First, and had a brief time in the lounge before boarding and sat on the aircraft for three hours before takeoff.
The reason Miami wasnt ready was that they had a 1-2 mile queue outside the terminal, for everyone to go through the only metal detector arch they had working - so they had at least arranged a covered walkway along the queue for miles, and had people going around handing out water to queueing passengers. The queue was supervised by 16 year olds with twitchy trigger fingers from the national guard who hadnt seen much of a foreigner let alone a terrorist in their entire lives. The captain decide to wait until most of the passengers had made it through the debacle, before heading back to the UK.