For Howard Crabtree, Sept. 11, 2001 will forever be seared into his memory.

 

“It’s kind of surreal at this point,” he said. “It just gets burned into your psyche.”

 

The Johnston man, who worked as a ramp supervisor for American Airlines at Boston Logan International Airport, told 12 News his job was to make sure traveler’s bags were loaded onto the correct flights in a timely manner.

 

Crabtree said he was on the tarmac when Flight 11 left for Los Angeles that morning.

 

“It was a beautiful day,” Crabtree said. “We weren’t that busy and we thought it was going to be a relatively calm shift.”

 

Crabtree remembers receiving a concerning call over the radio as workers loaded dozens of suitcases onto Flight 11.

“‘Hey, I still have some bags for this plane,'” he recalled his colleague telling him. “I said, ‘Well, you’re cutting it really close.'”

 

Crabtree said Flight 11 was on track to leave at 7:45 a.m.

 

“He came out [onto the tarmac] at like 7:44 a.m. with the bags,” he continued. “We were like, ‘We’re not putting these on the plane. They can’t go on the plane because it’s going to be late and we’re not going to cause the delay.'”

 

Crabtree said the two suitcases, which came from a connecting commuter flight that originated in Maine, were left behind as a result.

 

“I didn’t know at the time that the passengers had made it on the flight, but I did know we were not putting those bags on the plane,” he said.

 

Crabtree said the next hour was business as usual as he began preparing another outgoing flight for takeoff.

 

It wasn’t until he heard a commotion on his radio and returned to the operations office that he realized something was wrong.

 

“There was a little TV in our operations office, and the news was breaking in about something that happened in New York,” Crabtree said. “We were like, ‘What the hell is going on?'”

 

Crabtree and his colleagues eventually learned that Flight 11 had been hijacked and flown deliberately into the World Trade Center’s North Tower nearly an hour after takeoff.

 

“My boss at the time came in, he was crying, and he said, ‘It was Flight 11 that hit the first tower, and we have a real problem on our hands,'” Crabtree said. “Everyone was obviously shell-shocked.”

 

“It was chaos,” he added. “Everything just stopped. The FAA shut down the airspace and we had to move the planes off the gates.”

 

Crabtree then received another call on his radio from his colleague about the bags that never made it on the flight.

“He was like, ‘Those two bags that you guys left off Flight 11 — I still have them in the bag room,'” he said.

 

Crabtree rushed over to secure those bags.

 

“I knew I was going to have to take control of them and make sure they were locked up,” he said, adding that the bags were eventually “put off to the side” in a locked cage.

 

By that point, Crabtree said Massachusetts State Police troopers were already scouring the airport with K-9s.