The Man Who Tried to Burn Down the Airport

This is a true story of one of the worst air travel experiences of my life.  It is also the story of the moment I realized—definitively and without hyperbole—that the reality we all live in is not real at all, but rather an insidious mirage.  Enjoy!

The year was 2018.  I was in San Diego for a meeting on Tuesday, and had to be in Nashville for another meeting first thing Wednesday morning.  For some inexplicable and inexcusable reason, my afternoon flight from San Diego to Nashville included a connection through Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, one of America’s busiest and shittiest places.  How long was the connection between flights?  50 minutes.  Five. Oh.

Obviously, the key to this whole operation was the flight from San Diego taking off on time, which it did.  End of story.  Just kidding.

But it actually did take off on time, so I was in good spirits the whole flight.  Sure, it wouldn’t leave me much time to freshen up and buy another Diet Mountain Dew for the connecting flight, but who cares?  I was good. 

Even the rowdy kids behind me couldn’t bring me down.  They were kicking my seat and screaming and screeching the whole flight, enough so that the guy in the seat next to me shook his head in disbelief each time.  We exchanged looks and laughed.  He must have been in even better spirits than I was, as I could tell his seat was taking much worse of a beating.

Here’s where it goes sideways. 

The flight landed at O’Hare right on time.  We started taxiing towards the terminal. 

Right before we made the turn into the gate, the plane stopped.  The captain announced that we were a little early and were therefore waiting for the current plane to leave the gate, which was in the process of boarding.  I sighed.  So did the nice man next to me.  The kids kept rumbling behind us.

Ten minutes passed.

I was still good time-wise.  I was optimistic.  Should be any minute.

Fifteen minutes passed.

No shot at using the bathroom between flights.

Twenty minutes passed.

I noticed that the pleasant man next to me started to fidget.  “Do you have a connection, too,” I asked.

“Yup.  Milwaukee.  You?”

“Nashville.”

The kids behind him started screeching and his seat lurched forward once again.  But this time, he didn’t laugh.  He exploded: “Shut the fuck up!”

(Swear to God, he went from zero to a hundred in a millisecond.)

At around the thirty-minute mark, the plane started to move, finally pulling into the gate. We were cutting it extremely close, but by my calculations I had about twenty minutes before the boarding doors would close on my flight to Nashville.  I knew I had to move fast.  This was O’Hare, after all.  There aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to account for all the gates in that airport.  I doubt there are enough letters in the Chinese alphabet.

I got off the plane (deplaned, for the insiders).  I peered up at the monitors, as did my once-friendly middle-seat neighbor.  My next flight was departing from Terminal 3, Gate G.  I looked around.  We were in Gate B.  I didn’t know exactly which gate he was going to, but it looked as if the two of us were both going to take the airport shuttle train to get to our next flights.  He took off and started sprinting down the terminal.  I did the same. 

There was no time for decorum.  There was no time to play it cool.  I was O.J. Simpson hurdling luggage—the fun O.J. from the Hertz commercials, not the mean one with the knit cap, leather glove, and bloody knife.  (Editor’s note: Mr. Simpson was acquitted by a jury of his peers on all criminal charges relating to the deaths of Ms. Brown-Simpson and Mr. Goldman.)

I was hopeful.  The airline personnel at the next gate would surely know that my connecting flight had arrived and that I was dutifully making my way to my next flight.  I’ve been on enough planes to know that they will often hold the plane for a little while to accommodate passengers from connecting flights.

My neighbor was fast, but I was keeping up.  He zigged.  I zigged.  He zagged.  I zagged.  He darted up the next staircase.  I followed.

I reached the top step and expected to see the shuttle train entering the station.  Instead, I saw nothing.  Just a hallway with a few random people, much fewer than the bustling crowd I just left at the bottom of those stairs.  I lost track of my friend, who seemingly disappeared into thin air.  For the first time, I had to start relying on the signage.  Thankfully, there was a big sign right behind me. 

It said DO NOT ENTER.  YOU ARE NOW OUTSIDE THE TERMINAL.

If there was ever an instant where an astronaut was exploring the moon and saw his spaceship flying away without him, this was that feeling.  Sure, you can stand there piecing together what went wrong, but you know it’s irrelevant to dealing with the current situation.    

I was so confused, there wasn’t any time to get mad.  Plus, I knew I had largely brought this upon myself, first by devising a cross-country itinerary that left precisely zero margin of error, but more directly by following a stranger in the airport instead of finding my own way, which I have done literally every other time I’ve been in an airport in my life.  Isn’t this how the kid from Home Alone ended up Lost in New York?  Did I learn nothing from that movie?

At this point, I had two choices.  I could re-enter through the DO NOT ENTER portal or I could make my way to Gate G by other means.  Because I didn’t want this story to be titled The Man Who Got Tased and Detained at the Airport, I chose Door Number 2.  (Technically, there are always two additional choices in any dilemma.  To do nothing or to kill yourself.  Each was considered and declined.)

I headed towards Gate G. Hey, did you know that there was a ramshackle train outside of the passenger terminals at O’Hare that also takes you from terminal to terminal?  I do now.  Did you also know that the only people who take that train are people who work at the airport?  Go figure.  Did you also know that if you are clearly a business traveler with a wheeled piece of luggage, the other people on that train will look at you with a mixture of pity and confusion and mockery.  Because they know—and you know—that you fucked up.  Since they were right, I stared down at my feet in shame as the train lumbered its way from terminal to terminal, from Gate C. Then D.  Then E.   Then F.  Why did I think the plane would be waiting for me at Gate G?  It was probably in Nashville by now.  Did I believe that the flight crew would hold everything and simply wait for the great Brian Howard to inch his way to the gate? 

The Train to Busan finally arrived at Terminal 3, Gate G.  By now the sun was setting.  I knew there was no plane waiting for me there and that I would be spending the night in the Windy City, but, like a zombie instinctively returning home after the fall, I entered through the doors of the terminal.

What I found there was about as promising as what that zombie might find.  There was no one there.  At least no passengers.  There wasn’t even a security line, just a giant room that was now cordoned off with airport ribbon.  The only sound was the steady hum of the Zamboni machine, driving around the terminal waxing the floors.  Two female airport employees were chatting as they walked through the terminal, looking at me just like the good people from the cattle car train looked at me.  Like I was not supposed to be there.

For some reason, at this point, my resignation finally turned to anger.  The realization that I was not getting to Nashville tonight was sinking in, as was the fact that I would probably have to sleep in a shitty hotel, and likely fly out again at the crack of dawn the next day. More acutely, I zeroed in on the reality that, despite my own errors, it was still the failure of the airport to physically accommodate the plane into the gate on time that caused this mess. Plus the airport was just too damned big, offensively big.  I started to wallow—not usually my style, but it was the end of a long ordeal—and this wallowing stirred up a jumble of memories of prior horrible travel experiences, including several repressed nightmares of air travel gone wrong.  In fact, at that moment I remembered one particular incident when I spent day and night at O’Hare because my flight was cancelled.  This felt like that. It was always O’Hare.    

I had one overriding thought, and it was so profound, that I had no choice but to express it out loud.  “Someone should burn this fucking airport to the ground.”

One of the ladies heard me and did a double take, but she kept on walking.  I guess there’s no maxim that if you hear something, say something. 

And it was at that moment that I realized that reality was not real.  That I was living in the Matrix.  That another world, a real one, underlies this fake one.  Here’s why: because right after I uttered those words, like a flash of lightning I remembered that the prior O’Hare nightmare occurred during a nationwide travel disruption, and that disruption was caused by—wait for it—someone trying to burn down O’Hare airport.  

Here’s the kicker, though. In that split second, I also remembered the name of the guy who tried to burn it down.  I can’t believe I ever forgot it. 

His name was Brian Howard.

To be clear, as I sit here I know that I am not the Brian Howard who tried to burn down the airport.  Not metaphorically—he’s a different human being altogether. Unrelated. But in that desperate moment, alone in Gate G, watching the rays of the setting sun reflecting off the newly-waxed floors, I wasn’t so sure.  Was I him?

Or, in the words of the great Steve Irkel, “Did I do that?”

On September 26, 2014, four years earlier, a well-regarded contract employee at the Chicago FAA air traffic control center woke up, went to work, set fire to the place where he worked, and then tried to kill himself.  (It appears as if some people actually do choose that other option from time to time.)  He used a mechanical device to lift a massive floor tile, cut all the critical wires underneath, and then started a fire in order to burn all the equipment in the facility.  As for his sabotage attempt, his plan worked perfectly, as his targeted mischief shut down air traffic in the Midwest and caused massive travel disruptions around the country for days, leading to thousands of cancelled flights.  As for his suicide attempt, he was less successful. After lighting the fire, he then tried to slit his own throat, but thankfully failed.  Also thankfully, he didn’t try to burn down the part of the airport where the passengers were, just the air traffic facility, and he was therefore the only person injured that day.  Nonetheless, in the aftermath, he was widely reviled across the country—he should have known that if there is one person everyone despises, it’s someone who fucks with their ability to get from Point A to Point B. 

A few money quotes:

“Brian Howard attacked a critical piece of infrastructure in our nation’s airspace, causing one of the most severe disruptions to air travel in recent memory,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Polovin.

“This is the biggest challenge we have faced in the national airspace system since the tragedy of 9/11,” Paul Rinaldi, president of the air traffic controllers union, told NBC News.

The story made headlines for several days.  Obviously, a few of my friends saw the guy’s name and called me and asked why I tried to burn down the airport.  Ha, ha!  Little did they know that the question was only funny because it was a few years premature. 

Brian Howard plead guilty to one count of willfully damaging, destroying or disabling an air navigation facility, and one count of using fire to commit a federal felony.  Who knew that these are actual crimes on the books?  At his sentencing, he explained that he was depressed and that he did not intend to hurt anybody.  “I'm so sorry. I've had 11-and-a-half months to think about what I did, but I still can't understand it.” The judge was largely unmoved, sentencing him to 12 and a half years in prison.  If he’s not out by now, he’s probably counting down the days.  In the almost ten years since the incident, he has had no way of knowing that one of the millions of travelers he inconvenienced that day shared the same name as him.  

He also had no way of knowing that the impulse to burn down the airport was still alive and well years after it took hold of him in that inexplicable moment. That it lurked somewhere in the metadata of that haunted airport, right there in Gate G, where his namesake momentarily became possessed by the same malevolent spirit that animated the tragic tale of the man serving 12 and a half years in federal prison.  That the same demon who beckoned him to burn it all down still walked the Earth, this time in the form of a smiling passenger in the middle seat, luring other unsuspecting Brian Howards to commit disruptive acts of sabotage motivated by revenge.    

Thankfully, my out-of-body experience was short-lived.  I checked my phone to confirm whether my memory was accurate and started scrolling through the old news stories. It was there that I saw the photo of the perpetrator, then compared it to the reflection of my beleaguered face in the terminal window.  It was not me. 

I also saw that my phone had less than 10% power remaining, so I quickly went on Expedia to book a hotel room for the night, surely a familiar low point for any self-respecting business traveler.

Although the haunting knowledge about the nature of reality was chilling, and remains, burning everything down would just have to wait for another day. 

“And this is why I am about to take out [the control center] and my life . . . So I’m gonna smoke this blunt and move on, take care everyone.”

(The other) Brian Howard’s Facebook post from the morning of September 26, 2014