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Ron Horak
Ron Horak is an inspector based at the Flight Standards District Office in West Mifflin, Penn. On the morning of Sept. 11, he was at Latrobe airport when he caught a glimpse of the tragedy unfolding in New York City. About an hour later, Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.
"My supervisor paged me and told me to get to Shanksville as quickly as possible," recalled Horak. Arriving at the crash site command center later that evening, Horak met Accident Investigations' Tony James.
"Tony asked if I knew what a cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder looked like. I have seen quite a few of them over the years." Once he heard that, "Tony said, 'let's go.'"
Horak, along with many others, used picks and shovels to scour the crash site for aircraft parts, including the voice and data recorders and any other material that would help in the investigation.
At one point, searchers stopped using hand tools and brought in a backhoe to assist with the search. Thursday night, as the backhoe was moving mounds of dirt in a crater that was about 30 feet deep, the flight data recorder fell to the ground. The cockpit voice recorder was found later.
A week later Horak and other FAA personnel called it quits at the crash site. "I have to give Tony James and the other members of the team a lot of credit. They worked tirelessly through widespread devastation," remarked Horak.
"We were common folk who were called on to provide an uncommon task. We never had encountered an experience like that, but we saw it through. We did it well."
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Hundreds of FAA people worked to improve security and restore civil aviation after the skies were closed on Sept. 11, 2001. Here are some of their portraits.
Week of September 2
Week of September 9
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