Around this time 8 years ago I was sitting in the departure lounge in Vienna waiting for my flight to New York. Just a routine return home after another trip to Europe. Of course I did not know at the time that this flight would take me 5 days. We were about 3 hours away from New York when we were informed that there had been an attack on the financial district in NY and the airspace over NYC had been closed and there was no space left for us to land in Canada. So we would be returning to Vienna. I will not go into the details of the extraordinary job the airline ( Austrian ) did in taking care of us until my return to New York on September 15, but it was amazing. We flew into an empty JFK airport that afternoon and as I sat in my window seat I could see the plume of smoke rising from lower Manhattan, a very sobering sight. However there was a comfort in being back. Of course we now know that the events of September 11, 2001 have changed the world forever.