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361 34 September 11, 2001 geneva, 2:38 p.m., September 11, 2001. It was a Tuesday. The breeze drifting through the half-open window foretold, with its sudden freshness, the end of the Swiss summer. Pierre Jeanniot peered over his reading glasses and gazed outside. Sitting at his work table, he paused in the preparations for his next meeting with the representatives of Eurocontrol.n On the agenda: the decongestion of European skies. One of the problems that had struck him since his arrival at iata in 1992 was to what degree, in Europe, the division of airspace still showed traces of the First World War. Although the Treaty of Maastrichtn decreed a partial opening of the borders between signing countries, the airspaces, seen by governments and various national pressure groups as exclusive domains, remained fragmented and survived as outdated military dominions. In promoting the idea of a ‘Single European Sky’ advocated by iata, Pierre Jeanniot had told the Mitterrand government ’s secretary of state for transport that Europe still clung to its air corridors as though the Great War of 1914–1918 had never ended. Thus the airspace over the Ardennes and Vosges was out of bounds to civil aviation, as when the Germans had invaded France through Alsace. There resulted numerous unnecessary twists and turns in air corridors that were not only crowded, but subject to different guidelines separately laid down by each country within its respective zones. For example, over France planes had to maintain a distance from each other of seven kilometres, while over Germany it was only five. Security being a priority, pilots performed feats of virtuosity equaled only by their irrationality. Pierre Jeanniot was grateful, on this September 11, 2001, nine years later, that the situation had greatly improved,n although there was a The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, or Eurocontrol, is an intergovernmental organization whose head office is located in Brussels. Its role is to implant a uniform Air Traffic Management (atm) system whose aim is the harmonization and unification of navigation services in Europe, giving priority to security, efficiency and respect for the environment. Its vast project, sesar, to be implemented in three stages, is designed to put in place a pan-European infrastructure for air traffic control by 2020. The Treaty of Maastricht is the treaty that founded the European Union. Officially the“Treaty on European Union,” it was presented in December 1991 by all the members of the former European Community: Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland and Portugal, as well as Denmark and Great Britain (the last two with opting-out clauses). It was signed on February 7, 1992, at Maastricht, in the Netherlands, and ratified in 1992 and 1993. It deals with economic long way to go before navigational standards would be uniform in Europe. He had reached this point in his thoughts when there was a sudden commotion in the corridor. Without announcing himself, his director of public relations, Will Gaillard, burst into his office: a one-in-a-billion probability had just occurred.n A passenger aircraft with a capacity of two hundred people had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. Both flabbergasted and sceptical , Pierre Jeanniot asked his colleague to follow him into the adjacent meeting room, where there was a large television screen and they could see the live transmission from cnn,n the only network providing non-stop international news. As the journalist was commenting on the images captured by the team of reporters urgently sent to the site, in the upperleft corner of the screen there appeared another plane flying dangerously close to the World Trade Center’s second tower. Without slowing, veering in, the aircraft catapulted itself, accelerating, into the side of Tower 2, like an arrow let fly parallel to the ground. The smoke already pouring from the first stricken tower thickened as it reached this newly created gash, as though to greet the black cloud rising from it, fusing into a single deadly smokestack the two slim, twin structures of steel and concrete. There was sheer stupefaction in the iata meeting room in Geneva, unconsciously echoing that of the three thousand human beings trapped in the two infernal towers just as they were preparing for what they had thought would be an ordinary workday. Like Pierre Jeanniot, William Gaillard and the stunned Geneva employees in the room, millions of people, their eyes riveted to their...

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