Quad Cities International Airport

After the, uh, terrorist attack, the number of guards had to be increased at every base across the country.

Back in the Quad Cities, gates were put on base and National Guard units were dispatched to both the Arsenal and Quad Cities International Airport.

Howlett was cer-- uh, scheduled to be gone for up to two years.

He was granted compassionate release and returned in August 2002 after his wife fell ill.

Twenty-five years later, flying continues to transform from Lexi Woodcock of the Quad City Times.

Flying in the United States may never again be the same as it was before the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks.

For days, not a single plane flew through American skies, Quad Cities International Airport Police and Fire Chief Jeff Swan said, except for President George W. Bush on Air Force One and his surrounding fighter jets in the flight to safety.

"It was one of those eerie, weird feelings of quietness," Swan said, "and it was the only thing in the sky." Swan said he was a mere twenty-five-year-old kid when nine eleven happened, and when he first heard the news, he was sitting in the same room his office now sits in a quarter-century later, which was formerly the officer's lounge area.

Pritzker said he opposes the Iran war, quote, "That's driving gas prices, diesel prices sky-high and killing American soldiers," unquote.

Pritzker praised several infrastructure products, uh, projects completed or underway with the help of state funding, including modernizations in the Quad Cities Airport, the new Interstate seventy-four bridge, and the soon-to-be-started reconstruction of the John Deere Road and I-seventy-four interchange, which he t- uh, noted has created good-paying union jobs.

"I'm proud of the things we've been able to get done," Pritzker said.

"They've been big things, and we've done those things together." He also pointed to laws he pushed, uh, for that guaranteed universal paid leave for workers and require workers to be paid the prevailing wage on all state and federally funded projects.