The silence on the Potomac Approach frequency was stark. It was September 17,2001, and I was flying a Piper Archer from KFDK in Frederick, Maryland, down to Newport News (KPHF), Virginia, logging two hours down and 1.7 on the return. I filed IFR on a day of shockingly blue skies because that was the only way to operate six days after the World Trade Center towers came down, the Pentagon's seemingly impenetrable belt line was breached, and a field in Pennsylvania became a final resting place for heroic souls. A defining moment, when I felt viscerally how the world had changed. Twenty years later, I'm circumnavigating the special flight rules area around Washington, D.C., but I'm VFR and monitoring my fellow pilots and controllers on a sunny summer Sunday without any particular restriction to my flight path beyond my choice to stay outside of Class B. That I choose to just listen stems from my desire to hold on to a certain amount of freedom in my flying-and because the ADS-B In traffic data illuminates almost every target that ATC would call out to me anyway.
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