9/11 nine years on

I was at work. I was wrapping up a call with a customer when there was a flurry of activity nearby as one team member hurridly tried to connect an external aerial to the little TV we have for video editing tests. He then proceeded to tune into BBC1 broadcasting live video.
It was just as I got as look at what was on the screen when the second plane hit the second tower. I knew it was a 767 right away and instantly knew it was a terrorist attack. I watched live as the towers fell and then info about the pentagon and flight 93 came in. A very surreal afternoon.

The events caused some concern amongst my more jittery colleagues as it was an American company and American client we were working for. (I still am. long story).

A statement was then issued my management, basically telling us to say “No comment” should the subject be mentioned by a customer in the coming days, months. That instruction was never rescinded.

Shortly after, I remember reading a blog by a Northwest 757 Capt. William “BBall” Ball about his views on the day’s event. In it he wrote a message to his deceased father stating “Dad, there are a lot of new people up there today, they’ve had a bit of a rough time. Give them a hug and show them around.”

Sad, sad times.

On an accountancy course, I finished at 16:00 and had an hour to fill before the present Mrs EN830 finished work, so I went for a coffee in a nearby Cafe, the TV was on and I could something major had happened but could hear it because of two foreign waitresses who stood in front of it chatting. So I left the coffee and ran to the car to listen to the radio. I just sat there in shock at what I was hearing, we had been stood in the shadow of the towers 9 months before, when I took Mrs EN830 to New York as a surprise late Christmas present.

Sometime after the attack, I found some black and white film, which I had developed. I had forgotten about the fire in a basement we had witnessed during our visit just below the towers, and photographed the firemen running around, we sat and went through thinking were any of them still alive. I guess we’ll never know!

I was sat in a Reno bound 747 at Heathrow ready for pushback (tug connected) – needless to say,we went nowhere !!but we were lucky compared to all the families involved in the tragedy and also all the airline pax facing diversions and turnbacks ,Heathrow was absolute chaos – I just headed for the shortest queue out of there (taxi) and got a taxi down to sussex (how much ??)
I knew instinctively that the Reno races would not happen but managed to fly out to SFO on the sunday,our 737 to Reno had 4 pax on board- boy did she climb out of SFO 😉
We made the best we could of our holiday,drove up to Oregon…at Tillamook we had a great flight in this 1928 Travelair (one of a very few private a/c being allowed to fly in the USA at that time !!)

It was a sad and strange time to be in the states,but one of those quirks of fate that allowed me the privilege of flying with Larry in his wonderful old biplane !

I would have been 13 at the time, it was a pretty normal school day but I do remember people making some strange comments to the effect of “we’re at war now”, but I dismissed them.

When I got home I was reading in my room when I heard my mum screaming downstairs, so I ran into the living room to see her and my brother watching the news unfold. She was panicing about someone attacking London and I calmed her down and explained that it was New York, and that is when reality sank in, that this was really happening on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

At first I was convinced that the towers hadn’t collapsed, that ‘only’ the portions above the impacts had fallen, but then the ash cloud gradually cleared, leaving only a vision of hell right there in the middle of the city. My dad got home and was convinced that the US was going to start deploying nuclear weapons at any time, it was frightening, all the more so because for what felt like a long time there was no news on who was responsible.

I wonder what lessons we have learned from the events of that day…

I was sitting in front of my PC doing some writing work when someone IM’d me on MSN and said their was an explosion at the WTC. I went down where my dad was watching his Sunday night movie and i told him this and he said must be something similar to the WTC truck bombing while he switched to BBC, and their it was unfolding right in front of us.

I was 16 year old back then…DL….something:rolleyes:…from the internet quite long hour that day, only went to open TV when the Buildings started to collapse, and I honestly first thougth it was some movie trailer, as it felt so unbelievable at first.

Today, I cant remember any other day, that I would remember spesifically from the fact that what was on TV that day…And I never forget the sense of “what will happen next?” feeling that sort of rose from the very bottom of my guts after I had realised what had taken place.

125 people died on the ground during the Pentagon attack as well as the passengers and crew of Flight 77. The death toll could have been more but for the fact the area hit was undergoing renovation.

I was in 5th year at High School in a physics class when the lab technician told us a plane had hit a building in NY. We all thought it was just a light (Cessna type) plane. It wasn’t till we heard the news a second plane had hit and the class next door got the TV on, when we realised what had happened. The rest of the day at home was spent watching the news.

It was all very movie-like though. That is to say, it definitely didn’t feel real. You couldn’t imagine something like that happening and the fact that there was/is so much footage of it actually happening is pretty surreal.

I’ve still not been able to make up my own mind about what happened at the Pentagon. On one hand the fact that that wing was vacant, the security camera didn’t pick up any plane and that (as far as I know) there was no aircraft debris found makes me question it. But on the other hand, I have seen documentaries that say that force of impact would have left nothing of an aircraft hitting a building at full speed.

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) lost 341 firefighters and 2 FDNY paramedics.
The New York City Police Department lost 23 officers.
The Port Authority Police Department lost 37 officers.
8 additional EMTs and paramedics from private EMS units were killed.

My thoughts exactly, did you see the documentary ( last week/earlier this week?) with camcorder recordings taken by ordinary people in and around the WTC? the images ,taken by one person as he/she walked out ,of the Rescue personel and police heading in the other direction knowing they were heading into hellish danger were very , very emotive and i wondered how many of them got back out.

I suppose like many others i was at work and one of the other guys walked in and told me what was happening. We didnt have a TV and could only listen to somewhat disjointed Radio reports. I remember, the face of a young lad at work fearing for his brother working a block or so away , being worried myself about a old school chum who was a cop near the WTC & ringing one of my best friends who had most of his grown up kids living in Manhatten, working near the WTC and not knowing if i should ring him or not.

Thankfully none of them were lost unlike so many innocent people going about their daily work or those who went charging into the face of death to try and save others.

Did you share the fear, the not knowing what was going to happen next & the utter disgust that someone, anyone could do this and claim that it was in the name of any God ? I did.

I was at work – watched in disbelief then mounting horror with colleages as the details were broadcast.

The question of helicopter rescue not being possible was due to the amount of equipment stacked onto the tower roofs, the high winds at 1400ft and the effects of heat and smoke on helicoptor rotors.

I visited Ground Zero in 2006 and stopped in St Pauls Chapel – I found it very moving and as Kev said the thought of all the emergency responders heading into a highly dangerous situation as thousands streamed out is hard to watch year after year.

My mother phoned me at work soon after the first aircraft hit, and as others have said, at first it seemed like some awful freak accident. Later a bloke came to see me who hadn’t heard, and I breathlessly filled him in on what I knew; both buildings collapsed, talk of 50,000 dead (all sorts of rumours at that time) talk of another plane heading for the Pentagon and one for the White House. “Oh, right,” he said, like I’d just told him the toilets were blocked or something; “Do you know where this gauge is?” Weird.

Does anyone else, even after all this time, still find it hard to take in? When I see footage of the second aircraft hitting, there’s a split second when the aircraft just seems to vanish and nothing seems to happen, and in that nanosecond I still suspect I’ve imagined it all; planes just don’t fly into buildings like that. Then of course that awful angry red burst of black and red, and I know it’s all too real.

I was in year 7 at school and I remember laughing at all the girls crying about some film they had just been watching…

I remember a real quiet on the bus home, didnt really understand why

I remember sat curled up on the sofa in the snug in my old house watching it unfold minute by minute thinking i was watching an adaptaion of a Tom Clancy novel

I remember bursting into tears and not really knowing why and I remember my mum hugging me and telling me that it would be ok.

Some years later, I remember hugging my mum and telling her the same thing as she and her brother went to London to get my grandfather (her dad) on 7/7 He was 20 feet down the road from one of the blasts.

I spent the whole day at work today expecting something to happen. I work in the police control room for Thames Valley, Everyone at work today was very quiet an unspoken tenseness in the room.

And now, 9 years on the vast majority of the western world lives in perpetual fear of similar happenings, the vast majority of the western world now lives in a paranoia of most arab/muslim cultures, we lose friends and loved ones in a senseless war.

All of the above, because of the actions of a few evil men acting under a veil of religious righteousness

I was at work. I was in the mailroom when our office manager said to me “Have you heard? All flights over America have been grounded ‘cos some idiot’s flown a plane into the World Trade Centre.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time that he meant “an airliner”, not a light aircraft.

Went back to my desk to find EVERYONE had stopped and had either BBC or MSN news pages on their PCs.

We were on holiday in Dubai and were in the hotel room getting ready to go to one of the hotels for happy hour (it was 5pm).

My missus was having a shower and I was watching CNN when I saw the World trade Centre with smoke coming out of it. Then I saw the second plane go in as it happened.

We went to the hotel and in the bar everyone stood in silence and disbelief watching the screen as the horror unfolded and the buildings collapsed 🙁

I have been to NYC when the towers stood and when after they were destroyed.

To this day I still can’t believe they are not there anymore.

I seem to recall that helicopters could not be used because the tops of the buildings were festooned with aerials, air conditioning and elevator equipment, etc. Perhaps someone who had flown over the towers before 9/11 could confirm this.

IIRC there were multiple reasons given at or around the time as to why helicopter rescue was not tried. Among these, again, if memory serves me correctly, was a visibility issue caused by the smoke, the heat from the flames affecting the helicopters performance, single engine helicopters which had no escape route if they encountered any kind of problem and might just add to the unfolding disaster and I think I read somewhere about the crews abilities and the helicopters capabilities to undertake such rescues.

September 11th was, and remains, the spectacular that every terrorist organisation wishes to achieve. Nothing has surpassed that since, and terrorism still continues. Have subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq made either the world in general or those countries in particular safer places to be?

As for the day itself, my Father’s birthday, I had just gone into a shop to pay a bill and saw the first tower burning on a tv. I asked the shopkeeper what he was watching and he said he’d just turned it on and thought it was some disaster movie. He didn’t realise just how true his words were. At home, a few minutes later, realisation dawned. One thing that struck me straight away and has stayed with me eversince was the contrast. Thousands of people running away from the site terrified while hundreds more in the various uniforms of the NYPD, Port Authority, Paramedics and Firefighters were rushing in.

Regards,

kev35

I was flying my first solo at the exact time it happened, I was coming in to land at Bristol when the ATCO announced it over the comms freq. She said a “737 has just hit the WTC”. Obviously it transpired it was not a 737.
I then went up to the club house to see the 2nd hit live on TV.

So instead of it being a day to remember for the right reasons, I remember it for the wrong reasons.

I always wondered, why, with all the news helicopter up there to start with (before the lockdown) why did nobody try to evacuate anybody off the roof? Even just a few lives saved would have been better than none.

The only reason I can see is the smoke coming from the building may have greatly obscured the pilot’s view as he approached the building. Does such a roof rescue not depend on perfect all round visibility. Another reason may have been, how many more planes are coming? Would you want to be at the building evacuating from the roof and suddenly see a B757/767 hurtling toward you at full pelt?