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I was still at university - in at a pub in Plymouth Barbican getting some lunch. Saw pictures on the TV screen behind the bar of smoke coming out of the WTC - at that time the news had only just broken and it was being reported as a light aircraft, pilot error etc. Asked the staff member to turn it up, just as they did, the second tower was hit... :(

A very surreal and tragic day indeed.
 
I was at home, doing homework (secondary school), when my brother came to my room and told me about it. He had CNN on. First I thought that it was a small aircraft. I saw the second one crash. A terrible memory...
 
I was getting ready for work. Sitting at the table, eating my fruit loops. At first, when the said the first tower was hit, I thought it was a hoax. Meh... I ain't that gullible.

I was barely paying attention when I saw the second plane hit. Right then, I covered my TV with multi-colored cereal bits. When I got to work, I heard about the Pentagon and Flight 93. Fixed a 1st Gen G3 and a monitor that morning; spent the rest of the day "around the water cooler." It enormity of events didn't really hit me until the next day.
 
Was in a meeting and someone poked their head in and told us of the first plane. A bit later, she poked her head in and told us of second plane. We ended the meeting and all walked over to other side of office (on Long Island) as you could see the NYC skyline from there. We had CNN on then and saw the first tower collapse. That took out all our Internet and phones (Why Sprint routes Long Island traffic through lower Manhattan is a mystery).

Since half of the people in our company know people who worked in or around the WTC, we closed office. Driving home from Long Island to Queens was surreal. I got on the highway and no other cars were on it. Apparently I got on just as they closed it. As I exited the highway, I saw fighter planes flying over the Throgs Neck Bridge. The jets flew over NYC all day. That's when the whole thing got "real" for me.

Spent the next several hours trying to track down all the people I knew who worked there. In a previous life, the WTC was my territory as a salesmen so I know quite a few people there. Sadly, 3 people I knew from my old job died on 9/11.
 
Holy ****, man. Is everyone here under 15 or something? I was still in the Navy at the time. The day after, I had watch at the Port Operations Tower dispatch. Took 4 hours to make it through the front gate of NOB.

Know how you feel! Glad to know there was someone here at least in their 20s when this happened! The rest of you lot that were in elementary school then make us feel old!

I was 27 at the time, and living in Las Vegas. At the airport there, there is a parking area parallel to the 2 longest runways that you can park at, listen to ATC, and watch planes land and take off.

However, from where I lived, to get there, I'd have to drive south, which meant facing the departure corridor when they are climbing out. That day, I found it odd that I didn't see any aircraft departing at all. So on the way, I call the ATIS (Automated Terminal Information Service) at the airport, to get the weather, winds, and landing info, to find out the runways in use. I heard the following (and I wish there were a way to record it (this was before the LiveATC.net days)

McCarran International Airport Information Delta, 1856 Zulu. Wind calm. Visibility 10; sky clear below 12,000. Temperature 34, Dewpoint -3, altimeter 2973. By order of the Federal Aviation Administration, Until further notice, only Fire, Police, and Military aircraft are permitted to participate in the United States Air Traffic Control System. New information will be dynamically updated using the ATIS system. Advise on initial contact you have information Delta.

From there, I decided to turn around and head back home, my enjoyment for the day defeated. On the way back, I saw lines wrapped around the local Red Cross chapters for those wanting to donate blood. I still had no idea on what was going on.

Then I turned on the TV and saw why.

There's a good story of what happened on a Northwest Airlines flight from Osaka that was en route to Seattle when 9/11 happened. They had only heard about it after giving their position to the FSS. Without telling anyone onboard anything, they diverted to Vancouver, because when they'd make it to US airspace, it would be closed. If I find it, I'll post it.

Also, if you'd like a really good read, go grab the book Thunder Dog by Michael Hingson. This is a memoir of a guy who managed an office on floor 78 of Tower 1. He's blind, and his guide dog not only helped him, but his entire floor get down, and out to safety just as the building was coming down. It's a great read, and hits home for me, as my wife's guide 1st guide dog was graduated from the same class as this dog. Have a look:

http://rosellefoundation.org/sample-page/


BL.
 
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I remember what happened when I entered the Airliners.net at 0545 hours PDT that morning on its message board system and saw a posting about a plane crashing into one of the two towers of the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV, tuned it to CNN, and never turned it off until 10:30 pm that night....
 
I was at work as a systems admin for a healthcare facility. A co-worker came into my office and mentioned that the first tower had been hit. As I was one of the very few in my department with authorization to use the Internet at that point, I fired up the three major online American news sites at the time: ABC News, CNN.com and MSNBC.com.

ABC and CNN's sites kept crashing, yet MSNBC.com soldiered on pretty much throughout the morning. I've had respect for MSNBC ever since, although I must admit that their HTML layout has been somewhat buggy in recent years.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

I was in 8th grade gym class, 2nd period about to end. I was waiting at the door to be let out when the teacher popped his head out of his office to tell me that a plane crashed into the twin towers. Stupid me went on over to a friend and told her. Her father was killed and worked on one of the higher levels (if I remember correctly). We didn't speak much after that and she changed a lot since.
 
Just getting up for work. Saw one tower go down. Just before I left for work, the second tower fell. I was in Pittsburgh at the time and that whole incident just seemed unreal. Like you wake up one day and all the sudden this is happening? Univ of Pitt shut down their campus and everyone was kinda moping around or huddling around the nearest TV watching in disbelief (as I'm sure much of the world was).
 
I was driving to work and listening to the radio. There was a commercial playing, musical jingle or something, and then it just faded out right in the middle of the commercial. That got my attention. Then the radio host got on and announced the breaking news that a plane had just crashed into the first tower. They were getting their news feed from CNN so they were repeating what a lot of the early CNN coverage was: perhaps a small plane, a Cessna, pilot error. Then the second plane hit, and the host was flabbergasted.

By that point I had made it to work, and I kept refreshing CNN.com and visiting the floor above my office, where people were crowded around a large-screen TV to watch the live development.

The rest of the day is a blur.
 
Was going into my morning class at college. Hung over like crazy, leaving from some random girls dorm room.

I thought it was just so quiet cause I was having my "walk of shame"

sat down in class. Professor starts class with "Despite the current events going on right now, we will focus on our classwork and not discuss what is happening".

I rudely interrupted him with a "excuse me, WHAT CURRENT EVENTS?". at which point everyone ni the room turned and gave me a rather bad look.

They explained that 2 airplanes had JUST hit the WTC and that there was a possibility of a 3rd in the pentagon and that they suspected it was terrorism. The prof then tried hushing up the class and explaining it was his duty to ensure we continue with normal class.

At that point i promptly stood up, Told him to shove it, and left class. Most of the class joined me, as we went out to the parking lot to listen to our radio as to what was happening. Hearing the radio announcer describe the collapsing buildings. It was absolutely chilling listening in absolute silence, as not a single plane was left in the air and there was a stillness to everyone.

Everyone has moments in their life that they will never forget. For me, 9/11 will be one of those days.
 
I was at home in Bydgoszcz, Poland playing Sim City 3000 on my PC. It was somewhat late in the afternoon and I had just come home from high school. My granddad came to my room, visibly shocked and told me to turn the TV on. I will never forget what I saw.
 
I worked on that time for Fairchild Dornier, an aircraft manufacturer located in south part of Germany and Texas. After a project meeting a colleague told us that the WTC got hit by one plane. Couldn't belive and wondered what he was thinking to make such a bad joke. But then we tried to connect to internet news and saw it was real. We went home as nobody had anymore mind to work. Came home and saw that the other plane hit the second tower. Then it was clear what it was ...
Few month later when near NY an Airbus crashed we first thought: please, not again.

Will never forget those days and feeling of sadness ...
 
I was on my way to work on the train. Everyone's cell phones started going off all at once. When I got to my stop, people were running up the stairs to get on the train. It was chaotic and people were crying. Some people were saying a plane was headed for the Sears Tower. It was horrible.
 
I had just started my internship down in wall street the week before (sophmore in college) I was at work already since I would go in early and leave around mid day to go to class. we heard the boom and felt the rumble of the first plane hit, everyone went to the window and saw the smoke... At the time we had no idea what was going on and thought maybe a small private plane flew into the building by mistake.... Once the second plane hit all hell broke loose. I remember coming outside and all the smoke engulfing us... It was horrible people were running around with their shirts wrapped around their faces. I had to walk over to the FDR drive and walked 90+ blocks to my apartment..... As I was walking to the FDR looking up at the buildings I could see tiny little objects flying off the building, it wasn't until my co-worker pointed it out that I realized it was people jumping from the burning building... That's a visual that I'll never forget for as long as I live.
 
I was in bed.
I was in the central time zone, didn't have class til noon thirty. I was in bed too. Got a phone call about the time the second tower was hit. Texas got weird (-er than usual) pretty quick in the days that followed, all those undercurrents of hatred and bigotry finally had a new outlet. I bugged out to the west coast two weeks later.
 
9/11, Through the eyes of the CEO of American Airlines at the time.. an interesting read.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/09/07/3344505/ex-american-airlines-ceo-recalls.html

Ex-American Airlines CEO recalls chaos on 9-11

Posted Wednesday, Sep. 07, 2011
By Andrea Ahles

It was the type of phone call that an airline executive never wants to receive.

American Airlines CEO Don Carty was at his Highland Park home, getting ready for another day at the office, when he received the call from the company's operations center telling him that one of their planes might have been hijacked.

"I hung up the phone and my wife was saying, 'What was that about?' And I said, 'I think we've got a hijacking,'" Carty said during an interview at his Dallas office last month, recalling the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

As he answered his wife's question, he heard a television news report that a small plane had flown into the World Trade Center.

"My stomach just sank. My wife said to me, 'Oh my God, is that your plane?' And I said, 'No.' Like if I said no, it wouldn't be true. But I just knew it was true. I just couldn't even believe it."

During his car ride to American headquarters on Amon Carter Boulevard in Fort Worth, he got a call from United Airlines CEO James Goodwin.

"'Are you missing an airplane?'" Carty recalled Goodwin asking. "And I said, 'Yeah.' And he said, 'So are we.'"

Carty's panic grew in the minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

He got a call from his wife, telling him that a second plane had hit the towers, and then another from the operations center saying a second and possibly third American plane had gone missing. (The third missing plane was eventually attributed to a pilot inadvertently turning off a transponder.)

Goodwin called back to tell him that United was also missing a second plane and that its security personnel said it could be part of a terrorist plot involving about 20 planes.

By the time Carty and his executive team assembled at the airline's operations center, a plane had hit the Pentagon and they were faced with the unthinkable for an airline that operated 2,500 daily flights.

Should they ground the airline?

No one could reach Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta -- he was in a bunker with Vice President Dick Cheney -- to tell the government what American wanted to do, Carty said.

But after finally reaching FAA Administrator Jane Garvey, American and the other U.S. airlines all had their planes land immediately at any airport.

Confusion reigned in those early hours.

At the time, Carty thought that both airplanes that had crashed into the towers were American planes and that the one that crashed into the Pentagon was a United plane.

But while he was talking to Mineta, who made contact with the airlines later that morning, Carty realized just how much was unknown about the planes and the attacks.

"I asked him whose airplane flew into the Pentagon and he said, 'We don't know.' And my adrenaline was high and his adrenaline was high and I said, 'For God sakes, Mr. Secretary, why don't you send someone up to look?'

"I was sort of angry, frustrated with him and there was a long pause. ... He finally said, 'We've already tried that. You can't tell.' And I remember just thinking, 'Oh my God,'" Carty said.

Once the initial crisis had passed, Carty spent the next few days getting the airline back in the air. Airplanes were scattered all over the U.S. and Canada.

He also spent a lot of time and energy on security and discussions with the Transportation Department about airport and airline security measures that were going to be put in place.

Looking back, Carty talks proudly about how American's employees responded on 9-11. But the decade after the attacks has been tumultuous for the airline industry. Carty would resign from American in 2003 after the disclosure that the airline's executives had received bonuses and perks as union workers took pay cuts to avoid bankruptcy.

He is now chairman of Virgin America.

"The profound effect that 9-11 had on thousands and thousands and thousands of people in America has probably never really been measured," Carty said. "It's huge. I think that is part of the reason why it stays with us."

BL.
 
Basic training, Fort Benning, Ga.

That morning, we were waiting for our final inspection before graduation on the 13th when we were called to the classroom and given the news.
 
I was in my Graphic Design class at School. I remember one teacher coming in to tell the other and me over hearing it. An announcement to the class then followed.

By the time the towers has fallen I was at home and remember watching that live on TV.

Amazing how the brain can remember dramatic emotional times so clearly.
 
I was 11years old, it was another school morning at my middle school. I was in the 6th grade. I really didn't hear about what was happening till school ended and I came back home and saw my entire family and even my great-grandmother glued to the TV and I saw images of the Twin Towers on fire and replays of the towers collapsing :(

Also that same day for the first time ever I didn't hear a sound of a single plane over LA (I live near LAX, planes practically pass over my house every 10-20 mins or so..)

Complete Silence
 
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