9/11 20th anniversary

thought i had seen the second live, but theres no way with the time it occurred

It's hard to fathom that one , anyone, could just walk into a cockpit of a airliner, and do as they pleased.

I was at work when the first plane hit and I remember a Palestinian colleague commenting on how some depressed stockbrokers crashed the plane and it wasn't a terrorist attack. Still not sure if it was a joke in bad taste, but years later I met him and he thinks it was an inside job. He has returned home since.

war, its fantastic!

I was sending out an A320 in Dublin Airport and the Captain asked me, over the headset,if I'd heard anything about a plane hitting a building in New York. I replied that I thought it was a guy in a Cessna accidentally hitting a skyscraper. When I'd sent him on his way and went back to our line office, the supervisor had just turned the TV on and we saw the second aircraft impact. We watched it for a while and then I went out to see in another aircraft and the crew had obviously heard of the event and everybody on board was stunned. The airport went from being buzzing and active to being almost silent within minutes. We had aviation frequency radios in the vans and I remember the outgoing pilots asking the Tower if they were going to be allowed to take off. Even then,just after the second crash and in Ireland,they thought the airlines would be grounded. Going home off shift, every TV and radio was talking about nothing else and the atmosphere in and around the airport was one of stunned silence. Crazy day. I'll never forget it and RIP to all the innocents who died that day.

The usual PSA: the conspiracy theorists and "on-the-fencers" will be along in no time

Even at the time you could learn a lot from a PC flight simulator too, enough to maintain a course and altitude. Not enough to take off or land, but the hijackers skipped the former and had no concerns about the latter. Once set, the autopilot can maintain your course and altitude, and changing either of those is a literal twist of a knob. In my estimation they used the autopilot to get close enough to their targets, maybe taking control only in the final seconds.

Yeah whole thing was mad. Our teacher told us he thought World War 3 had started. Walking home we were hearing all sorts of rumours, car bombs hitting court houses, Yasser Arafat claiming responsibility with the PLO, more attacks were imminent as more planes had been hijacked, it was a surprise Chinese strike, etc

Got home and saw New York in this huge plume of smoke. Didnt know what to think. Like everyone else glued to the TV that day and night.

Is it?

World can be a very dark place. The price of a human life isn't much these days.

You have to laugh tho, as "safest times to be alive in the history of the planet" - he says during a global pandemic lol.

because you want to debate and highlight the cause and the effect. none of us here are ignorant to that. There are other threads about that.But a memorial is a memorial. It is about remembering this particular day and what people experienced on the day. You are missing the point about memorials and remembrance. But sure do what you want. I wont be responding to you again.

That is really worth a watch just to see the flavour and shock of the reporting on the day. RTE's "Ashes of 9/11" on the experiences of Irish people on that day is worth a look too. 1 story of a man who escaped the Towers, only to find his sister and 4y.o niece were on flight 175...

You're the only one bringing it up.

Pop back to the conspiracy theories forum you're so fond of where you can feel important.

So why did they not hit the Pentagon as they should? Why did they cause the least amount of damage possible if it was so easy to fly ground level at those speeds

incredible that it's not covered in school history classes. I asked a history teacher once and she said they'll discuss it if brought up, but it's not due on the curriculum for another ten years or so. Some of the kids she teaches, thought it was a scene from "an old disaster movie".

Lol, I know your "views" on 9/11. I've rarely seen a 9/11 thread anywhere on this forum not turn into a dumpster fire of conspiracy theorists and their "on the fence" validators. Just pre-empting it and hopefully this one doesn't descend into the same.

Yeah well it was a very inventive attack and it's extremely unlikely with all the airport security introduced since anything like 9/11 will happen again. The US's biggest problem is ironically homegrown mass gun shootings, on their land anyway.

I have to say, the 9/11 memorial is stunning. It's just prefect. What is that white winged structure beside it, I hadn't see that before today from today's TV coverage. I take it it's a large sculpture of some kind, not a building, idk. I don't think much of the freedom tower though, it's just looks like a lame shadow of the original.

"lol" there's an entire forum for discussing conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 where you can grandstand to your hearts content.

Your "pre-empting" is just you expressing your views in a manner as graceful as a brick to the face.

Without veering into the territory of back seat modding this thread is clearly about people's memories of 9/11 as it happened. The first mention of conspiracies came from you. Like I mentioned previously, you have an entire forum dedicated to arguing with the same small group of people you have been arguing with for well over a decade on this topic with.

As your condescending tone suggests to anyone unfamiliar with that forum, it is a "dumpster fire" all of it's own.

Just watched 9/11: Inside the Presidents War Room, good doc, demonstrates they really had little idea what was happening. The paranoia was so high that the pilots of Airforce One posted a guard outside their own cabin door.

The memorial doesn't really allow for it as the "voids" exist in place of the original towers, that and the decision was made to keep the redevelopment to just the one tower.

I remember there was a campaign at one point to rebuild the towers as they were, with support from a certain Donald Trump before the redevelopment of the site was finalized I to what it is today.

I was flicking between Sky News and BBC One (Neighbours), waiting for Diagnosis Murder to start. When Sky News reported it, I just assumed it was some kind of light aircraft accident. The hugeness of the tower made it hard to comprehend the enormity of what had just hit it. Anyhow, Diagnosis Murder never did start in the end. That's when I realised that something big had happened. And then, when the second tower was hit, I realised that something really massive had happened. There was a moment of confusion where I thought the second collision was just a replay of the first one. But it soon became very obvious that America was going to have no choice but to invade somewhere and kill a disproportionate amount of innocent civilians in the process. I knew it'd only be a country where poor non-white people live though.

Coverage of the 9/11 attacks as they happened in real time (around 2 hours), morbidly gripping to watch it all again

George W Bush: The 9-11 Interview another good watch, it's on Disney.

What was it like flying before 9/11?