AIBU to judge passengers complaining about grounded flights on 9/11?

Your experience isn't going to be universal though is it. In America I can imagine phone calls spread rapidly about the news. That wasnt happening in the sleepy village in England where I worked in a shop

I'm American and was in sixth grade when it happened. I live in Chicago, so an hour behind New York and the second plane hit when were waiting in the halls for class to start. By homeroom, every teacher in the school already knew what was happening, and that's when all the students found out so yea, the whole 'we didn't know anything til the next day' BS some people are claiming on here is both wildly and embarrassingly inaccurate.

To me, It was a terrorist attack/plane crash , which was an unfathomable tragedy obviously, but it caused the world to change in ways we still can't properly explain to younguns almost 25 years later.

Not just boarding flights but starting jobs, opening bank accounts, renting/buying a house, so many more things I can't remember, doing easily prior to this event.
You only have to watch films prior to 9/11 and they just seem unrealistic now.

I was completely oblivious 🫣.

I was very into the latest tech in my twenties and I had a Nokia 3330 in 2001 which was top of the range and had a very rudimentary web browser that was barely functional - you definitely couldn't watch video on it. The first phone I had which it was actually practical to keep up to date with the news on would have been a Blackberry Pearl or a iPhone both around 2007. I'm not even sure it was possible to stream video on the original iPhone either.

Yes, I agree @ColdAsAWitches is mistaken. I definitely saw the second plane go into the twin towers live on TV. I was standing outside a curry's in our local shopping centre watching footage of the aftermath of the first hit on the display TVs in the window when it happened. However, if I hadn't happened to be passing a display of TVs I probably wouldn't have heard about it until later, let alone seen the footage. I think people forget how in 2001 we weren't able to constantly access the internet on our phones to get updates so news spread more slowly. Even people working in offices wouldn't always have access to an internet-connected computer in the way they do now.

Off topic but my absolute favourite line from airline 😂
Airline Departure Confusion: A Cabin Crew Perspective | TikTok

"realistically they’d all seen screens of the news"

how on earth do you know this? they wouldn't have been able to stream it on their phones!

We were on honeymoon in the Maldives at the time, and flew back a few days after 9/11 into Gatwick. I just remember armed police everywhere. And lots and lots of checks and delays. It was surreal.

2 particular memories from that time:

A couple of hours after it happend dh’s old aunt rang to complain bitterly that Countdown wasn’t on!

I said, ‘But haven’t you heard about the terrible thing that’s happened in New York?’
‘I don’t care! I want Countdown!’
(Absolutely typical of her, I might add,)

The other thing, just a few days later we were scheduled to fly to Boston for a memorial event for my BiL, who’d died at only 53.

It didn’t occur to us not to go, but at around the same time I read that Clint Eastwood had cancelled a planned trip to London for a film premiere. Too scared!
That was the end with a vengeance of the ‘Thing’ I’d had about ‘tough guy’ Clint Eastwood since I was about 12, when he was Rowdy Yates in Rawhide.

YANBU, there were multiple flights under attack and it was obviously entirely possible that European flights would have been targeted simultaneously so it’s shocking they weren’t worried for their own safety.

I was watching Neighbours and after it finished, it switched to live footage. I can remember seeing the second crash and the beautiful blue sky, a real contrast to what was happening. At the time, I didn’t comprehend the full impact of what I saw, plus the first crash and the other planes.

The second plane literally hit the South Tower live on television in front of millions of people. News cameras were already pointed at the World Trade Center because the first tower was on fire ... this is not some hazy, disputed detail buried in 25-year-old memory, it is one of the most extensively recorded moments in modern history and the confidence with which you’re lecturing everyone else about “false memories” while getting that so spectacularly wrong is honestly incredible. You’re not demonstrating how unreliable everyone else’s memory is. You’re demonstrating how unreliable yours is.

I think people did struggle to put it into perspective in the immediate aftermath because it was so unprecedented. I remember watching it on a TV in the window of an electrical retailer and people around me discussing how air traffic control had really messed up when the second plane hit the tower because the idea that this was a terrorist attack seemed so far fetched and there was no mobile internet access to do fact checking. I also know someone who was in New York at the time and was annoyed because he'd intended to go back to a shop in one of the towers to buy a shirt he'd liked but he obviously was no longer able to do that. And I know someone else who was stranded in Iceland for a week because his journey out to New York as an exchange student was disrupted. He was really disappointed that he was going to miss various welcome events and me and his other friends all spent time commiserating with him about that on MSN messenger. People travelling on the day probably saw headlines on a screen in the airport if they were lucky and would have very little detail of what was happening. Looking back the enormity of what happened is really obvious, but at the time the personal inconveniences suffered by many, many people felt real at the time too.

Keep in mind that people in the middle of traveling did not have access to seeing much information. They did not have smartphones. At best they caught a few seconds of coverage on an airport television.

I had a job in America that was considered a potential terrorist target and worked in a building with permanent security. I was still in the dark. Things were just happening too quickly. I just spent the day glued to my 13 inch tv at home.

To be fair, you never know what exactly people are going through in their own lives. I had surgery a few years ago and had to fly to the mainland for it and, after a week recovering confined to a single hotel room, my train back to the airport ended up delayed between stations due to someone very unfortunately dying on the tracks. At that point I was exhausted, in pain, and reliant on strict timings for my booked airport assistance and next round of medications- I was crying and close to having a full-on meltdown. Of course I have sympathy for the poor person who died, but at the time I was at the end of my tether and desperate to get home to my family.

Which really is all to say that you don't know what situations people might have been in; desperate to get home, on their way to see a dying relative, making an important deadline that could cost them their job. I'm sure most of them felt the full impact of the situation once they had a moment to get their heads around it, but I can't blame them for needing to get to wherever they were going. People aren't just travelling for holidays.

I remember every news website I tried had crashed due to demand. Getting accurate information was seriously tricky.

Some people are self-absorbed idiots, yes, but as many others have said, it wasn’t immediately clear what had happened. I was working abroad and heard an early news report via a colleague whose brother was a journalist. The report was that a light aircraft had hit the world trade centre. I was aware of the world trade centre in Switzerland. So my early understanding was that there had been a small but tragic incident in Europe. (I think the misunderstanding came about because some had misunderstood “two passenger planes” as “a two-passenger plane”. The early reports were very garbled and the real story slowly trickled out over the coming days.

7/7 also had misinformation at first. I was kicked off a train because of a “power surge”. I was almost certainly grumbling about TFL as I trudged across London to work. I only heard there had been a terrorist attack when my parents called me from their holiday because the news there was reporting it.

My boyfriend at the time first saw it in the windows of Rumbelows on his way home from work. Lots of people stood there watching it.

I remember someone telling me at work what had happened. We then watched live news reports on the internet. Then I rang my dad - who was also my boss - on his mobile to tell him. I remember just wanting to pick my ds from nursery and be at home with him.

But why wouldn’t they want to get on their own flights? That wasn’t unreasonable.

I was flying on 9/11 (to Asia) and was grateful my flight left on time. My brother go stuck in Europe for 10 days unable to fly to the states and nearly lost his job.

I think there is a massive amount of hindsight being 20/20 in your post.

I didn’t say that people didn’t know it was serious, I said the full magnitude wasn’t immediately obvious for lots of us. I was 20 when it happened and I’s never been to the US at that point and I didn’t have a clue how many people worked in the towers, because i hadn’t ever thought about it. And i definitely wasn’t alone in that.

People in an airport couldn't do that.

Well that’s ruined my memories of “Luscious Leo” as we called him. (Not weird we are same age!)

Glad he got caught and charged and hope the lady is ok now.

Don't want to derail the thread but your mention of Leo (Jones) reminded me that he was arrested / charged three or four years ago.

Airline’s Leo Jones from Bovingdon given 5-year restraining order after stalking TV presenter https://share.google/y1JgpjpdEX2F6ptte

That sounds vaguely like the attempt on an El Al flight ex.Heathrow in 86 where a lady was duped by her boyfriend into trying to carry a bomb in (I think) hand baggage.

Not sure if shoes were involved in that one, the serious checks on footwear really started post Richard Reid's antics.