Today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11 do you remember what you were doing when you saw the news?

[Shmoigel]

I remember every single bit of that day like it was yesterday. I had only visited the WTC 3 months earlier too. Thinking about the families and survivors and emergency workers today.

Yes I thought this - who would have been recording and using what?

Yes - I was watching neighbours too as was at home for the summer and waiting to go back to uni.

I remember watching the whole thing unfold and the palpable horror of not knowing when the attacks would stop.

Just got back from secondary school and it was on the news. The next day every time we saw a plane in the sky we were all terrified it was going to crash

Agreed.

People forget that by current standards mobile phones were very basic and connectivity was poor...I don't think taking a video and hitting "share" would have been an option.

Other devices that might have been in/on the towers that were able to record images would have been good old camcorders and the CCTV system..but we know the environment in the rubble post the towers collapsing wasn't conducive many or even any recording devices or recording media surviving.

Obvously it's unwise to say such records can,'t exist but I'd be thinking similar to @AsburyPark, there's a very very low probability of any images being real, but there will be AI and similar out there.
.

@CaveMumthanks for putting the timings. I wondered if it was a false memory but I definitely was home before 3.30, would’ve come home by about 3.25-3.28- we walked in and my step dad was watching it on BBC.

And why? People didn't automatically film everything in those days and as a pp said wouldn't have had cameras in their phones.

It is a bit suspect that suddenly these pictures are coming to light when AI is a big thing now, why not 5 years ago.

It's a big shame as it seems to detract from the genuine footage. Younger people who don't remember the event are more likely to believe the AI version. I know very little about the technicalities of AI but surely it should be possible to mark it so people can tell the difference between a valid reconstruction and a lie.

I’ve seen a lot of AI “videos” across social media claiming to show footage from inside the towers, etc. It’s pretty disrespectful, but as several others have said the younger generation (god I sound like my mother - I’m only 45!) often don’t realise that the capability to just record something on a whim just didn’t exist then.

If you watch documentaries like “102 Minutes That Changed America” you see the quality of the footage that people were able to record on personal camcorders - even some of the footage from actual reporters and news cameras is pretty grainy.

I was a new airline pilot, I’d been flying for about 2 years. Long enough to have begun to get used to how it was. Everything changed after this.

I was buying wood in the local timber merchant. It was just round the corner from my house, a little old fashioned shop. I knew the staff because I’d just bought my own house in London and could only afford to do it up one bit at a time, so I was often there buying a single piece of skirting board or something. They knew what my job was, and called me into the back room to watch the news. I watched the second aircraft hit the Towers there, and headed straight back home to get in Pprune with the news on in the background constantly. The aviation community was in complete shock.

As I said - everything changed after that. Security - instantly became a thorn in our sides, a pita which has never got better, because these people were qualified pilots and we were no longer the untainted professionals we’d been the day before. How to deal with hijackers - they’d always wanted to live before. Now we had to learn to deal with people who were intending to die and take us all with them. We had training on what to do if offered the choice of opening the cockpit door or allowing one of our colleagues to be killed to persuade us to open it. I only signed up to take people on their holidays! This was not a choice I’d expected to be contemplating.

To this day, it’s different. There was ‘before’ and now. For the aviation community, it brought about nearly as great a change as Covid. I only lived it for a couple of years, but strolling, security-free from one flight to another, we could dash into the terminal to buy a coffee or suncream without having to go back through security, heck - we could even take our own suncream through security without it being in too big a bottle. We could bring passengers onto the flight deck, leaving the cockpit door open so people could poke their head in and see the Northern Lights, letting kids in on Christmas Eve to see if they could see Father Christmas out the window. I can’t believe we ever did these things, but that’s how it was ‘before.’ A different world.

It change us. I cannot to this day begin to imagine the shock, horror and disbelief those pilots felt. It is still the most shocking and work-changing thing that has happened in my lifetime.

According to this they started showing the news on BBC1 about 14:09.

I don't think security was ever as lax in the UK and the rest of Europe as it was in the US - apart from anything else we'd had the IRA and other European countries had terrorists too. I don't remember being able to go the gate (though last time I flew via Singapore, security was at the gate and not at the departure lounge entrance, which was a PITA as far as taking drinks on board was concerned).

But I do remember plastic cutlery appearing (though if you are in business class you still get metal, maybe that wasn't the case immediately afterwards though). The bigger change for me was after 2006 when the whole liquids thing happened.

Of course locking the cockpit then helped to cause the Eurowings mass murder/disaster. You solve one problem and cause another.

@Cadeaukatze

Yep, agreed, the US airport system was definitely lax compared with UK/Euroland back in '01..passengers friends could indeed go airside as far as the gate at many/all US airports but AFAIK they had to clear security.

"though last time I flew via Singapore, security was at the gate and not at the departure lounge entrance, which was a PITA as far as taking drinks on board was concerned)"

Changi has been (or mostly been) like that for decades, with security between the main terminal and the individual gate lounges - don't know why.

If the place still works how I recall it non- travellers can't beyond the check-in area, passengers have to go through border control of sorts before entering the main departure area, it's a bit of a hybrid system.

"Of course locking the cockpit then helped to cause the Eurowings mass murder/disaster. You solve one problem and cause another"

The possible consequences and risks introduced by the improved post 9/11 locked/armoured doors were certainly foreseen and discussed by many, pretty much the minute they were introduced...

It was a risk v benefit issue.

I flew to the States in 1999. It was insane the lack of security. I couldn't wrap my head around it. To me it was a disaster waiting to happen.

I was walking home.from.work and was mildly surprised to see mounted police at the entrance to the shopping centre. I remember thinking there must be a football match with a threat of trouble.

Went into corner shop to buy something and they had the news on a little TV.

I still didn't appreciate the level of the attack until I got home.

I had never heard of the Twin Towers before and had no idea they were meant to be iconic.

My boyfriend (worked in an American bank) rang my direct line at work and told me to put on the tv....
I walked out later to have a sneaky snifter and stared up at the BT Tower on a flawless blue sky afternoon, a few planes very high up moving overhead on their regular flight paths, and this dread engulfed me as I realised that nothing would ever be the same again.

I realised that nothing would ever be the same again.

I think a lot of us had that thought.

In our lifetime it has been 9/11, Covid and 7/10 that have been those monumental, horrific things (be they sudden and unexpected, or slowly unfolding dystopian horrors) that everything else has pivoted around and have meant that nothing would ever be the same again.

We've had awful atrocities and tragedies on British soil of course, but nothing so globally and historically life changing and all encompassing as those three things.

I was working in a call centre and we all got sent home as people we were calling were watching news. I remember calling someone and they said no we can't hold up the phone line as we are waiting for news. We had sky at the time and I remember watching it all afternoon. I had never known of the world trade centers though I had been to washington in 1996 as a sixteen year old. I definitely got the impression it was huge but there is no frame of reference at that point for me anyway as to the meaning. An innocence of that era waa gone though. One thing I note is they were not showing the same footage that you see now, it was less graphic. I only saw some of the footage this weekend of the second plane for example. I remember thinking why does everyone not have parachutes. I watched a lot of footage waiting for survivors, everyone did, and it was very hopeless.

@Aintgointogoa

The sky is something I remember, watching TV and glancing out of the window to see a sky the same colour, just completely cloudless.

I saw Beverly Bass being interviewed about diverting to Gander. She said the sky was clear for the entire flight and how rare that was.

I was outside a classroom in college waiting for it to be opened, we were all wondering why the lecturer was late. She’d been watching it on a tv in the staff room. We all went into the class when she turned up and the tv was put on in there where we all watched it.

Similarly awful things happen over the course of history to different generations. My parents were born during WWIi, experienced rationing, saw JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinated, Watergate, the Vietnam war to name a few events. It goes on and on over time.

I witnessed all those things except WW2 myself and, believe me, this was different. We saw it happen on live TV and the change to our way of life was immediate.

I didn't say they didn't and I wasn't trying to say we've had it worse. I just said that those were the big, life changing events that happened in our lifetime.