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

[doosesmarket]

I’m watching an old Airline UK episode and it’s from 9/11. The way people were behaving at not being able to get on their flights blows my mind. I keep trying to think well they hadn’t processed 9/11 the way we have now, but realistically they’d all seen screens of the news and watched 2 planes smash into the towers and the towers collapse full of people.

Surely you’d have enough understanding of the need to ground flights and change security measures even then?

I know it was 25 years ago but AIBU to hope those people demanding/shouting at the staff/the entitlement that they need to get to Benidorm that day because ‘we’re not in America’ were ashamed when they seen themselves on the telly and how they acted during the most horrific terrorist attack any of us have ever lived during?

my family and i didn’t know anything til we came back rom holiday and the queues at the airport were immense and we couldn’t figure out why

we didn’t find out til the taxi driver told us

My friends got married the Saturday after it happened.

They were gutted to have missed their honeymoon abroad. They did not complain one bit that they did.

We worked in a shop. No radio on. And of course people out and about shopping didn't have the internet in the pockets either. Likewise people on trains or travelling or just at home without a radio on. I tended to have a cassette tape on to listen to in the car as I have never really liked radio. And growing up we only turned the TV on occasionally and that's still the case today. DH grew up with the TV on constantly so I can understand in those houses you would have known sooner

The only reason i knew before getting home school (which would have been 4.30, nearly three hours after it started) was my dad phoned me after school to tell me to go straight home.

The only reason i had a phone on me (it was a family one, not mine as such) was because I was supposed to be going to sports practice, and not be home until 8pm.

None of my friends had any idea apart from me telling them "theres been a bomb in New York". There were no noticeable differences on the crowded London bus. Our teachers had had no idea.

Sure, if you were in the UK/US in an environment where the TV/radio was on in the background you'd know quickly, or were a frequent texter with someone who was and couldn't wait to share the news you'd know PDQ.

But as a lot of posters have pointed out that's not everybody, there will have been a sizeable number of people driving/walking the streets/at work/elsewhere who for whatever reason won't have heard quickly.

I didn’t. Someone mentioned it at work and there was a few seconds chat about it and then we all went about our business. I knew it was bad but I was young and didn’t know what the WTC towers were. I’d heard of them but thought they were some sort of monument like the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t until I got home many hours later, watched the news and slowly started to comprehend the horror of exactly how many people were killed.

I have had a mobile since December1994, a brick of a Motorola, it rang rarely and calls were £££, no internet, no text they were basic, sketchy signal.
I was at home as DS was in reception and was poorly again with his tonsils, my lodger ( a good friend) used to come home for lunch and we'd watch the news ( Sky or CNN can't remember) the program was interrupted to say a plane had hit one of the towers and then there was live footage from the scene, it was then broadcasting when the second plane hit.

There were lots of strange things that happened that day (and following days).

I was trading in the city and actually had two brokers on the voice box in the twin towers. It was eerie the way it went from one minute shouting prices to the next minute just white noise. Sadly, they both died.

We then went into the CEO’s office and watched it in real time on his huge (at the time) TV. I was totally shocked when the towers collapsed. That shouldn’t have happened. It subsequently turned out that it was due to fraudulently not using the right quality and quantity of building materials.

Then there was the bizarre fact that 9 private Saudi jets were able to fly, even with all other planes grounded, some with members of Bin Laden’s family. There has been no explanation to date of who authorised these flights or why.

There was an assumption, before the shoe bomber and 9/11 that hijackers didn’t want to die themselves, so as long as the hijacker got on the plane with their luggage, the flight was safe. Sadly, with suicide bombers, that assumption had to be changed.

Finally, as to the OP’s question, I think we all tolerate strangers dying for our leisure. Controversially, every time we fly, we contribute to global warming which, statistically is contributing to pressure on the whole system and causing random deaths. I know that feels very different, but it you didn’t know any of the 5,000 odd people who died in 9/11, why would you care more about them than those who died in tsunamis, earthquakes, wars etc. Humans are strange; we care about people we feel are geographically close to us or ‘like us’ far more than others.

It was a very different time. I was at home so watched the news. Those in airports couldn't watch the news. You couldn't watch TV on your phone they where only used for phone calls and texts. People in airports had to rely on information from airport staff and even they didn't have the full information .

Your girlfriend had a bomb in her shoes?!

I know what you’re saying.

Of there’s any huge news stories now my watch will give me a breaking news warning (although we may differ on our opinion about what’s hugely breaking or not ) so even if I’m not somewhere I can watch I’ll know there’s something to watch iyswim?

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.

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

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.

People in an airport couldn't do that.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.