13 Years ago this day -
 

It was my final year of uni, I had to go in pre semester to do a Solid Works Modelling test and there were a few of us in deep concentration - ....one of my mates started to email funny stuff across and I thought don't need the distraction at first thought it was a wind up as she was in the Learning Resources Centre having a coffee....then her emails changed to Oh My God This Is Horrible ....

I thought no need for a wind up but out of curiosity, I opened my internal uni email - and there it was one plane had smacked into the Twin Towers and then another .....on the news ...did not take a semi genius of a final wear aero and mech student like my good self to figure out something was way not right.....

There were murmurings and muttering so throughout rest of the afternoon from those not comatose and those in semi comatose from nights out down the SU Bar and in Londoninium ....


I figured I get the train home and ironically enough the peeps , the City commuters were not talking much about anything bar the usual BS the atmosphere was not much the same as every day...

Left the station but then got dragged back into our rock club by a mate who spied me walking in his direction ......and there was some chatter chatter but not much about the news...the clubs two wall mounted TVA where they used to play everything from porn movies to MTV vids were off...

By 2300 hours went into my folks house and my cousins and my mom were glued to the TV as the Pentagon had been hit and then other airliner which was in the Penn countryside....

So I like to pay tribute and homage to my mates on both sides of the pond - both air and ground crew and doing who are serving, have served in the war fighting the bad guys both on land and bit sea, more importantly , let us remember the victims of this day , 2001 and those who haVg given the ultimate sacrifice.

So take care and all the best and stay safe so many happy landings .


Chopper2004

Watched the whole thing unfold in the bunker at PJHQ. There were an awful lot of "so what do we do now" and "where did that come from" faces that day.

Visited Ground Zero about a month ago. Very moving and humbling (and in some ways slightly surreal) experience. The museum is a fantastic memorial to those lost in 2001 - some of the exhibits are quite 'hard hitting' to say the least.

Then and now
 

Arrived home from an early at BHX and watched it unfold. Next day had to operate a BA A319 from BHX to FRA with no guidance on securing the flight deck.

We had three passengers who had booked a Muslim Approved breakfast, turned out to be businessmen from the Far East who were as scared as the rest of us.

The BA Magazine had a picture of NY and the Towers on the front cover. They were skipped, wish I had kept a few dozen as I suspect they would now be quite collectable.

Picked up a change yesterday and find myself flying to Tel Aviv in an Orange Airbus. Lovely day, what could possibly go wrong?

In the Tel Aviv Hilton.

Bored from reading materials in preparation for a meeting I was channel hopping and caught the first reports on the news. I called my American colleague to watch and just after he turned on his TV, and while we were still talking on the phone, the second plane hit.

About 30 mins later we had to head off to our meeting - at the end we were told by another colleague that both Towers were gone and a further two aircraft had crashed - we just couldn't believe it.

As we thought it inadvisable to go outside, due to the British Embassy being just across the road, we headed up to the Business Lounge to get some food and watch the news coverage. In there were five or six people from Cantor Fitzgerald, a company based in the WTC, who had watched it all unfold on the TV knowing their colleagues were in the building :sad:

Later, during a quick call home to the wife, she told me her London office was trying to contact employees in a subsidiary of theirs based in the towers - with little success. She'd been over to visit them a few months earlier and so knew several of the staff working there.

A horrible, horrible and sort of sureal day.

Spent the day in a field on the Great Dividing Range with a CH47 with an Aft Xsmn Chip.... several hours leading up to a successful drain and flush and we headed for Tamworth (now dark). Watched events on the TV in the motel.

Next day was very strange - probably the only people flying in Australia as we transited to Amberly.

Second week teaching in a girls' school in UK, some of whose parents were in the military and international finance - two were in New York, but fortunately not the Towers. Caught the second tower going down on a TV in a classroom at lunchtime. Spent the next 3 days explaining to staff and students what had happened, everything from air defence and US pilot schools to tower structures, as everyone was desperate for knowledge. Impossible to teach normally.

A friend phoned me to say 'watch the tv, something is happening and I can't believe it'. After watching it (in utter dis-belief) I recall saying to myself 'the world will never be the same again!'

I uncharacteristically switched the TV on in the middle of the day and watched the replay of the first strike, initially thought it was Towering Inferno or similar until a horrible realisation that this wasn't Hollywood crept in. At the second strike I said out loud to the TV, "Now there's going to be a War".

Was at home, mowing the lawn as the CH47 National Standby Captain...came in to see the first tower already alight and watched the second aircraft hit. Star-jumped into my grow bag, went to work and spent the rest of the day hoping we wouldn't be needed......

I uncharacteristically switched the TV on in the middle of the day and watched the replay of the first strike, initially thought it was Towering Inferno or similar until a horrible realisation that this wasn't Hollywood crept in. At the second strike I said out loud to the TV, "Now there's going to be a War".

That was the day the fun went out of flying. Then they locked the flight deck door and that sealed it for me.

Colleagues in our Wall Street office started to say strange things on our internet chatrooms and it took a while to work out what they were going on about. Most news websites were down. All sorts of strange and unbelievable stories were flying about the office as our people in Putney talked to our people in the States. When I eventually worked out what was going on I ran out of the office and used a stack of coins in the nearest phone booth to call my father and brother in South Africa and tell them. I'm not sure why I did that other than the feeling of having to tell someone. We got TV images later.

QRA sqn at Leeming and a very surreal hectic day as events unfolded as I recall. Two AD sqns were in Oman and two more were swapping out in Saudi leaving just one full sqn on home soil. UK was a little light on AD that week.

Det to France cancelled and a herc ride further east 3 weeks later for the response. Been camping ever since.

As pax en route to Bermuda I spent this day orbiting lands End at FL330 for 7 hours until we returned to Gatwick . None of us knew anything more than US Airspace had been closed and that we had to hold (as we had full fuel) until all the return transats were safely back on the ground.
Surreal, had lunch and later tea and just like the normal 7 hours to BDA but we went absolutely know here and arrived back to a very shaken and shocked Gatwick and TV monitors filled with smoke and talking heads.
Not a day I will forget that's for sure

R I P to all the victims, especially those innocents who died on the day and who died since then in the idiotic Bush Blair war on terror-we have all now seen where that lead us haven't we.
V Sad

I'm currently in the USA where, unsurprisingly, there is a lot of TV coverage of the events of that terrible day.

We were at home (in normal retirement mode) when a friend telephoned to tell ys to watch BBC news. The OH and I sat in the study watching events unfold in almost complete silence for several hours. I did put a tape in the video recorder and switch it on, but that tape has never been touched since the moment I removed it after it rewound itself at the end.

There are no words for the enormity of the events of that day, nor any way of forgetting what happened. RIP to the thousands who died.

My only comparable period of disbelief was the Concorde Paris crash.

I am a worldly wise old cynic, believing "if it can happen, it will happen" but nevertheless ...............

We were all Americans that day round here.

I was getting ready for school, I would have been 9 at the time in Australia when my parents were kind of sitting around like stunned mullets infront of the TV. I had a pretty good idea at the time what was going to happen as a result, even then.

Certainly something that has stuck with me, unlike anything else from that age range.

Now I'm in the military, watching what ISIL is doing in the Middle East.

I was teaching a bespoke radar course for 2 Saudi Sqn Ldr engineers at the Koledge of Nowledge. When it had sunk in we all agreed that someone was going to get hell for this - but never thought it would be Iraq who had zilch to do with it.

On vacation, staying at my mom's house. My mom woke me up saying my sister had called and to turn on the TV - a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
My half awake mind was thinking this had better be good, and it was probably a Cessna or something like that. Turned on the TV just in time to see the second airplane hit :eek:.

I remember telling my wife "We are at war, we just don't know who with yet".

I had just landed from an SCT Tutor trip and was told by the eng team that an aircraft had flown into the WTC. I imagined it must have been an errant light aircraft but by the time I reached the crew room the second 767 had hit and all were glued to the TV. The shock when the first tower collapsed was physical. Then it was announced that one of the jets was an American Airlines 767, my sister was a pilot with AA flying 767s so I rushed home to make a call to the USA to find all my family over there worried sick as she had a trip that morning and since then nothing was heard. An hour or so later she phoned from Huston, where her aircraft had landed after all US air traffic was ordered to the ground! She had taken off about the same time as the hi-jacked jets but her route was from Miami to SFX. All the family were relieved that she was safe but if I had had access to a big red button that day then certain cities in the middle east might have been glassed that night!:(

Was on a long leave at my parents house in between a posting from Saxa vord to Tidytoilet. Both my parents were at work and normally I would have switched the old analog sat TV on to CNN just to see what was going on while doing other things. On that day however I decided to sort out all of my stuff that I had in storage in their loft, so it wasn't until My mother got home from work at around 4.30PM UK time and told me that everybody in Woolworths were talking about a major terrorist attack on New York, that we turned the TV on and just happened to catch a recap of the events from just before the second impact happened. When my mother asked me 'who do you think did it', my reply...

1. A bunch of Islamists known as Al-Qaeda...
2. .....lead by a guy called Osama Bin Laden...
3. ....And there is going to be a major war in Afghanistan, which the UK will be involved in'.

20 days later arrived on the bus at Tidytoilet to see a mission statement on the entrance sign saying 'The role of this station is train Aerospace System Operators for deployed operations'. I turned around to a RAAF Sgt who I'd met at Saxa while he was up there as part of 'Longlook' and said, 'that sign will be changing to defend UK airspace in very short order', which it in fact it did.