9/11 20th anniversary

Hindsight is great but you wonder how the cockpits were all pretty much insecure up to this date, any randomer with mental health or dodgy intentions could have taken a plane over with little effort. For decades before this bus drivers had secure cabins blocking access from the general public, just seems mad that wasn't law for all passenger jets.

All those lives lost

RIP

I remember watching the tv at me nannies on lunch from secondary school the day it happened . Id say its our generations " you know what you were doing" moments

The Smithsonian Channel's The Heartland Tapes is a great docu IMO. No talk, no commentary, just news reports of that morning interspersed with ATC and emergency services radio.

I lived in Lanzarote when it happened and was sitting at home watching BBC News when they broke their coverage. Shots of the smoking 1st tower and then the 2nd plane hitting.

I remember initial death toll estimates of up to 50k! If nothing else, the fact that the planes impacted before the work day fully started, saved an awful lot of lives.

The mood in the bar that night and for the next few days was like nothing I've ever experienced. We opened but cancelled live music and kept as much news on as we could. It's not something I think of often, but I'll always remember where I was when it happened. My wife was stranded back in Ireland too as she was home on holidays and was meant to fly back out on the afternoon of 9/11. Her flight that day still took off, but she didn't make it to Dublin and fair play to Iberia, they looked after her and rescheduled the flight for her even tho it was her own fault (and Sky news') that she missed it in the 1st place.

the world is multiple times more dangerous now.. it will get worse...Despite trillions being spent... Aviation is multiple times safer yes... but what fûcking use is safeguarding aircraft and airports.... when these scumbags can just blow up trains, train stations, trams... walk down a main street or into a shopping center with an automatic weapon or IED ...

fûck all use spending billions on aviation security when what should have happened is quite simply the EU to have the fûckin cop on to halt, limit non EU citizens from certain locations from arriving... safeguarding us in the air and on the streets, in our homes, in shopping centers...

no Islamic terrorist gives a rats about ETD, ionscan detectors, backscatter technology or the latest X-ray machine...

quite simply the clock is ticking, it’s happening here...

you would find it multiple times easier to kill / injure more people by just walking into a shopping center with an automatic weapon / grenades...

10th of December, if Liffey Valley, Blanchardstown, Jervis St, Charlestown, Mahon Point, Eyre Square Center are attacked by people with automatic weapons and improvised explosives, you’d be seeing similar casualties to 9/11....

my own view is that it’s at some point in the future going to happen... could be one year or twenty away.

if you invite trouble it will arrive.

No point in thinking if we learn from 9/11 and make the skies safer when we as a society have done that very thing but inviting problems on the street, shopping areas, public transportation...

I was only 7 or 8 in 3rd class when it happened, I remember the teacher turned on the tv so we could watch what was happening. At that age all I cared about was pokemon cards and capri suns so seeing the news reports meant nothing to me. Was only many years later watching documentaries about it, realised the affect it had on American

^^ I was also collecting a couple of family members from Cork airport on the 10th of September. I remember thinking it was small planes at first and I didn't know what the WTC was..

Was that before or after that imbecile was taking about Pamela Anderson's jet? I really struggle to understand when they took it seriously without being dicks? And I know it's low brow and all the rest but, surely, there is a point where all that goes out the window? Because I also listened to it throughout and it's really not quite as you paint it imho.

The Pamela Anderson talk was going on when the first plane hit and did continue until the second plane hit.

There was an interview on LBC's Andrew Pierce show today, with a woman who on 9/11 started her FIRST day at work there. What a first day at work, how surreal. Didn't get to listen to it but it just shows there are so many untold stories around this terrible day in history.

I remember myself on the day hearing on the radio a plane had hit the first tower, at the time there was no real sense of the scale of the collision, assumption was a Cesna type plane hitting in some kind of navigation error, once you heard the 2nd tower was hit I knew it was terrorists. The internet wasn't able to cope with the news across the world, ISDN was only being implemented and most homes didn't have this, multiple websites completely collapsed with the traffic for the day, BBC, Sky, CNN, ABC etc, as did phonelines between Ireland and US. There was a fear in our office that European targets could be next, got off early in work, going home in the car my mind was wondering what in the jaysus had just happened and how it could be responded to so it didn't happen again.

Hitting a 60m wide target at 500 mph is absolutely difficult. Didn't the official report exclude all systems and conclude it was manual? Even more difficult when you consider the pentagon, a mere 5 stories from the ground. All logic there though would suggest they were attempting to plow straight into the roof from above and somehow managed to hit the very narrow strip between the ground and roof at that speed

was living in california and working in silicon valley when it happened. my radio alarm clock went off at 6am californian time and i heard reports of a plane hitting the world trade centre. like everyone else i just presumed it was a light aircraft because i think one had hit the white house the year previously if i remember correctly...anyone, next thing the announcers say they suspected it was a jetliner...i jumped out of bed and ran to turn the tv on. the second plane had hit at that stage...so i ran around the house waking up all my housemates...we all sat there stunned at 6.30 am in the morning...there was so much confusion going on...it seemed there might be hijacked aircraft everywhere...we immediately thought silicon valley might be a target as it was the middle of the dot com boom and the place was literally the technological capital of the world at that point so we thought it would be an obvious target.

san fran evacuated all its high rise buildings and shut down all the bridges across the bay...and because we were 3 hours behind new york, we all thought we were gonna get attacked at 9am our time...i stayed and watched until the towers crumbled and then decided i better go to work...the drive up the 101 freeway was one of the most memorable moments for me...normally for a 4 lane freeway each way, it was nuts on there in rush hour each morning..but that morning it seemed like everyone was driving at 30mph...no overtaking and you could really feel how the other drivers were all stunned and shocked...on the way to work there was one overpass where someone had hung up a homemade sign "god bless america"...by the time i was driving back home that evening, every single bridge over the freeway was completed covered with signs and american flags. i lived near an air force base and in the days afterwards the house would shake with the fighter jets taking off and landing all the time and the most eery part for me was lying in bed at night and hearing those jets in the distance flying up and down the coast on guard...for the first time i knew what it really felt like to be living in a non-neutral country.

I was flying back to Dublin from the UK, when the first plane hit. I knew nothing about it until I got out of the terminal building and turned on the car radio for the drive home. The first reports were coming in of a plane.... perhaps a light aircraft, having crashed into one of the towers. The radio prog carried on with the music, promising to update soon. The story then developed into a passenger plane accident. I stopped off to pick up some grocery shopping and by the time I was back in the car, the second plane had hit and radio coverage was constant. I got home and rushed in to turn the TV on, just as the first tower fell and reports were also (or soon) talking of a crash at the pentagon and another plane flying without air traffic control contact and heading for Washington. It was like the world was ending.

I was involved in Dublin pirate radio at the time and using the still developing internet, I used to record US stations, on my dial up modem. This was in the days where you had to know the stream URL or else go to the few radio websites that existed at the time. I logged on to a few I knew of in the NY area and sat stunned as my mini disc recorder captured the developing incidents, live.

I listened and recorded for as long as I could before the local NY radio stations went off air due to either power failure or loss of transmission facilities - some had their relay and link equipment located on the towers. Some of the bigger NYC stations came back on air in the following few days using backup and borrowed transmission equipment, before The Empire State building was then kitted out as the main radio relay location for the NYC area, just as it had been, before the taller Twin Towers were built.

It was a surreal few days. I remember our government then declaring a national day of mourning for the victims, giving everyone a day off to contemplate. It was a strange time as I was working for a company that had strong American connections and they were fighting on, no day of mourning declared there - they were still in the middle of trying to cope. As a sign of solidarity with our colleagues, some of us stayed working on the day so that they could carry on and interact with us as normal. We never told them that Ireland had shut down to think about their pain, while they were determined to carry on and not be beaten.

A year or so later, I attended a talk given in a Dublin hotel by four NYC Firefighters that had been involved on the day. Three were on duty on the day, one was retired due to previous injuries received. All four were right in the heart of the madness and suffered additional physical injuries on the day. One had survived being trapped in the collapse of the North Tower. They give their time free and were going around the world to tell their story and experiences, the admission fee for the event was donated to the burns unit in Crumlin Children's hospital. They were using local fire service contacts wherever they went, for accommodation and to organise the venues for their talks.

I asked them why they were doing the lectures .... they all said that they still didn't sleep at night and wanted to do something positive to highlight the better aspects of humanity that they experienced on the day and since. The motivational speeches they gave were stunning, in recalling the horror of their direct experiences, they found light and wanted to get that message across. It was strange to see hope for humanity coming from people who had seen so much hate and horror on the day that changed the world.

It is hard to believe that twenty years have now passed.

The Pentagon is much larger but only 7 stories, hitting it anywhere would be more akin to a targeted crash landing so not surprising that the hijackers nearly undershot. Hitting the WTC was more of a flying than a landing exercise. Great visibility on the day and two huge towers, one hit much lower than the other but similar result. Options to go around or hit something else if you miss.

In terms of terrorism it isn’t. Globally...

In 2008 approximately 8000 people were killed due to terrorism.

in 2014 approximately 45,000 people on the planet were killed due to terrorist activities.

in 2017 approximately 28,000 people on the planet were killed due to terrorist activities.

Al Qaeda have attacked and killed in dozens of country’s in almost every continent.

I was in the WTC in 1999 getting a tour. To give an idea of the height your ears pop a few times going up the lift.

Saddest part in hindsight (given what happened two years later) tour guide said in the event of an emergency all people go to top of tower to be airlifted by helicopters. Which was obviously the worst thing to do when the towers were hit.

Christ even after twenty years hearing people reading the names out is rough and especially when they get to their relatives and talk about them.

Hard to believe it's exactly twenty years since I watched the second plane hit live on TV.