I really feel sorry for those that are not old enough to have witnessed this event live. When you learn about it in school, it simply can't tell you all these small and big impressions that just burn themselves into your memory. When you witness an event that you know will change history forever. You might learn what has happened, but when you only learn it as something from a modern perspective looking back, you don't get the emotional level or how plain weird and surreal this whole situation was.
I mean, for me personally, I was watching TV, it was suddenly interrupted, but I only listened half-heartedly, so I switched to a different channel the moment the burning North Tower was visible. I figured it was just a fire or something and didn't care. I actually switched away from several TV stations until my mother burst into my room going "You have to see this, it's like something out of a movie!" and then I spend the next 8 or so hours watching this whole mess pan out. At some point, german news outlets were reading a list of people and groups that had claimed responsibility for the attacks - amongst which was a japanese group that claimed they did it as revenge for the atomic bombs. It's that extra layer of completely crazy weirdness and uncertainty that a history textbook won't cover.
Or the emotional impact of watching the towers collapse live and the many, many videos of people covered in dust, walking like zombies through the eerie twilight, through the thick smoke-like dust cloud and every square inch of ground, everything, is just covered in inches of dust, paper, debris.
I lived in a pretty rural part of Germany back then and the next day, our teachers addressed what had happened in NY. Even though it wasn't really scheduled, every class would start with our teachers coming in and addressing the issue which would then last the entire class. Some teachers were pretty idiotic, implying that there's a risk of our little neck of the woods being attacked as well in a similar way. As if anyone would go through the trouble of hijacking a plane and crashing that into bumfuck nowhere, southern Germany.
The resident CS-addicted whigger in my class displayed his stupidity in one fell swoop: He remarked that the US should have just shot down the planes and nothing would have happened, when I pointed out that that would still mean that a shitton of burning debris would scatter over all of Manhattan and cause a lot of death and destruction, he replied that they could have used "a nuke or something and vaporize the whole plane".
Be that as it may: Has anyone ever published videos made by the helicopters that flew close to the WTC before it collapsed? I don't know if they were from police of tv stations, but I think there were quite a lot of those but I can't remember ever seeing footage from a birds eye view.
I liked the part when those airline passengers overpowered the hijackers, but they couldn't land the plane so they crashed in Pennsylvania. Real American heroes.
It's a popular myth about the vigilantes fighting back and regaining the cockpit, but unfortunately, the scum that hijacked the plane ended that flight on their terms.
Transcript from the voice recorder.
But the passengers still went down fighting and their actions at least caused the terrorists to not pull through with their plan to drag even more people into this.
Now I know that there was some exercise and bureaucracy involved, but it still feels fishy.
When the planes were hijacked, noone expected them to actually being crashed into a building. The usual MO up till then was to hijack a plane, force it to land, make stupid demands and get your shit shot up by SWAT when the ground crew delivers soup to the hostages.
Even so, jet-fighters were made ready to intercept the planes, but they launched too late and even going supersonic, they didn't reach Manhattan in time before the second plane crashed. It certainly didn't help that airspace was an utter mess and it took air-traffic control forever to realize it was actually 2 planes going AWOL. An interesting side-fact is that the jets weren't permitted to go supersonic since air traffic control feared they might crash into other planes, since they were all over the place scrambling to land as quickly as possible.
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