[10g1k]

I was on IRC at the time, on Undernet. It was in the wee hours of the morning here. Some dude came into the channel and said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. I said something like "Dude, it's too low for a plane to hit it, with all those tall buildings around it", because I thought he was talking about the World Trade Centre in Melbourne AU. He clarified that he meant the one in NYC. So along with everyone else, I jumped into a hastily created temp channel dedicated to news of the event, which was filling with people faster than I'd ever seen before. Updates were scrolling up the screen super fast. I was living with my parents and siblings at the time, and I ran around and told everyone to get up, and turned on the old CRT television which weighed about 600 tons. So we all sat there watching, and then the second plane hit the other tower. It felt like it was some Hollywood BS, not a real thing. We watched people jump out and fall. It was quite difficult to believe it was even happening.

Not super relevant, but at the time, they said they had scrambled F16s and one had shot down the plane over the field in Pennsylvania to prevent another attack. Either their initial reports were wrong, or they changed the story later to create some heroes.

[sublinear]

> Not super relevant, but at the time, they said they had scrambled F16s and one had shot down the plane over the field in Pennsylvania to prevent another attack. Either their initial reports were wrong, or they changed the story later to create some heroes.

https://youtu.be/69uSD1S14RI

This YouTube channel is great by the way.

The first wave was a couple of F-15s three F-16s. That flight 93 was shot down by a South Dakota Air National Guard F-16 pilot is false. It's a coincidence that the pilot was heading west of the first attacks to pick up an FAA official to assist with the investigation in New York.

All the fighters at the time were either still on the ground or in a holding pattern off the east coast. The FAA was slow enough to relay details that every launch was already too late to respond to their target.

[scoutt]

I watched the whole thing live. I clearly remember a passenger plane being followed by a couple of fighters. It was filmed by a civilian on the ground. After some time, there was the news about a passenger plane that crashed somewhere.

I couldn't find that footage anymore.

[glandium]

The first reports were bogus. I remember the first articles I read back then were saying a Cessna had hit one tower, and it sounded like a weird accident. Later, articles about the second plane came in and it was still not clear that they were big airliners. Then things got busy because I was working in web hosting and we had one or two major French newspapers web sites in our datacenter, and they couldn't handle the load.