Cantor Fitzgerald, an American financial services firm whose offices occupied floors 101-105 of 1 World Trade Center (which were totally destroyed), announces that 658 of the company’s 960 employees (68.5% of the total workforce) are missing, which is a considerably-larger rate of casualty than any other company that occupied the World Trade Center.
CEO Howard Lutnick visibly cries as he talks with reporters about the dead and missing.
Lutnick was late to work on the morning of rhe 11th, but he stood outside the North Tower looking for people from his company - but slowly, it dawned on him that nobody was coming. Nobody at all came from above the impact site.
A U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot shares his view today of the column of smoke from Ground Zero.
The skies are quiet and devoid of civil aviation. The weather is exceptional. But yesterday’s events loom over everything.
(Credit to @LaserJet2000 for showing me this)
‘We have some planes…’
At 8:24 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a hijacker, attempting to speak to passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, accidentally keys his radio to air traffic control instead, unwittingly alerting controllers to the hijacking.
Boston Center alerted the military and F-15s were mobilized from Otis Air National Guard Base to intercept Flight 11
Some FDNY firemen who have been working at the World Trade Center site since this morning are rotated back to their firehouses to recuperate.
What remains of the 1st Battalion, the first crew on the scene, staggers in, covered in dust, crying, and physically shaking.
Several men vomit a thick chalky substance - a pulverized building, and everything and everyone in it.
A few try to return immediately to the site, but they’re held back. Others are laying on the ground, staring into space, unable to comprehend the horrors they have just seen.
Jules and Gideon Naudet, two French filmmakers who captured incredible footage of the attacks this morning, tearfully reunite - each of them thought the other was dead.
Here's a video I think very few people have seen. It reveals something fascinating.
The strip in the middle is frozen just before impact. Everything above and below it is live. Watch the South Tower's edge slide back and forth against it. That's roughly 22 inches of sway at the roof, per NIST, and it stayed up.
That's a credit to the people who designed it. They planned for a Boeing 707. What hit it was a bigger, heavier 767 doing roughly 545 mph. NIST measured the sway from impact video and found the building's rhythm barely changed, meaning the hit didn't appreciably affect its overall stiffness.
So it wasn't the impact that brought the towers down. And it certainly wasn't nonexistent explosives. It was the fire. The crash stripped fireproofing off the steel, the fires weakened it, sagging floors pulled the outer columns inward until they buckled, and then thousands of tons of building came down on floors that were never built to stop it.
The South Tower fell 56 minutes after this clip.
September 11th, 2001 - Boeing E-4B NAOC callsign ADDIS77 scrambled from Andrews AFB. While ATC was calling them “VENUS” which is a typical callsign used at Andrews, you can hear the urgency of the pilot wanting to get airborne. The E-4 orbited over Washington DC for a while…
Audience members let out gasps of shock when a cast member of 9 to 5 The Musical announced the death of country music legend Dolly Parton on Tuesday night. Live updates: https://t.co/l7rp0zfL2C
Did Lamar Jackson give John Harbaugh more leeway with Daniel Faalele’s struggles?
@RobLongSports, @JConnSports and @ednorris discuss why Baltimore stuck with Faalele for two years before moving on after one preseason game in New York.
Christopher Lloyd showing up as Doc Brown in A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (2014) is such a ridiculous little treat. Seth MacFarlane walks into a barn in 1885 and finds Doc hiding the DeLorean, complete with the BACK TO THE FUTURE III setup.