An Army buddy of mine was killed in the Pentagon.

I was thinking of flying on 9/11 but booked a ticket for 9/10. If I flew as originally planned, I would have been stuck in Houston.

When the first tower was hit, the reports was that it was a business jet. I turned on the radio and there was mention that the second tower was hit. The DJ thought it was some bad ATC problem. I immediate suspected Osama.

I had been booked BWI-MCO on 9/12, for my yearly Orlando vacation, with a friend. Of course, when all traffic was grounded on the morning of 9/11, I realized that even if planes flew the next day, there would be thousands upon thousands of stranded travelers trying to get home, so I called the airline (I think it was a US Air /Metrojet flight) and they refunded my tickets with no penalty, no hassle, no questions asked.

My buddy and I wound up driving to Orlando over night. We left Baltimore at 6:10pm. Though I would usually have taken I-95 south, going around DC via the Capital Beltway, we had heard rumors that the Capital Beltway was closed, so we took the more time-consuming US 301 and joined up with I-95 just north of Richmond. We switched off driving every 3 hours, dozing whenever we were off-shift, listening to news reports on the radio the whole time, and pulled into the parking lot of our hotel in Orlando at 8:30am on 9/12.

I-95 is typically pretty deserted in the wee hours of the morning, especially that tie of year (September is when kids go back to school in the US, so there is very little leisure travel), and on a weeknight. But I've never seen the road so empty, before or since. There were times when we'd go 15-20 minutes without seeing another vehicle on either side of the highway. At every fuel stop we made, a deathly silence reigned that was somehow different and far more foreboding than the normal middle-of-the-night quiet. And when we arrived at our hotel, the mood was more subdued and somber than anything I've seen outside of a funeral.

I'm glad I got to travel a little that week. The experience of seeing reactions from people in other parts of the country, and meeting people from other parts of the country and other countries (Orlando always has a lot of foreign visitors) was, I think better than simply sequestering myself in my home and watching the news footage over and over for a week.

Was flying on United BRU-IAD-SFO that day. Over the Atlantic the Captain came on and said there was a problem with the inflight entertainment system and they'd have to reboot it. When it came back up there were no flight maps.

About 2 hours later the Captain came back on and said we had turned back to BRU due to a security issue in the US and we'd be updated upon our arrival in BRU. After the maps had been shut down we'd done a wide sweeping turn over the Atlantic and headed east again to the continent. Interestingly to me, the cabin crew never gave any indication of something being wrong during the 2+ hours before the Captain alerted us to our new destination.

Upon landing we were told what had happened but I really didn't comprehend exactly the extent until a Belgian friend picked me up, took me to his house and I saw it on TV.

Ended up buying a ticket on BA five days later when UA was unable to say when they'd be able to get me home.

The daughter of one of my employees was a FA for American who regularly flew the Boston to LAX route. She was Boston-based, and had flown in the night before with the crew that was actually on that ill-fated flight the next day....but she had the day off.

Her mother (my employee) panicked when word of the flight became known, because she feared her daughter was working the flight. She called and called her daughter's cellphone, no answer. Turned out she had the day off, was sleeping and had turned off the phone.

Maybe the scariest part of the story: her daughter said she was talking with one of the FAs who'd worked with her the night before, as they got off that flight, and the FA said she always looked forward to that Boston-to-LAX run, because she said, and this is a quote, "the flight is usually 2/3rds empty and everyone's asleep, so there aren't any troublemakers." Now, by troublemakers she meant your run-of-the-mill pain in the butt....but little did she know how very wrong she would be. When my employee related this story to me, it sent chills down my spine.

Sounds like my mother who misplaced my itinerary & thought I was on the UA flight, which I did take frequently (& would take exactly 6 weeks later). She called my office in a panic & though my sec'y was able to send text messages over my beeper, I couldn't get thru to anyone on the phone for hours.

Nor me -- I remember only one of our traveling party in DC had a Blackberry, the rest of us had dumb cheap Nokia cell phones, and we were able to text our home office in Seattle through the Blackberry, let them know we were OK, and ask them to ring our families. Voice calls were not possible for some hours.

I flew out of LAX at about 2 AM on 9/15 on one of (I believe) the first flights that got to actually go after 9/11. My original flight was scheduled for 9/12 so it was just a game of calling back until I could get rescheduled on a flight that would not get cancelled. I got booked on an 11 PM on the 14th and I was told to get there a few hours early. I was living in Marina Del Rey at the time so took a cab the short distance to the airport. The cab was cleared through the heavy security stationed outside the airport (IIRC no private vehicles were being let in at that time) and I was dropped off to a nearly empty curb. The ticket counter area was like a ghost town -- I expected to see a tumbleweed rolling through at any moment. Security was a breeze (no line AND no new security measures in place yet) and the walk to the gate was eerily quiet. No shops or restaurants open, as I recall, and just a smattering of people at a couple of gates hoping their flight would actually take off.

Mine ended up getting cancelled last minute but I was one of the lucky ones who got re-booked on a 2 AM to a different destination. I spent the majority of the next day (my birthday) at some airport in the midwest (can't even remember where at this point) before luckily grabbing a seat to my destination.

There were some people who seemed on high alert and nervous to be flying but most were just relieved to be able to travel. I remember feeling calm about the whole thing because I figured the worst was behind us.

I remember thinking that morning how beautiful it was and what a great day it would be to fly. At my house the wind was calm and not a cloud in sight. When the news came about what was happening in NY, I thought "irony is tragic". Now when we have a cloudless day like that September morning I think off all who were lost, and for the people whose lives were changed forever. A friend of mine was in BOS for a meeting and was supposed to fly back to LA that morning. He was booked on AA11 but he ended up canceling his flight to spend more time with a friend. If I remember correctly he took a train home to YVR.

Remembering that day in my head clearly.. all my employees and other employees were sent home as a result of the newsshock on CNN.

Didn't occur to me that it was terrorism, until later in the morning. Say the least surreal.

Flew BOS - EWR that morning -- early flight, so was at the office by the time I got first instant messages about plane hitting World Center.

I was supposed to fly from LGA to ORD later that day but obviously did not. I was stuck in NY for 8 days (I had a place there) and saw a lot of "war scenes" that I never imagined I would see on U.S. soil.