I was on a plane when it happened, a flight from London to Dallas. This was a British Airways flight, with TV sets in the seats. As I was flipping through the channels, I looked at the auto-updating flight path on the screen. It seemed we had done a 180 turn not long after passing Halifax. I thought it was just something wrong with the system, but after about 10 mins the captain came on the speaker and said US airspace was closed, so we had to land at Gander airport, in Newfoundland.
Once we landed there, as the 3rd plane of a total of 39, we were informed there had been a terrorist attack in the US. Then the captain turned on the BBC World News radio through the speaker, and we learned that the two planes had crashed into the WTC.
Sat on the plane for another 7 hours, while other planes from all over Europe landed. This is a small airport, and is was PACKED after all those planes landed.
So, after 7 hours, we disembark. We were lucky though, some of the other planes did not get to disembark for close to 30 hours.
Now thats a long time to sit still in an airplane...
Then we were driven to a church, where I along with everyone else on the plane, slept on the church benches. For 3 days.
People were very nice there, I am extremely thankful for all the help we got when we were there. This is a small town, quite far away from other civilization, and all of a sudden close to 10,000 people need to eat and sleep somewhere. They did an extremely good job at accomodating us there, I had plenty of food, and got to take a shower after 2 days.
Then, after 3 days sitting in this church, we were taken back to the airport, and then flown back to London, UK.
I was thoroughly searched 3 times before I was back in Copenhagen. And we were not allowed to even stand up in the airplane on the way back to London. Actually there were 3 arabs on board, one of them flew first class, and one was his servant I think. They kept to themselves.
Here is a pic of the airport:
