NEW YORK CITY (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th September, 2021) Reports of the 9/11 attacks came as a shock to many across the world, including those who were themselves in the air, like Alexander Shedrinsky, a Long Island University professor and consultant at the New York Museum of Modern Art, who told Sputnik about his experience flying from Helsinki to New York on that tragic day.
News of the attack found Shedrinsky above Greenland, when a stewardess asked if anyone could translate from English to Russian. Shedrinsky volunteered to translate a message from the pilot, who relayed the news to the passengers.
"And having translated all that text, I suddenly realized what exactly I was translating. That was something," Shedrinsky said, adding that a slight hysteria set in across the plane as "people started bawling because as it turned out, many had someone who worked in those towers."
Shedrinsky noted the quick response by the stewardesses, who rolled carts with alcohol through the aisles, offering people a drink to calm them down.
"And I, not a drinker, said that I would like cognac when they rolled the cart to me. When they asked how much, I said � up to the brim. The pilot said that we were turning back, [that] the US airspace was shut down," Shedrinsky added.
The professor was able to get to New York City, where he had a wife and a child, only late in September. Shedrinsky also pointed out how much the tragedy had changed security measures in the city.
"I once left documents in a taxi, and when they were delivered to me to Kennedy Airport, I and a police officer were just running across the airfield to the Boing that was departing to Moscow [so that I can board]," Shedrinsky reminisced about old times, adding that "it will never be like that again" and "this all faded into the past for good just because of 9/11."
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda (terrorist group, banned in Russia) hijackers crashed two commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center, or Twin Towers, in New York, while another aircraft hit the Pentagon building near Washington, DC. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in the state of Pennsylvania without reaching its intended target. About 3,000 people were killed in the attacks and more than 6,000 injured.
