Man, 18 years already.
First and foremost, a time to remember when nearly 3000 people were killed in a most horrific way. The "lucky" ones were those killed instantly. The others in fire, or if they had the crappy choice, between fire and jumping to their deaths. The scenes of people going out windows sends a chill down my spine to this day.
After all this time, it's getting hard to remember some of the pre 9/11 things we took for granted, like being able to get to the airport 30 minutes before the flight and pretty much waltz through security.
I'll repeat what I say every year when we have one of these threads. What I still remember most vividly, as someone far from the scene, that told me things had changed: I had just finished up Aviation Water Survival training at Lemoore NAS two days before and had taken leave to jump on a plane and head to Hawaii to go diving for a week.
My girlfriend at the time, who lived in DC, called me at zero dark thirty Hawaiian time and told me to turn on the TV. Watching the scenes while on a Hawaiian vacation was weird and made me feel like I shouldn't be there. What I continue to remember though, is the strange and eerie quiet of not a plane in the sky (other than the occasional military aircraft). Hawaii always has the "background noise" of air traffic. To suddenly have the skies quiet was almost a Twilight Zone effect for me. Kind of how they say animals go quiet before an earthquake, it was a "wrong" kind of silence.