I happened upon a web page done by a Cessna pilot who was flying near the World Trade Centre when 9/11 happened. He even saw the 2nd plane hit. He took photos and put them up on a site. The photos are good.

However I noticed that his photos are very dark. I often run into these sorts of problems when I put photos on AfricanCrisis. So I’m an old hand at editing photos, especially changing their lighting to bring out details.

I don’t change anything, I merely use the normal editing features whereby you can lighten up things which are dark. I even use it on my own home photos. My little digital camera at home is not very good and I have taken photos which come out almost black but with the correct editing you can lighten them up and you can then see details which were there in the black area but which you would not normally see.

So I thought I would take 4 of the darkest photos taken by this pilot and just apply some decent lighting to them and you’ll see the difference. You’ll see sometimes that some of the background is incredibly bright and that’s because of the lightening process. I’m not a proper graphics artist – but I just want to show that you can see better detail on the parts of the photo that are important to us – in this case, the buildings themselves, the fires and the explosions.

Here are the 4 edited photos:-

This photo of the Pilots’ was entitled “Burning up close”. The original link is: http://www.maxho.com/wtc/pages/WTC-BurningUpC…I merely made the building lighter.

This one was entitled, “The Second Impact” – when the second plane hit. In his original photo at: http://www.maxho.com/wtc/pages/SecondImpact.h…you can see the debris more clearly. When I edited it to make it lighter, you don’t see the debris as easily, but what it does show more clearly is the impact itself and the fireball. In fact if you look closely, you’ll see a detail you don’t see on the original dark photo. Look carefully at the other side of the building, between the 2 buildings on the same floor as the impact and you will see a very faint but discernable red flame as the fuel and fires have exploded right through the building.

The original photo was entitled, “Smoke up close”. It is here: http://www.maxho.com/wtc/pages/WTC-SmokeClose…This photo was extremely dark and in the original you can discern the burning. When I made the photo lighter, you can see a dark detail which is lost on the original photo. You see a dark black circle covering several floors below the fire. I’m not sure what it is. I was wondering if that was where the plane struck. But why isn’t the fire there then? Has it burned upwards? Is that black circle cloud? It seems different… anyway… there it is…

The original photo was entitled: “Towers Burning close”. The original URL is: http://www.maxho.com/wtc/pages/WTC-TowersBurn…This photo is very dark and it was hard making it lighter. This was the best I could do. You see some strange squarish details in the original photo which are even more evident in the lightened ones. I wonder if these are reflections of the inside of the Cessna from its window?

These days with everyone wondering about terrorists being tortured by the CIA – people should be reminded of 9/11 and they should be shown photos and film footage of it. Time magazine produced heart-rending photos of it. A photo which I will never forget and which breaks my heart whenever I see it, are of a man and woman holding hands as they fall out of the building. There are many such photos where you see civilians falling to their deaths. So people should not worry too much about the torture of the terrorists. They should torture them more.

People who are worried about the terrorists’ feelings should download the video of that American engineer, Mr Armstrong who had his head cut off by the terrorists. Watch him die and then think again. I’ve done it and it still makes my blood run cold when I think about it.

I see a BBC journalist was abducted and “executed” recently and they said that his execution will be put on the Internet. He was a friend of the “Palestinian people” and for his troubles he was murdered. People should not feel to sorry for these terrorist scum. Terrorists should be killed – and frankly I don’t care how its done. Jan.

Below is the account of the Cessna pilot:-

MY STORY
That morning I took off from my field in Northern NJ to just bum around as usual in a rented Cessna 172SP and was planning to do the VOR approach at FWN and an ILS at MSV to keep my instrument skills in check, when I climbed out to about 2500 and leveled out to stay under Class B airspace floor, I was right about over Lincoln Park airport (N07) when I glanced back at the city and saw the smoke coming out of WTC (it was a VFR and a million morning, so you could really see far out), “damn! wtf?” I thought as I hit the throttle and went direct to Alpine Tower where I joined the Hudson VFR corridor, and tuned in to the self-announcement UNICOM freq 123.05. There was all kinds of talk about a “commuter plane gone into WTC”, so I also tuned in to 1010 WINS AM newsradio on the ADF receiver and listened in, they hadn’t had a clue either, all they were saying that a plane went into the building. Meanwhile I was just heading down the corridor at all the speed that a fully-shoved C-172 throttle can afford and announcing myself as usual “Spamcan 123, one thousand feet, GWB, southbound”, and by the time I made it to about Holland Tunnel I saw a bunch of helicopters around the WTC, smoke billowing out of the #1 tower and the atmosphere of some real big sh*t hitting the fan.

As I’m flying closer, almost opposite the WTC, right next to the Harborside Center in Jersey City, I see this airliner coming down in a steep bank, my first thought was, WTF is this guy doing!??? Why is he diving so steep to take a look at the fire! And it’s an airliner! (looked like a 737 to me at the time). I muttered something along the lines “Jeez, this guy is gonna get so fired by his airline, it’s not even funny!” The next moment…. it hits the building…. I felt like I was inside a cartoon or a movie, maybe that “Independence Day” flick, at the moment I thought I was seeing things, like this can’t be, this isn’t real… But I had my camera in hand and snapped virtually a split second later after the impact, I was simply too awestruck when I saw the plane, so it didn’t click in me to actually shoot the thing (but if I had a Stinger SAM with me, damn, I wish I did and I would)

Next… I didn’t know what to do, but I headed out towards Sandy Hook, called the approach and begged them for flight following, just GET ME OUTTA HERE… they kept me on following until about Colts Neck VOR where they said “unable” and told me I was on my own…. I tried to go back to my field, tuned in the tower… they couldn’t hear me, but I could hear that TEB was closed and they were about to get closed and told every aircraft to land.. gave up on the thought of going back to my field and landed at a first field in sight, , where a bunch of other awestruck pilots where trying to get a grasp on what’s going on…. After couple of hours it calmed down and airport manager shutdown the place and gave me a lift back to my airport, where I picked up my car… the FBO was closed…

This is so f****ed up, I never felt so helpless, at some point I even feared that people are gonna start shooting at any aircraft flying above them… That’s when it dawned on me to just land and deal with the rest of crap later, which I did, I’m here, I’m still sober.
—
HECTOP 9/11/01
PP-ASEL-IA
http://www.maxho.com
maxho_at_maxho.com

URL: http://www.maxho.com/wtc//p>