New Video of the First Crash Surfaces

September 6, 2003 6:19 PM

A Rare View of 9/11, Overlooked From the NY Times: "They did not even see the pale fleck of the airplane streak across the corner of the video camera's field of view at 8:46 a.m. But the camera, pointed at the twin towers from the passenger seat of an S.U.V. in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, kept rolling when the plane disappeared for an instant and then a silent, billowing cloud of smoke and dust slowly emerged from the north tower, as if it had sprung a mysterious kind of leak." I can't even look at the pictures, just too painful for me, but this will probably be a major development in the next week.
posted by billsaysthis (8 comments total)

While it sounds like the video is probably too shaky and distant to replace the existing iconic video clips in our heads, I hope this will be useful to authorities.

I'm also somewhat astonished at the treatment of the tape prior to now:

At one point, a friend of Mr. Hlava's wife traded a copy of the tape to another Czech immigrant for a bar tab at a pub... Mr. Hlava and his brother... tried at various times to sell the tape... But with little sophistication about the news media and no understanding of the tape's significance, the brothers had no success.

In the months after the attack, the tape bounced around in Mr. Hlava's apartment... Once, he found it in his daughter's closet... another time, in a drawer in his living room table.

On one occasion he noticed that his son was playing with the video camera and erasing the tape. Mr. Hlava snatched the camera away before either of the plane impacts had been wiped away.
posted by Tubes at 7:14 PM on September 6, 2003

Considering the numbers of video cameras I used to see around the Towers back in the *80s*, I have always been somewhat astonished that there was, by chance, no other record of the first impact -- not even a still photograph.

Major development is probably overstating it, though, and the NYT is whistling past a graveyard, and I don't mean that flippantly, by touting its importance to the engineering investigation. Fortunately, it seems he wasn't paid for it, at least in part due to his boss's stubborn principles. This is more a matter of an historical artifact that needed to be added to the public archive.
posted by dhartung at 9:07 PM on September 6, 2003

NY-based new media artist Wolfgang Staehle had an exhibit going on at the time, which included a set of webcams capturing a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline, updated live every few seconds and streamed to a Mac in the exhibit hall.

I'm told by my modern media professor that the cams were running at the time of the attack, that Staehle captured still images of the seconds immediately before and after the first impact (though the public monitor in the exhibit hall was off), and that he is against selling the images or showing them publicly. Not too sure on the details, though.
posted by brownpau at 9:51 PM on September 6, 2003

This is interesting, but where is the video?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:30 PM on September 6, 2003

Considering the numbers of video cameras I used to see around the Towers back in the *80s*, I have always been somewhat astonished that there was, by chance, no other record of the first impact -- not even a still photograph.

I've always wondered about that too, but then it occurred to me that it wasn't even 9 a.m., and that's pretty early for the tourists to be out in full force. Hotel concierges have been suggesting strongly that people wait until after the main morning rush before they venture out with their cameras to pan and scan past the landmarks, on 9/11 that seems to have worked against the interests of history and science.
posted by Dreama at 11:06 PM on September 6, 2003

I love bosses who threaten to fire their employees over things that are none of their business. (How dare you try to make a few bucks more than the pittance I'm paying you? It's against my high principles!)

Anybody know more about the Staehle thing?
posted by languagehat at 8:36 AM on September 7, 2003

kirkaracha: video was supposedly shown on ABC's This Week this morning.
posted by billsaysthis at 11:18 AM on September 7, 2003

I love bosses who threaten to fire their employees over things that are none of their business.

Well said. And I see nothing wrong with his selling the video anyway, if he wanted to.
posted by biscotti at 11:47 AM on September 7, 2003