Everybody has their memories of 9/11. I was at a conference in London and watched the events unfold on a laptop tuned to the BBC web site, struggling to keep up with the weight of traffic and the enormity of the situation. The rest of the conference seemed rather flat and pointless after that. The world had turned on its axis.
My four-year-old daughter had started school that day and I worried what future lay in store for her. Were we in the West at war with Terror, with a large proportion of the Islamic world? Would we be living with the daily threat of terrorism for a generation. Would the economy nosedive as terrified consumers stopped spending?
As it was, the world pretty much went on. Although aviation went through a torrid 12 months or so, there was no global economic crisis as there would be almost exactly seven years later after Lehmans collapsed. We went to war, far away, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Terrorism did not go away, but - in the West anyway - successful attacks have been mercifully rare.
Aviation did change, but in a way that we are now so used to that the other day I had to think quite hard to remember exactly what it was like before: before tediously long queues at security where we variously now have to remove shoes, belts and laptops and restrict carry-on liquids to 100ml containers. Before the nervous young guy behaving suspiciously across the aisle could, just, conceivably be preparing to blow himself and the 200 people sitting around you to Kingdom Come.
Back to the days when terrorists were rebels with a cause, who more often than not simply wanted safe passage somewhere and a million dollars. When you could ask whether your kids could visit the pilot in the cockpit. When you could turn up at a big airport an hour before your flight and have a hope in hell of making it.
Flight International's 6 September issue looks at the legacy of 9/11 on aviation - from how passengers and crew behave on-board, to airport security regulations.
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