Ceremonies to honor victims of September 11, 2001 on the 23rd anniversary of the terrorist attacks

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David Paventi was on the 81st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11.

Paventi, a banker from Charlotte, North Carolina, was in New York at the time on business. His company had a new office in the World Trade Center, where it was still moving in, with TV brackets screwed into the walls, but the TVs had not yet been installed.

The day before, September 10, Paventi remembers looking out the skyscraper window, on a day so humid and foggy that he couldn’t see the streets below.

“There was another gentleman… who was up there with me that day – he and I had gone for coffee that morning and went upstairs – and I remember him saying to me, ‘How do planes not hit that building?’” Paventi recalled.

He didn’t think much of the comment at the time, simply assuming that there were air safety and control methods in place to ensure that didn’t happen.

The next day, Paventi said, was a bright, crisp taste of fall. Just before he and his World Trade Center building team began their morning meeting around a long table in a conference room on the 81st floor, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the 93rd floor of the North Tower, just 12 stories above Paventi’s office, at 8:46 a.m.

He said he felt the same way he imagines an earthquake would feel, even though he had never experienced one himself.

“I remember looking up … and the light was swinging back and forth over the table,” Paventi said. “So my first instinct was to hide under the table, because I didn’t want the light to fall on my head. And as I was doing that, literally everyone in the conference room got up from their seats and ran to the front of the room.”