NEW YORK — Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, a retired New York City police detective and helicopter pilot is sharing a collection of rare aerial photographs he took as the World Trade Center towers burned and collapsed.
Greg Semendinger, who retired from the NYPD Aviation Unit in 2002, was dispatched to the World Trade Center shortly after the first plane struck the north tower. He and his co-pilot flew over the area as authorities searched for people who might have reached the rooftops.
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Semendinger had brought a camera with him and began photographing the scene. Over roughly 90 minutes, he captured images of the burning towers, their collapses and the enormous clouds of smoke and debris that engulfed Lower Manhattan.
Many of the approximately 150 photographs in his personal archive have never been publicly displayed. Some had previously appeared in books, news reports and at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, with his permission. He has now shared more of the collection with the USA TODAY Network for coverage marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
Semendinger recalled that morning in an interview, describing the moment he first saw the smoke rising from the towers while preparing police helicopters at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
“I look at the towers and I see the amount of smoke coming from it,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘that does not look like a small plane.’”
The aircraft was American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 carrying 92 people that had been hijacked and flown into the north tower. Semendinger and his partner, Jim Ciccone, reached the World Trade Center about eight minutes after the impact.
After the second plane struck the south tower at 9:03 a.m., Semendinger realized the attacks were deliberate.
“Well, now we know it’s terrorist attack,” he recalled saying. “And now we know that there are other planes that are a possibility of being in the area.”
Later that morning, Semendinger photographed the south tower collapsing from a distance. As he flew near the burning north tower, he noticed signs that it, too, was becoming unstable and warned over the police radio that people in the area should be evacuated.
The north tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m., leaving Semendinger with what became his final aerial images of the building before it disappeared into a massive cloud of smoke and debris.
Similar aerial photographs taken by Semendinger were publicly released in 2010, providing rare views of the towers collapsing from police helicopters.
The newly shared photographs offer another firsthand visual record of the attacks and the devastation left behind in Lower Manhattan.
Yet the Americans now look favorably on the Islamic terrorists who certainly terrorized Israel on Oct 7….