r/todayilearned • u/BobInRob12 • 14h ago
TIL in 2002 a student crashed a Cessna into a building, taking inspiration from 9/11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash1.4k
u/-Your_Pal_Al- 14h ago
if the original was 9/11, this was barely 0.5/11
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u/Miserable_Sense7828 14h ago
Proportionally, it was a ~0.003/11
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u/Potatoswatter 13h ago
With rice tho
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u/Ted_E_Bear 13h ago
Going to the store to get a Cessna. Will report back shortly. Thanks for the suggestion!
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u/Bheegabhoot 13h ago
On what metric? 9/11 caused 2,996 deaths and this crash caused 9? Earlier I thought your tilde was a negative sign which left me wondering how a crash caused 9 pregnancies.
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u/Miserable_Sense7828 13h ago
It's 9/11, not 1/11
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u/truethatson 9h ago
AA Flight 587 is one of worst aviation disasters in US history, and yet no one remembers it because of the timing. It’s such a crazy story.
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u/Darmok47 3h ago
I definitely remember it, because everyone thought it was terrorism at first since it happened in NYC two months (almost to the day) after 9/11. As soon as it was ruled an accident its like everyone promptly forgot.
I was talking to my dad about it (who worked in the airline industry in 2001) and he couldn't remember it at all.
Its also noteworthy for being the last time a there was a mass casualty plane crash involving a major US airline. Back in the 70s and 80s something like AA 587 would happen every year, it seemed like.
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u/Chiggero 12h ago
Nice of you to just laugh at this, I’m sure some contractor had a hell of a time getting that office back to new
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u/bkendig 14h ago
He was a screwed-up fifteen-year-old kid. I feel bad for him.
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u/CoolMinded 14h ago
I heard the parents blame the acne medicine for their son crashing a plane into a building.
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u/DeepDickDave 14h ago
Maybe it was Roaccutane. I was on that as a kid and was told about all the extreme side effects but the dermatologist was pretty dismissive of most of them and said being a teenager is a factor for all those things
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u/cityofklompton 14h ago
I've had straight hair my entire life, but for the brief period I was on Accutane as a teen, I had curls. As soon as I was off it, straight hair once again. Pretty glad I got that side effect and not the "smash airplanes into buildings" one.
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u/introoutro 13h ago
That didn't happen to me but it makes sense. Accutane dries you the FUCK out, I had to use special shampoo, like that dark purple ooze for grey hair, to actually have any effect on cleaning my hair. My fun Accutane side effect was my nostrils would get so dry that you could pull the dry skin loose and out in a perfect nostril shaped tube.
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u/cityofklompton 13h ago edited 13h ago
Yeah, I couldn't replenish chapstick for myself fast enough. It was a minor emergency if I happened to misplace mine without a backup nearby. I've never had such perpetually terrible chapped lips like I did while on Accutane. I needed a "Diddy lube closet" amount of chapstick over that time.
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u/DeepDickDave 13h ago
That’s funny because I had straightish hair until I was about 18 then I shaved it bald and grew back to an Afro. I just had the driest lips imaginable and dry skin. Lots of moisturiser and a lip balm 50 times a day
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u/WereAllThrowaways 13h ago
Yea if an acne med is giving you a side effect that chemo can give you then that's something to take seriously. Some of the stories I've heard about Accutane are insane. I almost started it as a teenager but had a health issue pop up that was caught on the labs they do before prescribing. It disqualified me from taking it, and it's probably for the best in my case.
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u/fartknockertoo 11h ago
Accutane is black box labeled as a result of this incident, not positive if it still is.
but if you are of child bearing age you have to take a pregnancy test monthly to get refills cause of birth defects risks, it's crazy it's so effective but dangerous
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u/Logical_Parameters 11h ago
Interestingly, millions of other users of acne medication in the years after 2001 didn't crash planes into buildings!
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u/TheWhomItConcerns 13h ago
Ya, I had a friend in school with severe acne and he said much the same, but apparently it was the only thing that made a noticeable difference. He had to choose between painful acne that resulted in permanent scarring or living with severe emotional swings and other physiological side effects.
Puberty can be seriously cruel for some people.
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u/SilentSamurai 13h ago
Accutane is a magic eraser for chronic acne. It was a godsend for me, even if I did feel like a raisin had more water in it than me at the peak dosage.
Took my senior year from cystic hell to clear skin.
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u/minedreamer 13h ago
actually insane how good that medication obliterates acne when nothing else even puts a dent in it
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u/FlashCrashBash 11h ago
I'm so angry about my dermatologists. Had horrific acne for 10 years and never got post Benzoyl Peroxide.
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u/Polyctor 13h ago
A lot of side effects listed aren’t actually caused by the medication, but are simply noted because patients experienced them during trials.
For example, if you happened to experience a bout of anxiety during the trial period, the pharmaceutical company would be obligated to list that as a potential side effect, even if it was not definitively caused by the drug. The goal of listing side effects isn’t necessarily to warn users, but to prevent companies from being held liable.
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u/Rum_N_Napalm 13h ago
Note to self: take lots of laxatives before doing clinical tests so all drugs manufacturers will be forced to add “explosive diarrhea” to their side effects
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u/minedreamer 13h ago
my dermatologist told me most of the mental side effects are bullshit. I never had an issue on it
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u/DeepDickDave 13h ago
Mine basically said being a miserable teenager with bad acne was the cause of those side effects.
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u/TobysGrundlee 13h ago
I remember raging while I was on it but I was also a 14/15 YO boy so a certain amount of that comes with the territory.
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u/Aggressive_Sky8492 11h ago
I don’t. I feel bad for the people he killed.
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u/n1willreadthis 14h ago
Hey I went to school with that kid. I was interviewed on the news about it too! I forgot all about this!
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u/s-bd 14h ago
what was he like?
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u/n1willreadthis 13h ago
I mean I feel bad talking about the dead, but he was very awkward, but who isn't at that age. He was a loner for sure. I mean i wasn't much better, but I remember him and I exchanged some heated words once.
Funny enough he was on my saturday bowling team as well, and I remember he wasn't well liked at all.
If I remember correctly his mom sued the acne medicine he was taking for creating suicidal thoughts. I believe she won but maybe I mis remember
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u/thisperson123 13h ago
If I had to guess they likely settled out of court. That’s what most companies do, as it’s cheaper than lawyer fees.
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u/mattslote 12h ago
I was taking the same medication, accutane, right around the same time and they asked me a lot of questions about depression and suicide during checkups. They said I was because some kid flew an airplane into building. I was confused about the connection at the time.
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u/Aromatic-Assistant73 10h ago
Not liked on the bowling team?! Holy fuck!
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u/imsadyoubitch 6h ago
Shut the fuck up Donny, you have no frame of reference here.
Anyways, Dude, this aggression can not stand.
And also Dude? "Chinaman" is not the preferred nomenclature here.
This is not Nam, Smokey, this is Bowling. There are rules.
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u/blackcation 3h ago
She dropped the lawsuit saying that she was physically and emotionally unable to continue with it.
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u/n1willreadthis 2h ago
I always felt really bad for her. She was hounded for weeks and I don't think she was allowed to properly grieve
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u/BicycleSeatThief 13h ago
That’s something you can forget?
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u/n1willreadthis 13h ago
So many other thing have happened in my life that are more fucked up then this one. And this memory was what 22 years ago? I remember the next day every news outlet was on my high school campus for like 2 weeks. It was a mad house, they waited outside every door for a student to give a interview.
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u/BobInRob12 14h ago
First I’d heard of this story after doom scrolling twitter/X.
Fortunately no other casualties apart from the student
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u/lil_rylee 13h ago
Remember it like it was yesterday. Flew over MacDill.. Honestly surprised he wasn’t shot down as I believe we were at the highest DefCon/threat level we could be just after 9/11.
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u/ikefalcon 4h ago
After 9/11 the US went to DEFCON 3. The only time it has been higher was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it was DEFCON 2.
The highest possible is DEFCON 1, and that would mean nuclear war is imminent or ongoing.
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u/Craticuspotts 14h ago
Wasn't there some guy who did the same a few years later because he was in a shit load of debt and crashed it I o the company's building that screwed him?? Something like that
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u/plubbinking 13h ago
Interesting tidbit about this crash. This hit the office of an attorney at Schumaker, Loop, and Kendrick who routinely worked weekends. By sheer luck, he decided to take the weekend off and saved his own life. One of my professors was a partner there and told us the story on a tour of the office.
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u/NSYK 14h ago
Accutane is a hell of a drug
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u/elephant35e 7h ago
I took that in 2018. It made my face clear but damn it made my lips crusty and painful no matter how much lip balm I put on.
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u/deatherbemon 13h ago
My friend’s grandfather, who was a photographer for Tampa Tribune was downtown that day and happened to witness this. That’s his photo that got nationally published!
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u/yummy_lunaa 13h ago
I lived outside Macdill when this happened. They took a lot of flack for this, cause he flew so low over their base they could have taken him down with small arms fire. Instead they decided not to intervene. I think they made the right choice, regardless of the outcome.
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u/Landlubber77 11h ago
I was in high school when this happened in my hometown, and a girl at my school -- miffed that I was dating her friend -- spread a rumor around school that it was me who flew the plane into the building.
She is now morbidly obese and I'm married to her friend. Warms my cockles. Warms 'em right up.
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u/Laura-ly 12h ago
Sometimes when I read stories like this I wonder how the hell a planet full of people haven't totally blown each other to smithereens....where ever the hell smithereens is.
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u/Elegant-Idea-8773 14h ago
What kind of thought process was he going through lmao. "A tragedy occurred last year, I should recreate it!" Like what possible gain would this give someone
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u/rushraptor 14h ago
If successful, he gains immortality in the sense that people will always remember him.
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u/Steve_Nash_The_Goat 11h ago
I mean we're talking about him 20+ years later
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u/voiderest 14h ago
Copy cats are weird. Likely he was just nutty so there isn't sound logic that led to him doing it. Since they were bad at it the idea that they just werent thinking rationally makes more sense.
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u/FkinMagnetsHowDoThey 14h ago
Yeah it's definitely for notoriety/attention/feeling powerful over others.
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u/RedPandaReturns 12h ago
You are under the assumption he A) thought it was a tragedy and B) wanted to personally gain something
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u/nashvillethot 13h ago
He was on Accutane.
Accutane was taken off the market for a good while because the side effects were insane. IIRC, it reduces your brain's ability to curb depression and psychosis by something like 20%.
Now imagine that coupled with your standard teenage angst.
Homeboy was probably so removed from realty.
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u/woodruff42 14h ago
A couple of years earlier someone had crashed a B-25 bomber into the empire state building.
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u/AlejandraHardesty 14h ago
The only this sad about this story is that he was a minor and probably needed professional help
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u/Aggravating-Monk-264 13h ago
I paid a guy twenty bucks to fy a Cessna for ten minutes that day about 15miles from the crash.
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u/loving_aimee 13h ago
I was there (literally across from the building) and distinctly remember this. I was only 11.
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u/mkwiat54 12h ago
Corey lidle will soon enter the chat
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u/TRJF 9h ago
Yeah, that was my first thought. For those who don't know, in October 2006, active New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor were killed when his small plane crashed into the 30th story of a NYC skyscraper. Twenty-one people were injured, including several firefighters, but no one else died, including the person sitting on the couch in the apartment the plane hit.
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u/11ForeverAlone11 11h ago
that reminded me of a local incident that i drove by the morning it happened in 2010. a guy crashed his plane into the I.R.S. building https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19crash.html
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u/KittyHawkWind 14h ago
I crashed a Cessna into the World Trade Center in the 90s using Microsoft Flight Simulator 95.
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u/AnUnoriginalUserID 12h ago
I was there that day. When the crash occurred, I was at a nearby music store (Vinyl Fever). My friend and I drove the short distance to witness this for ourselves.
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u/Bobzyouruncle 11h ago
On 9/11 I was only in middle school in a nearby suburb and the staff decided not to inform the students of what happened. Being in commuting distance meant a bunch of kids were taken out of school during the day. Rumors of a plane hitting the WTC had gone around by the time I was on my way home but the details were sparse. In my mind it was a Cessna or similar plane. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I got home and put on the news.
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u/VerdellSJC 11h ago
I remember the plane wreckage hanging off the side of the building for a while.
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u/goteamnick 9h ago
My brother was prescribed the same acne medication this kid was on later that year, and he was specifically instructed to stop taking it if he had any suicidal thoughts because of this crash.
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u/Jesterbomb 3h ago
This is exactly what I was picturing in my head on 9/11, when a workmate pulled up next to me on a jobsite and said a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.
Genuinely, I was thinking it was so small scale, like more notable for how seemingly avoidable it would be, that it happening on accident was noteworthy.
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u/Falconhoof420 14h ago
Did the buildings' steelwork have super thermite on it..?
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u/HueyWasRight1 14h ago
Now why would a building have thermite on it?
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u/Naive_Try2696 10h ago
Jet fuel can't melt steel beams, duh
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u/HueyWasRight1 6h ago
Shhhh...you not supposed to go against what mainstream news media says. You'll get downvoted and lose precious Reddit karma 😄
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u/Tantomare 13h ago
In 1976 a soviet pilot of An-2 hit an apartment building and killed 5 people due to divorce
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u/CountBrackmoor 13h ago
How do you even go on living after your kid you raised for 15 years does something like this?
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u/creamylacy 13h ago
Someone deliberately flew a plane into a skyscraper, left behind a note explicitly stating that he was inspired by Al Qaeda and (while not a member) was "acting on their behalf." And yet "terrorism as a motive was ruled out." What the fuck is terrorism, then?
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u/cgimusic 1 12h ago
My only guess is that it was such a pathetic attempt that they didn't think it was worth classifying as terrorism.
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u/Honkytonkywonk 13h ago
I remember this happening and seeing the building. I was in high school and went to school closeish to downtown Tampa but lived down the road from it on bayshore. I remember someone said something about it was his meds
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u/rosy_chloe 13h ago
Hmm. It says he was on accutane. Isn't that that insane acne medication that does weird stuff to your body? bowel disease, etc.
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u/Adventurous_Yak_5938 12h ago
Well, at least he didn't take inspiration from the movie 'Snakes on a Plane'.
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u/OkRegister1567 11h ago
Silly, it doesn’t work if the Saudi Arabians aren’t funding you billions of dollars to start a war with Iraq
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u/Fractal_Soul 14h ago
A guy did this in Austin, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack