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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 City on business at the time. His company had a new office in the World Trade Center that it was still moving into. TV mounts were screwed into the walls, but the TVs had not yet been installed.

Paventi remembers looking out the skyscraper’s window the day before, September 10. It was 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 up there that morning to have coffee – and I remember him saying to me, ‘How come planes don’t hit this building?'” Paventi recalled.

At the time, he did not make much of the comment, but simply said that there were aviation security and control methods in place to ensure that such things did not happen.

The next day was a bright, crisp foretaste of fall, Paventi said. Just before he and his team at the World Trade Center were to begin their morning meeting at a long table in an 81st-floor conference room, American Airlines Flight 11 arrived at 8:46 a.m. on the 93rd floor of the North Tower, just 12 floors above Paventi’s office.

He said it felt like what he imagined an earthquake would feel like, even though he had never experienced one himself.

“I remember looking up … and the light was flickering back and forth across the table,” Paventi said. “So my first instinct was to get under the table because I didn’t want the light to hit my head. And when I did that, literally everyone in the conference room got up from their seats and ran to the front of the room.”