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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.

A banker from Charlotte, North Carolina, Paventi was in New York City on business at the time. His company had a new office in the World Trade Center that it was yet to move into, with TV mounts screwed into the walls but no TVs installed.

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

“There was another gentleman… who was there with me that day — he and I had gone to get coffee that morning and went upstairs — and I remember him saying to me, ‘How come planes don’t hit this building?’” Paventi recalled.

He didn’t say much about it at the time, other than that there were air safety and control measures in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen.

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

He said it felt like an earthquake, even though he had never experienced one before.

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