A training exercise held by United Airlines the day before 9/11 was so realistic that airline personnel initially thought news of the terrorist attacks on September 11 was “another drill”

Submission statement: Gene Kim, a flight dispatcher for United Airlines, recalls that when airline personnel were first notified about the crisis on the morning of September 11, 2001, they “thought this was coming from corporate security just as another drill.” They therefore took no action in response to the notification. “We all cleared our pagers and literally went back to work,” Kim says. The confusion came about because, the previous afternoon, the airline had sprung a surprise exercise on them that realistically simulated a United Airlines plane crashing.