The Pavel Hlava film is a video taken by Pavel Hlava, a tourist from the Czech Republic, in New York City, New York, on the morning of September 11, 2001. It is the only known video featuring both the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks. As a result, the film features the two deadliest plane crashes of all time, with 2,753 total deaths. It is one of two videos that features Flight 11 hitting the North Tower, the other being taken by Jules Naudet, a French filmmaker who captured the impact while filming a documentary about the fire department. A third man, Wolfgang Staehle, who was livestreaming the New York City skyline that morning from Brooklyn with a webcam capturing one frame every four seconds, also captured three frames of the impact. The film also features close-up footage of both towers as well as the collapse of the South Tower at 9:59am.
Background Pavel Hlava was born in Brno, Czech Republic, on April 24, 1963. He worked as a miner after moving to Ostrava to train as a mining machine fitter in 1978. He went to the United States following his divorce from his wife, wanting to earn enough money to move back home to Brno and buy a flat. He found a job in New York City as a maintenance man, even though he spoke little English.
On September 10, 2001, Hlava, his younger brother Josef, and his boss, Mike Cohen, were supposed to go on a work trip to Pennsylvania in order to reconstruct cottages for a Jewish camp, but Cohen, needing to make some repairs at his factory, decided to postpone the trip until the following day.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Hlava, Josef and Cohen, drove up to Pennsylvania for their job in a Ford Explorer. Hlava recently bought a brand-new Sony Hi-8 video camera and brought it along on the road trip to Pennsylvania to test it out. This is the same type of camera that filmed the infamous video of 9/11 pilot hijackers Ziad Jarrah and Mohamed Atta on January 18, 2000. This is different from the Sony DSR-PD150 camera used by Jules Naudet.
Film Beginning The film starts at 8:42:16am, roughly 4 minutes before American Airlines Flight 11 impacts the North Tower. Pavel Hlava starts filming the streets of New York City, as he wants to make a "video postcard" to send back to his family in Brno. Hlava is sitting in the passenger seat while Cohen drives. Josef Hlava, Pavel's brother, sits in the backseat. The video cuts for a couple seconds, before starting again at 8:43am, where the Twin Towers can be seen for the first time. The video cuts again before continuing at 8:44:58am. As they drive under the Gowanus Expressway toward the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, a much clearer shot of the towers can be seen. "Now they are clearly visible," Hlava remarks in Czech. "Do you see that? The two tallest buildings in New York: 411 meters." Hlava then pans over to the tollbooth and the towers come out of view. That shot is the final continuous video ever taken of the World Trade Center without a plane in view. After Cohen passes through the tollbooth, Hlava zooms in on a Collateral Damage billboard twice, before zooming out.
Impacts After Hlava zooms out from a Collateral Damage billboard, the Towers come into frame in the top right corner. As he pans over to them, American Airlines Flight 11 can be seen crashing into the North Tower at 8:46:40am.The 9/11 Commission Report It was the longest shot taken of Flight 11 that morning, lasting a bit over a second. By chance, Hlava zooms all the way in on the towers at the moment of impact. In this video, the sudden bank of the plane that left the left-banked plane imprint in the North Tower is visible in the shot. For a fleeting moment, the fireball can be seen coming out of the south side of the North Tower, which cannot be seen in the Jules Naudet video. This is the closest Hlava zoomed in during the entire pre-impact section of the video. He slowly zooms out as the explosion expands, before panning the camera back to the road. Hlava was unaware of what had just happened, as he was looking at the camera's low-resolution LCD display, not through the viewfinder and would not find out until two weeks later that he had captured the first impact.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37809064/
Hlava continues filming the heavy traffic ahead of him as he and Cohen enter the far-left lane of the tunnel at 8:47am. On the radio playing in the car, there is a report that a small plane has hit the World Trade Center, prompting Cohen to warn Josef and Pavel that the traffic would slow down because the towers were just on the other side of the tunnel. Hlava cuts the video at 8:48:08am. The video resumes at 9:01:29am as the SUV exits the tunnel and heads north. A second after the video restarts, one of the three exclaims "Whoa!!!" as they see the smoke billowing from the North Tower for the first time. Hlava and Josef repeatedly tell Cohen to stop the car. One of the three exclaims "Oh my God!" multiple times. Hlava then says "Mike, out?" before cutting the video and exiting the car. Ten seconds later, at 9:02:37am, the film resumes with all three of them now out of the car. The sounds of the street are now much more audible than before. Pavel remarks in Czech, "A short while ago we were filming the twins and they were cool. And now they're on fire." Hlava then briefly turns the camera sideways before correcting it.
Hlava zooms in on the south side of the North Tower, filming the damage. As he is doing so, the engines of United Airlines Flight 175 can be heard getting increasingly louder. Hlava zooms out and, immediately after he finishes doing so, Flight 175 comes into view in the top left corner of the screen and crashes into the South Tower at 9:03:11am. Hlava's shot of the crash is widely regarded as one of the clearest videos taken of the crash. When the plane impacts, it is blocked from view by other buildings, but the immediate aftermath of the crash is apparent. When the plane hits, an incredibly loud buzzing sound is heard, the source of which is not entirely known. Some have attributed the buzzing to the South Tower's generator breaking, but this is almost certainly false because in a phone call from Melissa Doi, a victim who was on the 83rd floor of the South Tower, revealed that the lights were still on. Others blame Hlava's camera, saying that it was audio distortion and microphone feedback from the overwhelmed microphone. The sound could also be from the plane damaging other electrical systems around the World Trade Center. When the plane hit, Hlava exclaims, "Mike! I got it on tape!" Josef replies by yelling, "It's an outrage, brother. That's not normal." Pavel replies, saying, "Let's leave or something else will happen, dude." The three men get back into their car.
After both impacts In the minutes following the crash of Flight 175, Josef and Pavel look for the plane, which was nowhere to be seen. Josef thought that it had gone through the entire building and fallen onto the ground. Cohen suggests in Russian that he thinks when the first plane hit, it disabled the antenna on the top of the North Tower, leaving the other planes lost and as a result one crashed into the second building. Pavel remarks a few minutes later that he "hopes no one takes [his] camera". The SUV was directed by police to the western edge of Manhattan, before going around the south tip and north again on FDR Drive along the East River. As Cohen drove north, Pavel narrates in Czech: "Right now I'm under the Brooklyn Bridge and I'm taping. After the Brooklyn Bridge comes the catastrophe." Hlava proceeds to capture incredible close-up footage of the burning buildings.
As the South Tower begins to collapse at 9:58:59am, Pavel yells "Mike! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!" Hlava then proceeds to film the collapse. Following the collapse, the three drive off to Pennsylvania, the same state where United Airlines Flight 93 would crash at 10:03:11 a few minutes later. The film ends at 10:08:51am.
Aspect ratio discrepancy The film is usually represented in the 4:3 aspect ratio, but that is not the actual aspect ratio that Hlava was filming on. Hlava was shooting on an anamorphic widescreen, meaning that the camera recorded the video in 16:9 but the film was stored in 4:3. Despite this, it is still meant to be played back in 16:9, either by stretching or letterboxing the frame. However, this early-form widescreen version was largely forgotten and as a result most videos online are in 4:3.Pavel Hlava's September 11 Video (Correct Frame Rate & Aspect Ratio)
Timeframe In the bottom right corner is the date (11 9 2001) as well as the time. If the time was based on the impact of Flight 175, then the clock was two seconds behind, as the NIST claimed that the crash occurred at 09:02:59 EDT. The 9/11 Commission Report claimed that the crash happened at 09:03:11 EDT, making Hlava's clock fourteen seconds behind. Other various sources have claimed that the crash happened at 09:03:02 EDT,https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1-5av1.pdf which would mean that Hlava's clock was five seconds behind.
Subsequent history Immediate aftermath Despite the attacks and having six children in Brooklyn, Cohen decided to continue the business trip, a decision that bewildered Hlava.
Hlava did not learn that he had captured the first impact until two weeks later, when they returned back to New York City. Hlava connected his camera to a small, black-and-white TV, but he still did not notice the first plane's impact. It was not until a colleague of his that was interested in the video noticed the plane and told him that he finally noticed. The colleague had exclaimed "You brat, you have the first plane there!", utterly bewildering Hlava.
Hlava wrote an email to the Czech TV station Nova offering the footage, but the station was not interested, replying that it already had enough shots of the impacts and that the viewers had grown tired of them. All of his friends told him "Hey, you made a mistake. You waited too long."
After the response from Nova, Hlava put the tape in a drawer in his living room table. After the following Christmas, Hlava's wife and children came to the United States to visit him. Hlava's son found the forgotten tape in drawer and started to mess with it. He deleted the first minute of the film before Hlava noticed and took it from him.
Rise to national attention After the attacks, Hlava sent the video back to his tight-knit Czech community. His friends knew a female English teacher who was a freelance with Walter Karling, a renowned photographer, and the two began looking for the tape's origin. After two years, Karling found Hlava and told him that he could make a lot of money off of the tape. Karling gave Hlava $500 (the price of the camera) in exchange for the camera. On September 4, 2003, almost two years after the attacks, Karling asked if Hlava could go to Manhattan to have an interview with The New York Times.