When the obvious outcome of either staying or jumping is death, I hardly count that as a suicide. Instead, it's someone making their last decision on this Earth as to how they're going to die. I respect the choices they made regardless of whether they jumped or not.

I've seen some terrible photos of those people as they made a desperate decision - to stay and burn to death or choke on the smoke or to jump to certain death. I've seen a photo of a man clinging to the side of the building as another falls nearby. The heat and smoke from thousands of gallons of burning jet fuel were unimaginable. When you can no longer stand the pain of being inside the building, your last recourse is to try to get outside, perhaps in the desperate hope that a helicopter could rescue you. When you can no longer hold on, be it from the heat or from fading strength, then you're going to fall.

In WWI, military pilots often faced the exact same choice. Their fuel tanks were not protected and none of the pilots wore parachutes until near the end of the war. If a plane caught on fire (as it did so easily and so often), the crew had to decide whether to jump to certain death or to ride in the burning plane and to somehow hope of surviving the flame and impact. A very high percentage of them jumped, and so would I in those circumstances.