Paul Murdoch Architects, of Los Angeles, won a design contest for the memorial. Gently, yet publicly, other Flight 93 families condemned these views. Such hate. In Pennsylvania, the landscape itself is the softener. The site of the Flight 93 National Memorial consists of twenty-two hundred acres, much of which is open to the public.
The rebirth of the onetime strip mine provided a useful metaphor for healing. Today, the overwhelming majority of the area is lush with wildflower meadows and native grasses.
Visitors arrive on U. Route 30 Lincoln Highway and follow a two-lane road for nearly three miles. They first pass the Tower of Voices, a ninety-three-foot-tall structure containing forty wind chimes. An overlook offers a long view of where the passengers and crew perished, and the forest beyond. From the ridge, it is best to follow a long pathway, down through the meadow, to Memorial Plaza, where forty tall slabs of sleek white marble line the edge of the Sacred Ground, the mass gravesite.
Each slab is engraved with a name. Visitors can touch them but are barred from entering the Sacred Ground, which is available only to authorized staff and the families of the dead. She hoped that she would one day feel less grief than pride. Over the last two decades, visitors have left thousands of mementos—baseballs, menorahs, license plates, firefighter gear, a miniature U.
Military service members often visited on their way to, or home from, their duty stations, including Iraq and Afghanistan. One Army lieutenant remarked that travelling to Somerset County was the least he could do, to honor the civilians who fought back. The Flight 93 Memorial regularly hosts tributes where various groups—bicyclists, bagpipes players, Tibetan monks—come to pay their respects.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon two such tributes. Black-bereted members of the Knights of Columbus, sweating in their sashed uniforms and white gloves, disbanded after a ceremony at Memorial Plaza. Several dozen members of the Leathernecks Nation MC, a motorcycle club for marines and some Navy corpsmen, were taking their place at the flagpole.
The four members who presided over their tribute included Cannon, the sergeant-at-arms, a tattooed contractor with a long, gray beard. He opened a manila folder and read from a page printed on Leathernecks letterhead. In response, the hijacker piloting the plane began to roll the aircraft, pitching it up and down to throw the charging passengers off balance.
Worried that the passengers would soon break through to the cockpit, the hijackers made the decision to crash the plane before reaching their final destination. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or several nuclear power plants along the Eastern seaboard.
The fireball from the plane, which was carrying 7, gallons of fuel, scorched hundreds of acres of earth and set the surrounding trees ablaze for hours. The crash site in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, near the town of Shansksville, was littered with the wreckage from the fragmented plane, with a debris field scattered nearly eight miles away from the initial point of impact. Though few human remains were recovered at the site, medical examiners were eventually able to positively identify the 33 passengers, seven crew-members and four hijackers aboard Flight The youngest passenger of Flight 93 was year-old Deora Frances Bodley.
The first phase of the memorial was completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in September Administered by the National Park Service and encompassing more than 2, acres, the memorial includes a visitor center; walking paths including the 40 Memorial Groves; and The Tower of Voices, a foot tower with a wind chime representing each person who perished on board.
Captain Jason M. Christian Adams Todd M. Britton Thomas E. Burnett, Jr. Folger Colleen L. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
On September 11, —a clear, sunny, late summer day—al Qaeda terrorists aboard three hijacked passenger planes carried out coordinated suicide attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D. On September 11, , 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States.
The September 11 attacks struck the nation on a clear, late summer morning on the East Coast. This was the first time hijackers used commercial airliners as weapons to destroy symbolic targets, commit mass murder, and spread terror. On that morning, three of the four hijacked flights departed on schedule.
However, Flight 93 was delayed more than 25 minutes due to typically heavy morning traffic. At a. The Federal Aviation Administration, at a. An estimated 4, aircraft landed safely without incident. This was the first time such an order had been given in United States aviation history.
By that time, though, Flight 93 was not responding to any orders. At about a. The passengers and crew were forced to the back of the plane and told to be quiet. Using airfones, passengers and crew began making calls to report the hijacking. They soon learned the shocking news about the other hijacked planes and quickly realized that Flight 93 was part of a larger attack on America. This realization led to a vote and a collective decision to fight back.
In just over 30 minutes, this diverse group of people on Flight 93 developed a plan and put it into action. The cockpit voice recorder reader discretion advised captured the sounds of their struggle: shouts, screams, calls to action, and sounds of breaking glassware. To stop the uprising, the terrorist piloting the aircraft began to roll it to the left and right, and pitch the nose up and down.
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