Flight 93 National Memorial, Let's Roll
Pennsylvania
On the morning of September eleventh, two thousand one, United Airlines Flight Ninety-Three departed Newark bound for San Francisco with forty passengers and crew aboard, along with four hijackers. Forty-six minutes into the flight, four Al-Qaeda hijackers seized control of the aircraft over eastern Ohio, turned it south, and headed toward Washington, D.C., intending to crash it into the United States Capitol or the White House.
What happened next changed the outcome of that morning. Passengers and crew members used airphones and cell phones to call their families and learned what was already happening in New York and at the Pentagon. They understood, with terrible clarity, that they were not hostages in a conventional hijacking. They were a weapon in flight.
At nine fifty-seven in the morning, the passengers voted to fight back. Tom Burnett, a businessman from Minnesota, called his wife four times during the crisis, telling her the passengers were planning to act. Todd Beamer, a sales account manager from New Jersey, reached a GTE phone operator named Lisa Jefferson and told her quietly what they were about to attempt. His last words to her were: Let's roll.
The passengers and crew attacked the cockpit with a food cart. The hijackers at the controls rolled the plane violently in an attempt to throw them back. They failed to breach the cockpit, but their assault left the hijackers with no option but to crash the aircraft. At ten oh three in the morning, Flight Ninety-Three impacted an abandoned strip mine field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about one hundred thirty miles from Washington, at roughly five hundred sixty miles per hour.
All forty-four people aboard were killed. Washington was spared.
The Flight Ninety-Three National Memorial here in the Laurel Highlands preserves the crash site and includes a wall of names, a visitor center, and the Tower of Voices, a ninety-three-foot structure housing forty wind chimes, one for each person on the flight. The crash site itself is marked at the exact angle and trajectory the plane traveled in its final seconds.
