Page 22 - AAA Magazine – AAA Ohio Auto Club – September 2021

Flight 93 Remembered
20 Years Later
By William J. Purpura
The Boeing 757-222 roared down the runway in the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001, carrying 44 crew and passengers. This was United Airlines’ daily scheduled
morning flight from Newark International Airport in New Jersey to San Francisco International Airport. The plane never made it to its intended destination.
On board that flight were four al-Qaeda terrorists who were reportedly assigned to fly the
plane into the U.S. Capitol Building in
Washington, D.C., as part of the
Sept. 11 attacks. Heading west across Pennsylvania, the terrorists took control of United Airlines Flight 93 and turned the plane back east in the skies above Cleveland. Several of those on board understood their fate, as they had received emergency calls from
loved ones warning them that other planes had been flown into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia.
Brenda Schwartz
According to official reports, the passenger revolt began at 9:57 a.m. Few who remember the horrors of that day will ever forget passenger Todd Beamer’s heroic words to his fellow passengers: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”
While it is unknown if the passengers were able to breach the cockpit, they did, at the very least, force
the hijackers to crash the plane far short of their intended target.
Rather than hitting the U.S. Capitol, Flight 93 crashed into a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Flight 93 tragedy, and many have been making a pilgrimage to the crash site located in southwestern Pennsylvania. The temporary memorial, which was a 40-foot (one foot for each victim) chain-link fence where visitors could leave notes and flowers, has since been replaced by the Flight 93 National Memorial, which opened on Sept. 10, 2015.
20 | AAA MAGAZINE
Tami Heilemann - Department of the Interior