Penney said, “The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing to sacrifice themselves.” Sasseville said, “They made the decision we didn’t have to make.” Flight 93 crashed about twenty minutes away, by air, from Washington. Air National Guard pilot Marc Sasseville “fully expected to intercept Flight 93 and take it down.” A fourth hijacked plane had already hit the Pentagon. Lieutenant Heather (Lucky) Penney, an F-16 pilot who was ordered airborne that day, later told Garrett Graff, the author of “ The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” that she and fellow D.C. The aircraft flipped, then crashed at nearly six hundred miles per hour near Shanksville. The plane roared low across pastoral Somerset County, Pennsylvania, skimming the village of Lambertsville. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijackers “judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them.”

If we don’t, we’ll die!” The hijacker soon asked again, “Shall we put it down?” This time, the answer was yes. One hijacker asked, “Shall we finish it off?” Another said to wait. One of the plane’s data recorders captured “loud thumps, crashes, shouts, and breaking glasses and plates.” The hijacker flying the plane, as if to throw the assaulters off balance, rocked the aircraft left and right. They rushed the first-class cabin, carrying out what the 9/11 Commission’s report called a “sustained” assault. In an act that has become American lore over the past twenty years, the passengers and crew members chose to attack the knife-wielding hijackers and “retake the plane.” Unarmed civilians, unbound by duty, they included a college judo champ, a former air-traffic controller, and a retired registered nurse. Learning that other hijackers had just flown jetliners into both towers of the World Trade Center, they held a vote. The crew and passengers, herded into the back of the plane, used the onboard phones, and their personal cell phones, to call people on the ground. The plane’s cockpit voice recorder captured the sound of a woman struggling with a hijacker she then went silent. Its transponder disabled, the flight became harder to track. Using autopilot, the hijackers pointed the jetliner toward Washington, D.C. A hijacker, one of four, was heard announcing that there was a bomb on board. Among them was a federal wildlife biologist, a former bookkeeper, a toy-company executive, an arborist, a retired bartender, attorneys, college students, and an ironworker who had helped build the World Trade Center.įorty-five minutes into the flight, at around 9:30 A.M., air-traffic controllers received two radio transmissions-a frantic “Mayday!” and the sounds of violent struggle, followed by “Get out of here!” United 93 plummeted seven hundred feet, over eastern Ohio. They were from New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Germany, Japan, Minnesota, Maryland, Florida, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New York. The passengers ranged in age from twenty to seventy-nine.

On September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 had forty passengers and crew members on board, travelling non-stop from Newark to San Francisco.

9 11 firefighter remembrance quotes