The Flight 93 Memorial

About twenty minutes north of the Pennsylvania Turnpike west of the Allegheny Tunnel, exit 110, is the rural field where United Flight 93 crashed at maximum speed on September 11, 2001 and disintegrated in a huge fireball of thousands of gallons of jet fuel, vaporizing all persons on board.  Up until that moment, a life and death struggle had been going on for many long minutes inside that plane as the heroic crew and passengers battled four murderous terrorists locked in the cockpit for control of the plane.

By forcing the plane to crash, the heroes aboard the plane lost their lives but won a bigger stake, causing the destruction of the flying missile before it could crash into the Capitol in DC, its intended target.  There was no air cover over Washington at the time, as the two jets scrambled, the only at-the-ready airiel defense for the entire east coast, were streaking east over the Atlantic looking for incoming Russians, their presumed enemies in the confusion of the moment.

The Flight 93 National Memorial at the tragic field is a somber and subdued place where the Visitor Center, set atop the last low ridge the screaming jet passed over before it burrowed into the field beyond, has an overlook that looks upon the field below where the impact crater was before it was filled in at the conclusion of the forensic investigation of the ground surrounding it.  A low retaining wall skirts the actual field, which still contains human remains too small to recover so it is considered to be a cemetery filled with heroes, and is off-limits for all visitors except for the family members of the victims of Flight 93, every September 11th.

The Visitor Center has displays explaining the day as it unfolded, tape recordings of doomed passengers calls from the plane to their loved ones, artifacts recovered from the field and gear worn by the heroic first responders who rushed in to try to salvage the unsalvageable.  The memorial is a sad but peaceful place, well worth a visit.