Flight 93 Families Gather for Private Ceremony to Honor Their Heroes
Editor's Note: Families of the victims of Flight 93 gathered at the crash site Friday for a private ceremony. A public ceremony will be held at 1 p.m.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
(TNS)
In the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001, an open field stood in Shanksville, in a former coal mine surrounded by hemlock trees.
Hours later, the field would become a crash site, after 40 passengers and crew heard about the attacks in New York City and made the decision to fight the hijackers on board to prevent further destruction. The plane crashed into the field in Shanksville just 18 minutes before it would have reached its intended target of Washington, D.C.
Twenty-five years later, the Flight 93 National Memorial will commemorate those events and honor the 40 passengers and crew in an observance open to the public.
The events are scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. with a welcome and pledge of allegiance recorded by actor Gary Sinise — whose namesake foundation supports an annual gathering for Flight 93 families hosted by the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department — followed by readings and musical selections. Bells will toll at the precise minute of each plane’s impact: 8:46 a.m, when Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center; 9:03 for Flight 175, into the South Tower; 9:37 for Flight 77, into the Pentagon; and 10:03 for Flight 93, into the field in Shanksville.
A ceremony at 1 p.m. will include remarks from Governor Josh Shapiro, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Gordon Felt, whose brother Edward Porter Felt was a passenger on Flight 93. The event will also include a memorial expression from Paul Murdoch, architect of the Flight 93 National Memorial, and well as music from the Somerset County Youth Chorus and soloist Bianca Melgar.
The Visitor’s Center at the Flight 93 National Memorial will also be open; it provides a chronological account of what happened on board the flight through artifacts, diagrams and recorded answering machine messages.
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