September 11, 2001: the only hijacked plane that didn't reach its target
United Flight 93 left Newark for San Francisco at 8:42 on the morning of September 11, 2001, twenty-five minutes late from runway congestion. The delay mattered. When four hijackers took the cockpit at 9:28, the passengers and crew still had time to learn, over airphones and cell phones, what had already happened at the World Trade Center. The other three planes that morning each carried five hijackers; this one had four.
What happened next is preserved on the cockpit voice recorder and in the phone calls. The passengers took a vote. At 9:57 they rushed the cockpit with a food cart, and the hijacker at the controls, Ziad Jarrah, rolled the airplane hard left and right and pitched it up and down to throw them off their feet. It did not stop them. At 10:02 the recorded voices in the cockpit agreed to put the plane in the ground rather than lose it. At 10:03:11, Flight 93 rolled onto its back and hit a reclaimed strip mine outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at somewhere between 563 and 580 miles an hour by the memorial's own accounting. It was about twenty minutes of flying time from Washington. The 9/11 Commission concluded the target was most likely the United States Capitol.
Forty passengers and crew died, and the four hijackers with them. The crash site is known today as Sacred Ground; a boulder marks the impact point, and the ground around it remains closed to everyone but the families.
The Flight 93 National Memorial was dedicated on the tenth anniversary, September 10, 2011. The Wall of Names is a white marble arc along the aircraft's final flight path. The Tower of Voices came later, dedicated in 2018 at the entrance: ninety-three feet tall for Flight 93, holding forty wind chimes, one for each passenger and crew member. The architect explained the design simply: for many of the families, the last memory of the people on that plane is their voices on the phone. The wind does the rest.