United Airlines Flight 93

United Airlines Flight 93 was an American domestic passenger flight from Newark International Airport in New Jersey to San Francisco International Airport in California that was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists on the morning of September 11, 2001, as part of the September 11 attacks. The hijackers planned to deliberately crash the plane into a federal government building in the national capital of Washington, D.C., but their mission failed when the passengers and crew members fought back, forcing the terrorists to crash the plane into a field near Shanksville in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, preventing them from reaching al-Qaeda's intended target but killing everyone aboard the flight. The airliner involved, a Boeing 757 with 44 passengers and crew, was flying United Airlines' daily scheduled morning flight from Newark International Airport to San Francisco International Airport, making it the only plane hijacked that day not to be a Los Angeles–bound flight.

Forty-six minutes after the flight took off from Newark Airport at 8:42 EDT, the hijackers killed one passenger, stormed the cockpit, struggled with the pilots as controllers on the ground listened in, and moved the remaining passengers and crew members to the rear of the aircraft. Ziad Jarrah, who had trained as a pilot, took control of the aircraft and diverted it back toward the East Coast, in the direction of D.C. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, considered principal instigators of the attacks, have claimed that the intended target was the U.S. Capitol Building, though government officials claim the hijackers could have also intended to crash into the White House.

Meanwhile, as passengers and crew members began calling ground contacts and family members to relay information on the situation, they quickly discovered the hijackers' true intentions. Because the flight's takeoff had been initially delayed by forty-two minutes and the hijackers waited another forty-six minutes into the flight before taking over, it allowed the passengers and crew members to learn through these phone calls that other hijacked planes had already carried out suicide attacks against the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shortly before. Realizing that their flight was likely being hijacked as part of a suicide mission, they decided to fight back against the hijackers. In the ensuing struggle, Jarrah chose to crash the plane sooner than he intended to prevent the passengers from taking over the controls, resulting in the plane nosediving at 10:03 into a field near a reclaimed strip mine in Stonycreek Township, near Shanksville, about 65 mi southeast of Pittsburgh and 130 mi northwest of the capital. One person witnessed the impact from the ground, and news agencies began reporting the event within an hour.

United Airlines Flight 93 was the fourth and final passenger jet to be commandeered by terrorists on September 11 and the only one that did not reach a target intended by al-Qaeda. The hijacking was supposed to be coordinated with that of American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon less than 26 minutes before the crash of Flight 93. A temporary memorial was built near the crash site soon after the attacks. Construction of a permanent Flight 93 National Memorial was dedicated on September 10, 2011, and a concrete and glass visitor center (situated on a hill overlooking the site) was opened exactly four years later.

Flight

The aircraft involved in the hijacking was a Boeing 757-222, registration N591UA The airplane had a capacity of 182 passengers; the September 11 flight carried 37 passengers, including the four terrorists, and seven crew members, a load factor of 20 percent, considerably below the 52 percent average Tuesday load factor for Flight 93. The seven crew members were Captain Jason Dahl (43), First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr. (36), flight attendants Lorraine Bay, Sandra Bradshaw, Wanda Green, CeeCee Lyles, and purser Deborah Welsh.

Hijacking

The cockpit was breached at 09:28, by which point Flights 11 and 175 had crashed into the World Trade Center; the North Tower had been burning for nearly 42 minutes and the South Tower for 25 minutes. The only other plane still in the air, Flight 77, was within nine minutes of striking the Pentagon. The hijackers on those flights had waited no more than half an hour to commandeer the aircraft, most likely striking after the seat belt sign had been turned off and cabin service had begun. It is unknown why the hijackers on Flight 93 waited 46 minutes to storm the cockpit. The evidence is that they attacked the pilots by at least 09:28:05, because the flight dived dramatically at that point – roughly 685 feet in thirty seconds.

Crash

At 10:03:11, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the plane crashed into a field near a reclaimed coal strip mine known as the Diamond T. Mine owned by PBS Coals in Stonycreek Township in Somerset County. The 757 had between 5,500 to 7,000 usgal of fuel remaining, which exploded and released a fireball that scorched a nearby hemlock grove. Far-flung debris that made up a third of the aircraft, including the cockpit, continued into the woods, demolishing trees on 163 acre owned by the Lambert family, and damaging the nearby residence of Barry Hoover. The rest of the aircraft buried itself in dirt that had been transported to the abandoned strip mine for reclamation efforts in the 1990s. The fuselage and wings shattered as they burrowed into the earth. One of the engines ended up in a catchment pond 2000 ft away from the main impact site.

The National Transportation Safety Board reported that the flight impacted at 563 mph at a forty-degree nose-down inverted attitude. The impact left a crater 8 to 10 ft deep and 30 to 50 ft wide. The coroner ruled that everyone on board who was still alive at the time of the crash died instantly of blunt-force trauma. Many media reports and eyewitness accounts said the time of the crash was 10:06 or 10:10; an initial analysis of seismographic data in the area concluded that the crash occurred at 10:06, but the 9/11 Commission report states that this analysis was not definitive and was retracted. Other media outlets and the 9/11 Commission reported the time of impact as 10:03, based on when the flight recorders stopped, analysis of radar data, infrared satellite data, and air traffic control transmissions.

The only known witness to the actual crash, and the last one to see United 93 airborne, was Stoney Creek resident Nevin Lambert, who reported that he saw the plane upside down as it crashed to the ground in a 45 degree-angled nosedive. Kelly Leverknight, a local resident, was watching news of the attacks when she heard the plane. "I heard the plane going over and I went out the front door and I saw the plane going down. It was headed toward the school, which panicked me, because all three of my kids were there. Then you heard the explosion and felt the blast and saw the fire and smoke."

Another witness, Eric Peterson, looked up when he heard the plane, "It was low enough, I thought you could probably count the rivets. You could see more of the roof of the plane than you could the belly. It was on its side. There was a great explosion and you could see the flames. It was a massive, massive explosion. Flames and then smoke and then a massive, massive mushroom cloud."

Val McClatchey had been watching footage of the attacks when she heard the plane. She saw it briefly, then heard the impact. The crash knocked out the electricity and phones. McClatchey grabbed her camera and took the only known picture of the smoke cloud from the explosion. In September 2011, shortly before the 10th anniversary of the attacks, a video of the rising smoke cloud filmed by Dave Berkebile (who had died the previous February) from his yard on Bluebird Lane, 5.8 mi away from the crash site, was published on YouTube.

The first responders arrived at the crash site after 10:06. Cleveland Center controllers, unaware the flight had crashed, notified the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) at 10:07 that Flight 93 had a bomb on board and passed the last known position. This call was the first time the military was notified about the flight. Ballinger sent one final ACARS message to Flight 93 at 10:10, "Don't divert to DC. Not an option." He repeated the message one minute later. The Herndon Command Center alerted FAA headquarters that Flight 93 had crashed at 10:13. NEADS called the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center for an update on Flight 93 and received notification that the flight had crashed.

At 10:37, CNN correspondent Aaron Brown, covering the collapse of the World Trade Center, announced, "We are getting reports and we are getting lots of reports and we want to be careful to tell you when we have confirmed them and not, but we have a report that a 747 is down in Pennsylvania, and that remains unconfirmed at this point." He followed that up at 10:49 by reporting "We have a report now that a large plane crashed this morning, north of the Somerset County Airport, which is in western Pennsylvania, not too terribly far from Pittsburgh, about 80 mi or so, a Boeing 767 jet. Don't know whose airline it was, whose airplane it was, and we don't have any details beyond that which I have just given you." In the confusion, he also erroneously reported a second hijacked plane heading for the Pentagon after the crash of the first.