Flight 93 9/11 Museum Now Open

Under a cold, steady rain and surrounded by the hills and wildflower fields of western Pennsylvania, perfect strangers met through tears and voices choked with emotion to dedicate a new museum to the 40 passengers and crew who brought down flight 93 during the 9/11 attacks 14 years ago.

“Today we take an ordinary place and recognize it for the extraordinary story that played out here on September 11 2001,” said Sally Jewell, secretary of the interior, to a crowd of family, friends, first responders and Americans who said they simply felt compelled to pay their respects to the people who foiled a presumed attack on Washington DC by hijackers whose fellow al-Qaida terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and crashed into the Pentagon.

“Everyday citizens came face to face with evil, but through their courage and their selflessness saved untold lives and protected another sacred and symbolic American site,” said Jewell.

For the officials and the assembled, September 11 was remembered in vivid, surreal detail again and again. Retired FBI commander Roland Corvington, who investigated the site, spoke in a broken voice about what he found after the crash, how “the site was still smoldering and the smell of jet fuel permeated the air”. He recalled listening to the plane’s flight recorder – the sounds of terrorists talking, of passengers working to break down the cockpit door – through the CD player of a nearby SUV.

He said that as he turned toward the field on Thursday “there were emotions stirring in me that I hadn’t felt in many years. I remarked to my wife how beautiful the landscape was. I didn’t recall that in September 2001.”

The new visitor center is flanked by the existing memorial of two huge walls built to resemble the angles of an aircraft’s wings. A walkway within those walls extends out to a point over the fields. Inside, amid sleek black walls and a timeline of the day, the center’s main exhibit holds the artifacts of the lives lost: photos of family birthday parties, flight attendant Debbie Welsh’s hat, the book that passenger Todd Beamer was reading, the badge of wildlife officer Richard Guadagno.

“He’s frozen in time,” Bill Heiderich, 62, said of his brother-in-law, the plane’s captain, Jason Dahl. “He’s still 40 years old, the pilot whose passions were flying and his son.”

Heiderich said that giving some of his belongings to the memorial meant “he’ll live on in perpetuity”.

Dahl had been voted one of United Airlines’ five best pilots that year, and worked mostly as an instructor, Heiderich said. “When a flight was delayed one time, he told the stewardess to get the oven going,” he said. “And then he went down the aisles with an apron on handing out freshly baked cookies. That’s just who he was.”

Full Story Here