American Airlines Flight 77, also originally bound for Los Angeles, pushed back from the gate at Washington Dulles International Airport at 8:10 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 left Boston Logan International Airport fifteen minutes apart heading for the same destination, Los Angeles. The strategy of the 9/11 plot called for all four airliners to depart within minutes of one another and reach their intended targets at roughly the same time. The drama of the hijacking of Flight 93 has obscured understanding of how close the U.S. The fact that Flight 93 took off late from Newark Liberty International Airport is the first critical precursor to the eventual fate of both the plane….and the U.S. Just as crucial was the composition of the terrorist team that took over Flight 93 over eastern Ohio forty-four minutes after it took off from Newark, N.J., putting the Boeing 757 on a course toward Washington, D.C., instead of San Francisco. National Park Service.Įqually important were the flight timelines of the four airliners hijacked that day and how those timelines altered the execution of the plot carried out by nineteen terrorists sent by Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Val McClatchey, who lived on a farm in Shanksville, PA, photographed the cloud of smoke from the crash of Flight 93 just after it happened. The passenger revolt is only the last of those happenstances. Capitol came to destruction that day, and how much its survival intact is due to happenstance. It is little understood how close the U.S. The lore of that amazing group, however, has come to so dominate American knowledge and understanding of that flight that the larger terror and implications of the fourth plane have been obscured. ![]() On that terrible day of September 11, twenty years ago, the revolt of the passengers on Flight 93 resulting in the plane hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest heroic events in American history. ![]() Richard Whittle is the author of The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey and Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. Reston wrote the cover article for our June issue on the Vietnam Wall and is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. is the author of 18 books including his just published novel about 9/11, The 19th Hijacker.
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