A visit to the United Flight 93 crash site
As part of the return trip from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) this year, we stopped at the Flight 93 National Memorial. It’s a 30-minute drive from the idiot-proof ridgetop airport that serves Johnstown, Pennsylvania (see Climate Change Reading List: Johnstown Flood).
The architecture is moving and designed around a walkway that follows the flight path of the airliner that jihadis had hoped to turn into a weapon against the U.S. Capitol. The path picks up after you go to a lower section of the memorial where the Boeing 757 actually crashed.



The building itself contains a lot of information about 9/11, not just the Flight 93 history. Visitors can listen to three phone messages to family members left by passengers on Flight 93.



Here are some of the outdoor signs:




A Harley is parked just outside the main building and includes Todd Beamer‘s final recorded words: “Let’s Roll”.



The walkway to the Wall of Names:




There’s a 93-foot-tall Tower of Voices of wind-driven chimes that look like aircraft parts (audio recording).
It’s a fitting memorial to a group of people who gave their lives in order to spare the lives of Americans on the ground.
Here’s the Hollywood version with the “Let’s Roll” line about 4 minutes in:
RIP especially to the crew: Lorraine Bay, Jason Dahl, Sandra Bradshaw, Wanda Green, LeRoy Homer Jr., CeeCee Lyles, and Deborah Welsh. Airline crews enable us to live richer lives by assuming a higher level of risk every day than those of us who earn our wages by flying desks.
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