How did Flight 93 go down?

The terrorists remained in control of the plane and chose to crash it rather than risk the passengers and crew regaining control of the aircraft.At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 plowed into an empty field at a speed of 563 miles per hour.



United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, following a heroic struggle between the passengers and the four al-Qaeda hijackers. After the terrorists took control of the Boeing 757 and turned it toward Washington, D.C. (likely targeting the Capitol or the White House), passengers and crew used airphones to contact loved ones and learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Realizing their plane was intended as a weapon of mass destruction, they famously voted to fight back. Led by individuals like Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, and Tom Burnett, they stormed the cockpit using a food cart as a battering ram. To prevent the passengers from breaching the door, the hijacker-pilot began a series of violent maneuvers, eventually turning the plane upside down. To deny the passengers control, the terrorists chose to nose-dive the aircraft into a field at 563 miles per hour. Everyone on board perished, but their intervention prevented a catastrophic strike on the nation's capital.

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According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the series of calls from the flight provided vital information both to the ground and to the passengers. Calls from on board the plane revealed that: the plane had been hijacked.

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The hijackers inside the cockpit are heard yelling No! over the sound of breaking glass. The final spoken words on the recorder were a calm voice in English instructing, Pull it up. The plane then crashed into an empty field in Stonycreek, Pennsylvania, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington, D.C.

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The plane crashed in an open field next to a wooded area in Stonycreek Township, Somerset County, Pennsylvania at 10:03:11 am. The nearest town is Shanksville. Flight 93 struck the ground at a 40 degree angle almost upside down, hitting right wing and nose first, at a speed of between 563-580 miles per hour.

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Any plane debris there was mixed with hundreds of floors of concrete and steel, office furnishings and materials, and bodies — all of which complicated the case, investigators have said. Flight 93 wasn't lost to the crash. It was just buried, McCall said.

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In what likely was his dying act Flight 93 pilot and hero Jason Dahl managed to push a button which, unbeknownst to the hijackers, caused everything said in, and all sounds from near the cockpit to be broadcast. And of course, there were some 30 phone calls were placed from Flight 93 that day.

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Naval aircraft on a training exercise called Flight 19 disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in 1945. That has caused speculation for decades, but no true answer to what happened that day in the air or to the men aboard has ever been found.

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Primarily airplane wreckage, some personal effects, and a very small amount of unidentified human remains were found.

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The impact killed hundreds, including everyone on the plane and many more inside the South Tower. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 people survived the crash, but were trapped by the catastrophic damage done to the skyscraper as well as the heat, fire, and smoke filling its upper levels.

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The youngest flight passenger who died was Christine Hanson, a 2-year-old on her way to Disneyland on United Airlines Flight 175. The oldest was Robert Norton, 82, who was on American Airlines Flight 11. The 19 hijackers from the militant Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda also died.

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