SHANKSVILLE, Pa. -- Every year, hundreds of people make a pilgrimage to Shanksville, Pennsylvania to commemorate the victims of 9/11 and see the final resting place of the heroes on United Flight 93.
WCBS 880 spoke with a number of people who had visited the site, just days before the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
“They probably saved thousands of lives down in D.C.,” said one woman at the site of the United passengers.
“A lot more people could have died,” acknowledged another man.
The aircraft took off from Newark, New Jersey, and was hijacked by a group of terrorists working for al-Qaeda just minutes after the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Passengers and airline staff had begun hearing about the attacks in New York City just moments after takeoff and when the plane was taken over, passengers decided to intervene and prevent the terrorists from reaching their destination – believed to be the U.S. Capitol Building.
The plane ultimately crashed into a barren field in southwest Pennsylvania, which was an old strip mine at the time.
Today, the land had been reclaimed by songbirds and windflowers, according to Adams. And at the site of the crash stands a tower with 40 wind chimes to remember those on board the plane. A Wall of Remembrance also stands in the field with the names of the fallen written on it.
“There's something so powerful about just seeing a name engraved and just feeling the letters,” said Katherine Hostetler with the National Park Service.
Hostetler said that the aircraft went down in a field of hemlock trees, and a survey of the field would eventually lead to a major clue in tracking down those responsible for the attacks.
“Forty-five minutes after the plane goes down, a Pennsylvania State Police officer finds an ATM bank card just laying against the bottom of the trunk of one of these hemlock trees,” she said. “And that ATM bank card belongs to the hijacking pilot of Flight 93, and it will lead to the financial backing of the terrorist attacks.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, radio newsman Tim Lambert was also at the scene reporting for WITF in Harrisburg. And as it turned out, many of the hemlock trees in the field were on his family’s property.
“I felt like a caretaker of the land for several years. And I felt like it was just something that we wanted to make sure was going to be protected,” Lambert said of the field.
Ultimately, the federal government acquired multiple parcels of his family’s land for the memorial.
Lambert said he now feels that Shanksville is overshadowed, but no less important.
“That's more than just a field to so many people. It was a field where 40 people did something pretty heroic that day and lost their lives. They sacrificed for the greater good, whether they realize it or not,” he said.