Center which details the events of september 11, 2001. The memorial is the final resting place of 40 passengers and crew whose actions prevented four al qaeda hijackers from crashing United Airlines into the u. S. Capitol building. This program is just under an hour. Adam i am adam shaffer and im a park ranger at flight 93 National Memorial. We will be looking inside the Visitor Center, which was dedicated in 2015. We are standing out at the end of the flight path overlook. We are standing on the shadow of the flight path flight 93 would have been on just before impact on the ground behind me. The reason we are standing here is because this orientation for visitors is central to the design of the Visitor Center itself. The walls shield the visitors view of the landscape around us. And the enormity of the landscape. And only frames the flight path as you approach the entrance. As you are coming off the parking lot, you have to walk the flight path this plane was on just before it crashed. The tall walls help to frame the last piece of sky flight 93 passes through before impact here. One of the first things visitors notice as they are walking the flight path is the timestamps that are embedded in the ground. This timestamp represents the first plane striking the north tower in new york city at 8 46. The second timestamp represents the second plane hitting the south tower. We have some geese flying overhead. The third timestamp is going to represent American Airlines flight 77. And if you continue down to our Memorial Plaza where the names of the passengers and crew are walk theontinuing to flight path, just beyond the wooden gate, the last possible piece of granite has been laid here before you step onto the crash site is the timestamp for flight 93. In 2002, Congress Passes legislation and the president signs into law the flight 93 National Memorial act designating flight 93 National Memorial as a unit of the National Park service. From that point forward a , federal Advisory Commission was appointed to oversee a Design Management plan for the site as well as boundary for this memorial. That was the beginning of the memorial that has taken shape around us. We are still not finished with the memorial. There are still a few missing components to the memorial landscape we are continuing to add on to. But the majority of the memorial came online this past year with the dedication of the Visitor Center, learning center, and the walking trails that extend from this complex down to the crash site. The Memorial Plaza itself and the walls that bear the names of passengers and crew is in white marble. We are looking down over top of that wall from the flight path, the continuation of the flight path just before the impact site and the crash site we protect. The National Park service protects over 42 acres of ground south of this black wall you see in front of us. That is the Northern Boundary to the crash site and debris field of flight 93. When visitors leave the Visitor Center, they can drive or walk these trails down to the Memorial Plaza. It is a quartermile stretch from our Visitors Center out to the path flight wall, that is the shortest walk. That walk is there because it protects the crash site and debris field but allows visitors the opportunity to get close to that landscape and to pay their respects or leave tributes to the passengers and crew of flight 93. These tall walls are the Visitor Center and sometimes confusing for visitors arriving because it does not stand out as a building. They do appear as walls. The design was based around answering the basic question of where did the plane crash . Wet is a common question r receive at flight 93. Because of the landscape here, it is very open sky, open sweeping landscape, very easy for visitors to become disoriented. The architect paul murdoch out of los angeles designed the Visitors Center around the orientation of the flight path. And as you turn, you are looking down the flight path and you can progress down the pathway, as you pass through the first opening, the entrance to our Visitors Center will be on your lefthand side. What he is trying to draw the visitor out to is the flight path overlook. When you pass through the second wall, the landscape reopens to your field of vision where you can taken the entire landscape, only after he has oriented you to the flight path and crash site. We will go inside the Visitors Center, but i want to stop here and show you the texture of the walls that appear throughout the memorial. On some of the structures you , will find this looks like wooden beams which are indicative of some of the barnes and older buildings found in southwestern pennsylvania. It also is a tiein to the Hemlock Grove of trees which was impacted when flight 93 crashed here on september 11. Some of the angles you see here sort of catch the angles of the eastern hemlock, the branches and the leaf structure. You are going to see that mimicked again in some of the cuts you see in the sidewalks. As we approach you will see it throughout the glass as well as in the ceiling tile. Lets take a walk inside and we will take a look at the exhibit space that just opened in september of 2015. The first panel you come to on the side is entitled an ordinary day. Each wall you come to has this glass panel that gives you an overview of what each wall will cover. It was very important to give visitors, especially if they did not experience september 11, everybody thinks back to the bright blue sky. It was important to place people in the context of Somerset County and the area around shanksville, pennsylvania. Since this is more of an unfamiliar story, new york city is quite familiar to a number of people. And so, as you progress through the timeline of events, you will see it places you at the three attack sites. There is some foreshadowing that takes place, but it places you in arlington at the pentagon and it places you at the believed attack site of flight 93 which is the United States capitol building. The artifacts behind the case are going to take you to those three places. You will see there is a Business Card from one of the people working for a subsidiary of cantor fitzgerald, showing the routine business as usual aspect of that morning. A military cap from the pentagon. As well as the wall plate hanging over an office that would have identified somebodys specific office space. The piece that stands out to me the most, the story i like to share with people because a lot of people do not realize this is on the evening of september 11, every year there is a congressional barbecue the president hosts. This year, it was on september 11, 2001. The members of congress were invited to the white house where they were going to enjoy a couple of hundred pounds of tenderloin served on the menu. After the events began to unfold that morning, and they realized they were evacuating washington, d. C. , and the barbecue was canceled. A lot of the food that was prepared for the barbecue was sent to the rescue workers and to provide support at the pentagon. The invitation came to us from a staffer and his son planning to attend the barbecue that evening. When you first come inside the Visitor Center, you will notice there are these tall black walls and the pattern is very similar to the walls on the exterior of the Visitor Center. When flight 93 crashes here, the thousands of gallons of jet fuel that incinerate on impact scorched 80100 hemlock trees. This black against the wall is symbolic of the charring of those trees. It is tying you back to the story constantly as you are moving through the site. Whether you recognize that or not, there are usually questions that come up from visitors about either the coloration or the angles and it allows us to tie it back to the story. This wall takes you right into the events of september 11 and what is happening in new york city initially. In the center of this exhibit space, we have rolling footage and it cuts between different networks. It shows the global aspects of that morning. We have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in new york city. It happened just a few moments ago. We have very Little Information available. You are looking at a very disturbing live shot. That is the World Trade Center. We have unconfirmed reports that a plane has crashed into one of the towers. Another plane just hit. Another plane has just hit. Right into the middle of it. My god, right into the middle of the building. Whats we just saw another one apparently go another plane just flew into the second tower. Adam the other thing, in the background, you have an image that shows the statue of liberty from new jersey. This shot is taken a number of days after september 11 but it shows you the smoke still hovering over the city in lower manhattan. The artifacts that were selected for this case were done so very specifically to represent the three sites. And place people at those sites. From new york city, you have some of the cutlery from windows on the world. Us from the loan to september 11 museum. You have pieces of limestone that were part of the collapsed pentagon. What is unique is you have a miniature statue of freedom, which people will recognize the capital is adorned with a statue of freedom. The architect of the capitol at the time showed up that morning a little before 9 00, i believe, and his story he is tuning into the news footage about what is happening in new york city. But he is also preparing that morning for a meeting to raise a u. S. Capitol Visitor Center. That is what his morning begins like. As things unfold, they learn about the pentagon being attacked. And then they are told about 10 minutes out, there is a rogue plane inbound for washington, d. C. The evacuation begins of the u. S. Capitol building. He later learns the immediate threat has passed because this plane has crashed in pennsylvania somewhere. He later comes here in 2012 and this specific statue of freedom, this desk model of freedom, was on his desk that morning. He leaves the statue of freedom at Memorial Plaza. Visitors have left other tribute items in the past. Letterhead het on , left an official letter and in the letter, we have a copy of that. It reads this model of the , statue of freedom that stands atop the dome of the u. S. Capitol building is left with deep respect, a final resting place of the heroes of flight 93. Those who sacrificed their lives here september 11, 2001, saved mine and those of many thousands of others at the u. S. Capitol building as well as an historic symbol of our democracy known around the world. We have come to shanksville, pennsylvania, to pay our respects and express our deep gratitude to those who will never be forgotten. We cover the buildup to september 11 with a timeline that takes you through the establishment of al qaeda. There is little piece about bin laden. We very specifically placed it on a rail so you have to get close to this wall in order to be able to read more about this. We did this specifically knowing that some people would not care and would choose not to step up to the rail and know more about this. We did this out of sensitivity for the many family members that often visit the site. After visitors come from this wall, they will turn around and they are faced with a map of the United States and this is depicting the nearly 4500 aircraft that are in the air that morning, potential threat s to the United States that morning. What was important about this wall was showing the chaos of trying to sort out correct factual reports coming out from erroneous ones. The other important thing about this wall, though, is it gives you the diagram of flight 93. Flight 93 was a boeing 757 and if we get closer, you can see, this is where the passengers and crews were ticketed on the morning of september 11. The diagram at the end shows you exactly where the passengers were seated, the terrorists, where they took position on the plane in first class that morning, and where the crew members would have been seated. The artifacts we used to represent, we have a boarding pass from the oldest passenger on flight 93. And a passenger who was headed home to japan that morning. One of the things a lot of visitors recognize immediately when they look at the diagram is how undersecret flight 93 was. Underseated flight 93 was. One of the major changes that has occurred since september 11 is there has been a number of aircraft mergers, fewer flights United Airlines typically flew this flight three times a day from newark to San Francisco. This plane would have been capable of carrying 182 passengers. Of course that morning, they are ticketed with 33 passengers and seven crew. That is minus the four terrorists ticketed in the first class section of the plane. A total of 44 people are going to take off from newark that morning. Four of them are not planning to arrive in San Francisco. Arethe 33 passengers that planning to make it to San Francisco that morning are expecting to arrive a little after 11 00 local time. We will go around the corner to the next exhibit wall. The next wall shows flight 93, it is airborne at this point after being delayed over 20 minutes. Flight 93 takes off at 8 42 a. M. And it will begin its gradual climb out of newark airspace of course, if you have ever left from newark, you realize the airport is right across the skyline from the World Trade Center. This is four minutes before American Airlines flight 11 is going to hit the north tower. Flight 93 gets airborne. It is going to begin its trip to San Francisco. This gray on the map represents the routine flight across the state of pennsylvania. You can see their barely into ohio when the four terrorists are going to take control of flight 93. They are going to incapacitate the first officer and the captain. And they are going to begin to turn flight 93 around for heading toward washington, d. C. At 9 28 a. M. , the approximate time the terrorists take over flight 93, the four hijackers seated in first class will get up from their positions and they are going to rush the cockpit. There are some details about this that we just do not know exactly how they took over the plane. We do know from what was covered at the site that they were carrying knives or box cutters. They did threaten the passengers and crew with a bomb, which is later learned to be a faux bomb. After they seized the control of the cockpit, there is a little bit of a dip in the altitude which gives us the indication when the plane is taken over. If you are following this on the flight data recorder the plane , is going to dip a couple of hundred feet, which is fairly significant. It would have been noticed by air traffic control. And then the plane because of being on autopilot, the plane will come up to its assigned cruising altitude around 35,000 feet. The plane is going to manually be flown in a bank. There is a steep bank and it is going to continue to climb to about 40,000 feet in altitude. The terrorists are going to use the heading of 120, which will take them back to washington, d. C. , and that draws the pretty straight line. The idea was from the tactics they were using, they were planning to lock on when they were within range of reagan airport, they were going to lock onto to the airport to help draw them closer in two washington, d. C. The diagram you see now depicts the change from the time of the hijacking from where the passengers and crew would have originally been seated. You can see by the yellow blocks indicated on the diagram, the passengers and crew have gotten up from their seats and they have moved to the back of the aircraft and these represent seats where phone calls would have been placed from on board the flight. We know there were 37 attempted phone calls. We do not know if that represents all of the phone calls because there were cell phone calls made. But most of the calls after the time of the hijacking were placed from airfones. These are satellite based phones the passengers would have used their credit cards to swipe and it leaves an excellent record for us to know these calls were attempted. We know who they called or who they attempted to call and we are able to go back to either transcripts or, in some cases, we have the actual recordings of some of the calls left on answering machines. These blocks represent the area of the aircraft were these calls are being placed from and you can see from the timeline, just to the right, how passengers and crew from their phone calls and from what we have been able to gather from different phone calls, a plan is being formulated to do something about their situation. They are learning very quickly in the early calls about the takeover that has occurred on other aircraft. And that the World Trade Center, as well as the pentagon, have been struck by aircraft. What they are being told by the terrorists on their flight is that they are going back to the airport to have demands met, which was common strategy being applied in reverse. What i mean by that is the faa developed what is known as common strategy for people in the Airline Industry in hijack situations, and it was really how you should respond. Some of the passive responses in years past is what a lot of the crew members would have been taking with them on board the claim that morning in how to respond to the hijacking initially. Because of these phone calls and the knowledge of what they are dealing with, it allows them to develop a completely new strategy while they are in the air that morning. That strategy is that they are going to attempt to retake control of the aircraft. We learn the passengers and crew took a vote from the back of the plane to do something and they would not sit idly by and wait for Something Else to happen. That they, themselves, were going to take action on board flight 93. That is best illustrated in the center of this exhibit space where you are viewing the information that has come back from the flight data recorder. This is the first box that is recovered out of the ground here at the crash site of flight 93 two days after the crash. But it allows the visitor to basically see exactly how flight 93 was flying in the final six minutes when they implement the plan of fighting back and trying to regain control. The terrorists are going to manipulate the controls to make it difficult for the passengers and crew to gain access to the cockpit. That is provided by the National Transportation safety board. At the top, you will see the cockpit voice recorder, the narrative is across the top so you can see in real time what is unfolding on the cockpit voice recorder. At the front of the plane, there are four microphones that capture the voices in and around the cockpit space. That is paired up with how this plane is flying in the final moments. As we approach 10 03 a. M. , you will see the plane is going to come up at a 90 degree angle. The plane is going to rise up and as it does that, it will hold that for about a second and then it is going to rock over onto its backside and the plane crashng to come down and at 10 03 11 in the fields just beyond the Visitor Center. Adam as we leave this wall and we turn to the next well, it was very important to try to give visitors, especially if they have never flown before, never been on a 757 before, the idea or the sense of being compressed into the space of a single aisle aircraft. Flight 93 and the flight that hits the pentagon are both these model aircraft. The planes that crashed at the World Trade Center are 767, so aisled aircraft. L it was important to give visitors the sense of being at the back of the aircraft where a lot of those phone calls took place. We give visitors the opportunity to listen to three of the four recorded phone calls that were placed from on board flight 93. She phoned her husband about 11 minutes after the hijacking began leaving this message on their home answering machine. Honey, are you there . Jack, pickup, sweetie. Ok, well i just wanted to tell , you i love you. We are having a little problem on the plane. I am totally fine. I love you more than anything, just know that. And okw, im comfortable for now. It is a little problem. I just love you. Please tell my family i love them, too. Bye, honey. Adam this is the answering machine in california capturing the message she just left for her husband jack who was at home that morning, but because of the time differential, being three hours different from the eastern seaboard, he is still in bed. He doesnt awaken when she makes the phone call. Atlinda phoned her sister 9 46 a. M. About 18 minutes into , the hijacking, leaving this message on her home answering machine. I only have a minute. I am on united 93 and it has been hijacked by terrorists. They say they have a bomb. Apparently, they have flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already. It looks like they are going to take this one down as well. Mostly, i just want to say i love you. Im going to miss you. Please give my love [sobbing] i just love you and i just wanted to tell you that. I dont know if i will be able to tell you that again or not. All of my stuff is in the safe. The safe is in my closet in my bedroom. The combination is 0913. Maybe and then it should unlock. I love you. I hope i can talk to you soon. Bye. The Flight Attendant phoned her husband at 9 47 a. M. , about 19 minutes into the hijacking, leaving this message on their answering machine. Hi, baby. You have to listen to me carefully. I am on a plane that has been hijacked. I am calling from the plane. I want to tell you i love you. Please tell my children i love them very much. I am so sorry. I do not know what to say. There are three guys that have hijacked the plane. I am trying to be calm. Ive heard there are planes that have flown into the World Trade Center. I hope to be able to see your face again. I love you. Bye. Adam if we walk around from this wall we will go around to , the next wall and it will take you right here to shanksville to where the plane impacts into the edge of a reclaimed mining site. If you look to the top, the 911 phone call or that lives only about half a mile or less from where we are standing. This is a snippet of her call. Flight 93 will impact at 500 563 Miles Per Hour inverted upside down and this case is meant to give you the sense of fragmentation that takes place when flight 93 crashes. If we get closer, we can take a look at some of the pieces recovered. These were average sized pieces found across the site from the point of impact and southward. You have a lot of wiring, 757 made up of over 60 miles of wiring. A very common thing to find bolts and rivets. There are over 600,000 bolts and rivets holding the plane together when it impacts. This shows you how finite this large locomotive waited piece of equipment has become after it hits the ground. You can see the bluish smoke coming out of the crater from the jet fuel that incinerates on impact. What i think a lot of people are oftentimes amazed by is the pieces are so fragmented and small, but the majority of the aircraft has been absorbed into the ground. It is not until later when they began excavating the crater and looking for evidence that they will start to uncover more and more of flight 93. That is represented best may be visually on camera by this mockup. This sort of represents the edge of where mining had ceased. This is the southern edge of a very large open surface mine that had been active up until the mid1990s. Flight 93 is going to crash just before the edge of the tree line. It is crashing in an area that would have been the soil would have been removed for a period of time until the coal had been removed and this would have been backfilled. Much softer than if it had crashed in a field where the soil had not been removed. This area here, where the trees, the Hemlock Grove exists today, this would have been a natural stand of trees across here. When the jet fuel incinerates that morning with the explosion from crashing into the ground, the fireball is going to continue on the trajectory the plane had been traveling. And the jet fuel being topside because the plane is inverted will come off the fuel will continue on the trajectory of the plane and engulf this area with flame impingement. That is best captured by the state police that morning. Around 11 30 a. M. That morning, the corporal from the state police with the Aviation Division is going to be airborne as they arrive here. They will capture some aerial footage of the site. Initially, they do not know what they are looking at. As far as where the plane impacts. They will land their helicopter, they will be briefed, and they are going to return that afternoon and get some closer footage of the impact site. This footage can clearly show you where this whole 757 impacts the ground and this is the vertical tail stabilizer you see up above in the fuselage. That is where it would have impacted. It was inverted so it would have been impacting the ground this way. It shows the scorching of the trees represented by the black walls of the Visitor Center. There is so much debris that it is embedded in these hemlock trees because it is on the trajectory of the flight path, whenever the decision is made to cut down the burned trees, they send those trees through a wood chipper and the wood pile remains here on the site. It never left. It was part of the effort to ensure there was proper care taken for the remains and no remains would leave the site unless they were going for identification and return to family members. You see some of the response out of the community that begins after flight 93 crashes here. This is rick king, the assistant fire chief out of shanksville. And there is a quote that captures sort of the moment and what that most have been like poor responders coming here that morning. This photo has been captured many times. The quote underneath captures the moment for her when she takes this picture. This also represents the state response. You have governor tom ridge arriving, the governor of pennsylvania at the time. Of course he will eventually be , promoted when president bush creates the department of Homeland Security as the secretary of the department of Homeland Security. And of course, the media immediately wants to know about this plane crash, what has happened in new york city and the pentagon, there is an immediate thirst for knowledge and understanding about why this plane has crashed here, what investigators are looking for, and what the experience has been. The media is going to be pushed out away from the site within the first hour or so of being here. There is a press conference that is established very near where the first 911 phone call is going to be received. This is a great place to transition to the next wall behind us. This quote is taken from a special agent in charge and shows the methodical nature all the investigators that came to this crash site were going to apply for the 13 days they were going to be combing over the site. If we went to the next wall, what you see is this is a tactile visitors can touch and it is representational of the flight, cockpit voice recorder. This crime scene become so becomes so important in those early hours and days after september 11 because this flight does not hit its target. And because of that, investigators are able to comb through the debris field and more easily get to any evidence that is going to shed light on who carried out the attacks, how they accomplished the attacks, and whether or not, if there were other attacks we needed to be aware of. Theyre hoping to be able to sift through debris here in order to answer a lot of those questions. It is here, one pittsburgh f. B. I. Agent says they were driving the 9 11 investigation because of the evidence they were able to recover here at this site. Recorder, theoice black boxes, this is orange. This is how they are loaded into the tail section of the aircraft. They are designed to be able to survive up to 2000 degrees fahrenheit up to a period of about 30 minutes and withstand a large amount of gforce. They were very hopeful they would find these boxes. And the reason we know so much about what happened on flight 93 is because these boxes are excavated out of the ground. You come to a Television Monitor that takes you through the methodical nature of combing through the ground, the linear approach they take to picking up aircraft debris that might be obstructing the view of any evidence laying underneath it or on the ground. They began sifting through the debris and categorizing plane parts from evidence and personal effects. The fabulous thing about this exhibit and some of the other exhibits we have here in the Visitor Center, it is captured by oral history. You can pick up i know you are capturing some of the text, but you can pick up these and can listen to the voices of the investigators themselves describe the importance of the site. You can hear how important it was the moment they discovered the cockpit voice recorder and the data recorder. You do not have to hear from a ranger why it is important. You can hear from the people themselves that were here combing through the site. You are looking at the suntrust bankcard recovered here that sheds light on the financial trail of al qaeda. It is a really important piece of evidence recovered here on the ground. You can see they are sifting through the dirt being excavated out of the crater and very carefully raking through that ground. Basically they are on their , hands and knees going through a lot of the debris. A big part of that is the recovery of human remains, the ability to identify everybody that boarded this aircraft. The end of the exhibit space, what youre seeing is the Somerset County coroner and his role. This is his scene. Hes going to have a federally dispatched Team Disaster mortuary Operational Response team. They are going to assist him with the recovery of the human remains. A lot of visitors ask us about the remains, about this being a final resting place because we sort of use that term generally. From the moment of impact, 92 of the remains, it is estimated, were unrecoverable. They are scattered across the site and were never recovered. It is believed about 8 of the remains of the people on board flight 93 were recovered and a percentage of that 8 were identifiable that could be returned to family members. The remaining unidentified remains were brought back here. This is both traditional and nontraditional Burial Ground and we treat the crash site as such, protecting over 42 acres of ground south of the Memorial Plaza. You are looking at some of the pieces recovered from flight 93 itself. You see a seatbelt latch, some of the silverware that would have been possibly used in first class. A portion of a manual. If you come up from that, youll see, these are some of the larger pieces recovered on flight 93. The piece to the front is the nose number. This is the number that wouldve been used by the specific airline. There is a nose number and a tail number and those are specific to the airline company. The tail number is used by faa to identify planes, like your license plate you have on your car. The top piece comes from the vertical tail stabilizer. That is the only place on flight other than the American Flag 93 itself that would have adorned the site of the plane where you have red, white, and blue. We have some examples of small artifacts recovered from the site. He works for the fish and Wildlife Service as a refuge officer. That is his Law Enforcement badge. We have an employee identification badge. We have her drivers license that was recovered at the crash that. Crash site. The drivers license is a facsimile. I will come around the side. This wall is all about the passengers and crew of flight 93. The idea here, much like the portraits hanging on your wall at home, there is a central photo where each of the 40 passengers and crew were identified and theres an unmarked photo, a secondary photo that captures them with other people in their lives, other family members and friends, captures a moment in time from their life that was really special to their family or friends. This piece in the center is the cap of the purser, which would have been the Flight Attendant caring for firstclass. This hat was a signature piece worn by deborah welsh. Debbie would regularly wear this sailor style cap when she went to work. This is one of the photos we have of her wearing that hat. If you pan just above that photo, you will see debbie with her dalmatian. She absolutely loved him. If you come down to the screen, we can look at debbie welsh. There is a bio that will cover a little bit about her life. You can look through additional photos. We see her with her dalmatian. You can scroll through. She loved to fly and she loved she was known for sometimes taking some of the leftover Airline Meals home with her and would take those home and distribute those to some of the homeless or to people in need. She would see they were distributed and used. Im sure that did not go with airline policy. This is her with her husband in the beginning of her career. Over here, you have some items that belonged to first officer leroy homer. You have his patch from his military service with the air force. He was a graduate of the United States air force academy. His wings and his luggage tag. Two passengers who were traveling for the u. S. Census bureau. She was a 21year employee of the United States census bureau. This is the bronze medal she received for exceptional service. I think the other neat piece we have here, this is the congressional gold medal that was struck for flight 93. In 2014, that was presented here on september 11 to the site for the actions of the passengers and crew of flight 93. Represented. Sides it is important to say that each site, each of the september 11 sites, new york city and the pentagon also have congressional gold medals that represent their sites specifically. This is the one that represents flight 93. If we turn around to the wall behind me, this captures how visitors have been drawn to the site over the last 15 years. At the top, you have a quote that was written on a tribute piece that was left here at the flight 93 crash site. It was left at one of the early, temporary memorials. If we come over here to the exhibit case, the words are on this photo of a quilt. It have been stitched together by someone in california. Captain ruda wrote these words. At an early planning meeting where they were trying to decide what would happen with this memorial, this quote was identified as a preamble to a Larger Mission statement for what the memorial would become. When we came in from the outside of the Visitor Center and you are walking the flight path, as we did at the beginning, you noticed a common field one day. That is where it comes from. A tribute item left here in these fields as a tribute to the passengers and crew of flight 93. In 2003. Some of the groupings of tribute items that have been left at the temporary memorial or at the permanent memorial, you have things that represent the rescue workers that responded at all of the sites. Patches are a common form of items left here representing not just rescue workers but military. We have a strong connection here with people visiting that leave military items. Down at the end, we also have items that were left here by the people who responded here. This is the shanksville fire department, a coat that would have been left. The original coat is in storage. This is a facsimile. The original coat you can see a picture on the wall. The other piece in the foreground is the assistant fire chiefs helmet. And some of the other shields that would have been at the front of responding Fire Departments that responded at the crash of flight a piece in 93. The center is a montage of various people and times throughout the history of the site since the crash. From the very moments where family members were coming here for the first time and leaving flowers and things themselves to visitors beginning to come here for the first time as well and pay tribute to the actions of the passengers and crew, you have shifting periods from the early days to the dedication of the permanent memorial in 2011 at the Memorial Plaza and the walls that bears their names, building up to the dedication of the Visitor Center we are standing in in 2015. , at the conclusion of the exhibit space, this is a final wall. And it captures the nearly 3000 lives that were lost that day as a result of these attacks, including flight 93. They are segmented out by the different locations. In the center, there are three screens that capture the three memorial sites. Because this is an unfolding story, we did not talk about postseptember 11 and the world that is continuously changing. And of course, there are events tied to International Terrorism that have unfolded since that time. The learning center, which he we passed on our way into the site, is a place where we are continuously going to be looking to expand on the story since september 11 and talk about it is a place where we can talk about the legacy of flight 93 as well as the continuing story from these events. We thought it was important to stop here and pay tribute to all those who lost their lives as well as show the three memorial sites where you can go and learn more about the individual stories at those locations. Flight 93 National Memorial represents a lot about what makes america a fantastic country. On september 11, 2001, the people on board flight 93 were every day ordinary people, citizens of the globe, and it shows you can make a difference no matter how big or how small and no matter where you are at. And in a very short period of time. It shows human nature at its best and its worst moments, together. It shows that everyday people can come together for the betterment of humanity and what you see illustrated here is people not sitting by and watching but actively becoming involved citizens in an event that unfolded to them. In a sense, the passengers and crew of flight 93 were living in a postseptember 11 world long before any of us knew about it. They were living it in the skies overhead. It is important for us to take the lessons of the people on this plane and what they were able to do in a short time. I often tell students coming here, think about how you utilize 3035 minutes out of your everyday life and what you can do with that time. Maybe you can repurpose that time, even if it is something as simple as, you know, helping somebody carry their groceries from the car or picking up garbage. It is often a challenge to the visitors who come here, a chance for selfexamination and i think a lot of visitors ask themselves, would they be able to do this themselves if they were put in the position . I think it is a question nobody can answer unless they are faced with the same set of situations. But it is one people often ask themselves when they are here. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] you can watchrg, our programs at any time at your convenience. Go to our home page and click on the Video Library search bar. You can type in the name of a speaker, sponsor of the bill, or event. Review the search results and click on the program you like to watch or refine your search with our tools. If youre looking for current programs, our homepage has many current programs ready your immediate viewing such as todays washington journal or the events we covered that day. Cspan is a service of your cable or satellite provider. Check it out at cspan. Org cspan are members september 11, 2001 through the stories of americans who were at the white house, the u. S. Capitol, the pentagon, and in the skies over washington, d. C. Former senator majority leader tom daschle was among the congressional leaders evacuated by helicopter to an undisclosed location. Over the next 50 minutes he recounts his experiences that day, from his aerial view of the pentagon to his description of the secret location for congressional leaders regrouped and determined how to respond to the terrorist attacks against the United States. Steve take us back to the morning of september 11, 2001. How did your day again . Sen. Daschle steve, my day began by my normal preparation for what we were going to hold a routine leadership meeting, every tuesday we would do that. I came in early and john glenn, a dear friend, came by