Death and Dying - Flight

Death and Dying - Flight 93

UNITED FLIGHT 93

The infamous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 involved four separate hijackings of commercial airliners in the United States. Two crashed into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City and a third crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The last of the hijacked planes crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, about 150 miles from Washington, DC. It is believed that its intended target was either the White House of the Capitol building. All four hijackings were the result of terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda operatives who trained for their missions in the United States by taking lessons in flying commercial airliners in the year prior to the attacks.

Discussion:

United flight 93 was scheduled to take off from Newark International Airport in New Jersey and to land in at San Francisco International Airport in California. It is believed that the hijackers purposely chose flight scheduled for long routes because they would contain more fuel than shorter flights and the additional fuel would increase the destruction when they crashed into their targets (Larsen, 2007). At first, reports based on statements of Osama bin Laden were that United Flight 93 targeted the White House. Later interviews of captured al-Qaeda leaders and materials confiscated by U.S. military forces in Iraq seemed to indicate that the actual target was the Capitol building.

Apparently, bin Laden and other al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the attacks had made statements about attacking the White House to increase the public perception of their power to destroy the most highly protected site in the U.S. (Longman, 2002).

Analysis of the attacks revealed that several of the terrorists had received flight training at American flight schools. Controversy arose in that regard after it was also revealed that flight instructors at one flight school in Miami had contacted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorities and the local Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Miami field office long before September 2001 to report their suspicions about several students who had requested and paid for flight simulator time to practice only in- flight operations of commercial airliners, but not any instruction on take-off or landing procedures (Longman, 2002). The failure of authorities to follow up on those first reports are now considered breakdowns in aviation security that contributed to the success of those attacks. Since then, regulations of airport operations and all other aspects of aviation security have been greatly enhanced to prevent any repeat of terrorist attacks using commercial airliners or any other type of aircraft (Larsen, 2007).