Posted By The Philadelphia Inquirer
Click Here To View PDF
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — Judi Baeckel put up her American flag as usual outside her home the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and gazed up at the limitless blue sky that aviators call “severe clear.” “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s going to be such a beautiful, wonderful day today,’ ” she recalled a couple of weeks ago. Within hours, United Airlines Flight 93, almost belly up and engines screaming, slammed into a grassy field a mile or so from her front door.
A fireball shot skyward, and then a puff of dark black smoke shaped like a mushroom. Houses and buildings shook in the rural town of 245 people. Windows rattled; garage doors popped open.
“There was nothing but a big crater,” said Rick King, former assistant chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company Station 627, who, with three colleagues, was first on the scene in an engine nicknamed Big Mo. Small fires flickered here and there. A grove of hemlock trees was burning. The air reeked of kerosene Jet A fuel. There was no one to rescue. “You never get over it, never,” King said. “I relive it every day. I can see it as if it’s happening now.”
United 93, the fourth weaponized jet in the 9/11 attacks on America, missed its target, believed to be the U.S. Capitol…
