Dateline NBC - Heroes: The Story of Flight 93
Episode Date: September 14, 2021Lester Holt interviews family members, including the now-grown children of some of the passengers and crew of Flight 93, as they honor the lives and courage that inspired the world on 9/11.Remembering... the Heroes of Flight 93: https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/watch-dateline-episode-heroes-story-flight-93-now-n1278967
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Here's the first confirmation from United Airlines. One of its flights crashed in the
Pittsburgh area. Flight 93 of Boeing 757. My mom, Cece, was on Flight 93. She was a flight attendant.
There was an explosion of smoke, flaming, grass and field all on board. My dad was named Tom Burnett, and he was a passenger on Flight 93.
Linda was seated in first class, row two. The passengers not only resisted the hijackers, they may even have thwarted them from crashing into the White House.
Lauren was seated in 11D.
She was three months pregnant with her first child. What happened above this Pennsylvania field ranks among the most courageous acts in American history.
One World Trade Center, Freedom Tower, a shining tribute to American spirit and resilience two decades after 9-11.
Good evening and welcome to Dateline. I'm Lester Holt.
9-11 was the worst act of terrorism this country has ever seen, but it inspired one of the
most astonishing acts of bravery.
Tonight, the heroes of Flight 93, the lives they lived, the people they loved, and the
courage that inspired the nation.
Their names are etched in white marble, one panel for each.
40 ordinary men and women who decided to do the extraordinary when it counted most,
sacrificing themselves so that others might live.
In those harrowing days right after the crash,
we spoke to family members still reeling from final phone calls home.
He was not interested in reviewing his life or whispering sweet nothings into the telephone, I assure
you he was problem solving.
Now, 20 years later, they look back.
I really felt as if part of me had died.
We also speak to some of the children of Flight 93, coming together for the first time.
I find myself wondering if any of your parents interacted with each other on that plane.
Absolutely. I mean, they were with each other in their last moments.
In their last moments.
Maybe comforted each other as well.
Sons and daughters determine that future generations will know their parents' story.
On Flight 93, they took a vote, and they did something for the greater good of the country.
September 11th dawned severe clear, as pilots call it, crisp blue skies.
United 93, Newark to San Francisco, had all the makings of a routine flight.
With just 44 people on board, the 757 would be mostly empty.
Good news for passengers looking to stretch out.
Little did they know they would soon be face-to-face with terror.
Boarding the flight that morning was aviation executive Don Green, his wife Claudette.
This is a guy who came home every Friday from work with flowers for me.
His greatest joy was being at home for dinner every single night.
Son Charlie was 10 on September 11th.
Daughter Jodi was six.
My dad was the kind of guy that would just get right into the ball pit with us.
Wasn't standing off to the side with the other parents.
He was breaking the rules and being a part of the experience that we're all sharing together. Taking a seat in first class
was businessman Tom Burnett.
He had three children waiting for him at home
in California, five-year-old twins Madison and Hallie,
and three-year-old Anna Claire.
Anna Claire, I understand you have your father's wit.
That's what I'm told. She definitely does.
Hallie, you have his eyes.
I have his eyes.
Madison, what do you have?
Probably his practicality.
Oh, she's got one here.
The COO of a medical technology company, Tom met his wife, Dina, back when she was training to be a flight attendant.
There was no one else like him.
He was confident. He was confident.
He was intelligent.
He was outspoken and dynamic.
Sitting two rows in front of Tom was another dynamo,
Linda Gronlund, a take-charge manager at BMW.
She and her boyfriend, Joe DeLuca,
were off to celebrate her birthday in wine country. She called her sister, Joe DeLuca, were off to celebrate her birthday in wine country.
She called her sister, Elsa, from the terminal. What was your mood? Oh, it was great. She was
leaving on a trip and she was excited. How old was she going to be? 47. Marketing director Lauren
Gran-Coles was traveling home after her grandmother's funeral,
but she had reason to be happy.
After years of trying, she and her husband Jack were expecting a baby.
We finally decided we're 38 years old.
If it doesn't happen, we'll be happy with, you know, cats instead of kids.
So it was a good time in your lives.
We were on as fast a track and a higher road as any couple could have been at that
time. Lauren wasn't supposed to be on United 93, but she got to the airport early. She left a
message for Jack, who was at home asleep in California. Hey, I just want to let you know I'm
on eight o'clock instead of the 920. So I get to San Francisco at about 11 and I'll be at the ferry
terminal probably a little before 12. Okay. So I'll call you then. Bye. Lauren was one of at least
10 passengers who switched to United 93 last minute. Father of two, Todd Beamer, was another.
Todd's wife, Lisa, was one of the family members who spoke to us
right after the crash. He and I had just gotten back from Italy Monday afternoon, and he wanted
to spend some time with the kids that night and have a little more time before he flew out, so he
decided to try to crunch his travel in in the morning. Jeremy Glick's original flight had been cancelled. He and his wife Liz had just
welcomed their first child. She also talked to us back in 2001. He didn't want to go and I said you
have to go. You know you can't say no to your company. You need to go out on your business trip.
Everything seemed normal to the passengers as the cabin door closed,
but they were about to become part
of a horrifying terrorist attack,
one that involved not just one, but four passenger planes.
Sitting in first class, right near the cockpit,
were four hijackers.
One was trained as a pilot,
the other three there to seize control of the plane.
They were known as the muscle hijackers. Mitchell Zukoff is the author of Fall and Rise,
the story of 9-11. Their role was to brutalize, to murder, to instill fear in the passengers and crew. United 93, I understand you're ready for the taxi.
At 8.01 a.m., United 93 backed away from the gate.
Runway traffic at Newark caused a delay of about a half hour,
time that would turn out to be critical.
At 8.42, the plane took off, headed west.
A few more minutes on the ground,
and the passengers might have seen this just across the river.
The world's safe center tower number one is Australia.
They didn't know it yet, but the attack on America had begun. By 9 a.m., United 93 was cruising comfortably at about 35,000 feet on its way to San Francisco.
Folks are settling in in the back, you know, thinking about a movie or some sleep.
You know, maybe you start smelling the coffee brewing and you know, I'll be here for a little while.
It seemed like an everyday flight, but down on the ground, chaos was starting to unfold.
The passengers didn't know it, but 45 minutes earlier, at around 8.14 a.m., terrorists hijacked the first of the
four flights, American 11, en route from Boston to Los Angeles. Air traffic controllers realized
what was happening when they heard injure yourself and the airplane.
Let's stay quiet.
They had tried to contact the plane but got no response
and could only watch as the flight abruptly changed course
and headed toward New York City.
The expectation of hijackings was if someone hijacks your plane, you try to
accommodate them to make sure that people get onto the ground safely. And then Flight 11 changed the
rules in real time because the terrorist pilot suddenly started flying the plane, not making
demands, but turning it into a guided missile. At 8.46, the terrorists reached their target, smashing the plane into the
World Trade Center's North Tower. The World Trade Center tower number one is on fire.
Don Green's wife Claudette was home after dropping her kids off at school.
I turned the TV on. It was like... What was your reaction?
I thought it was horrible,
and there was speculation at that point that it was just a small airplane, that somebody may have
had a heart attack at the controls. So terrorism wasn't the first thought that came to your mind?
No. No. But terrorism would consume everyone's mind 15 minutes later.
At 9.03, another hijacked flight out of Boston, United 175, ripped into the South Tower.
Oh, another one just hit. Something else just hit. A very large plane just flew directly over my building.
Elsa Strong was in her car listening to the radio when the station broke in.
Right away, she thought about her sister Linda on Flight 93.
And immediately, I just, I knew Linda was up in the air at that point or close to it.
Presumably, there were a lot of airplanes in the air at that moment.
Thousands, right?
What were the odds? Exactly. Jerome Smith was anxiously following the news as well.
His mom, CeCe Lyles, was a flight attendant on United 93. He was 16 and in high school science
class when the towers were struck. He ran out and called her cell phone. I didn't get an answer. I
went straight to voicemail.
Do you remember what you said in that message? I was saying, hey, I love you. I see this on TV.
You know, I just want to make sure you're okay. CeCe was a former cop who had only been a flight
attendant for nine months on 9-11. Javon, who was six, is her youngest. Javon, were you proud of
your mom? I mean, she put on her uniform and go fly
for a living. Yeah, I was proud, but I missed her. I wanted her to come back all the time.
Working alongside CeCe in the rear galley of the plane was flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw.
Her daughter, Alex, was just two on 9-11. She was independent and beautiful and everybody always says that my smile is similar
to hers, which I love hearing that. Sandy's husband Phil, a pilot for U.S. Airways, had tried to convince
her to skip the flight. They crossed paths at the airport on September 10th. As I was coming home, she was leaving, and I was begging her to come home.
Just scrap this month. Just go home with me.
And she's like, no, I'll just do this one trip, and it'll be fine.
Sandy would later speak to Phil from Flight 93, and things wouldn't be fine at all.
But in those early moments, as the plane soared over western Pennsylvania, fill from Flight 93, and things wouldn't be fine at all.
But in those early moments as the plane soared over western Pennsylvania,
everything seemed normal.
The pilots relayed a routine update to air traffic control. Morning, Cleveland United 93, is this your 350?
Intermittent lights up.
But terror was about to engulf the cabin. At 9.23 a.m., a United Flight dispatcher sent a warning message to the pilots.
Beware any cockpit intrusion, it said.
Two aircraft hit World Trade Center.
The pilots responded at 9.26.
Saying, confirm message, please.
He's like, what's going on?
But by then, it's almost too late.
Moments later, the terrorists breach the cockpit.
The takeover of United 93 was underway. It was unbelievable seeing this second jet come crashing into the second tower.
What is going on?
It just exploded.
As more and more Americans tuned in to the frightening scenes in Lower Manhattan,
they didn't know that above northeastern Ohio, another attack was just beginning.
It was 9-28 when terrorists stormed the cockpit of United 93.
The plane plummeted 700 feet.
Air traffic controllers heard the assault in real time. The hijackers quickly
subdued the pilots and herded the passengers to the back of the plane. All four flights had this
plan of action of get into the cockpit, take over the flight, and get everyone else as far away from
the cockpit as possible.
In the middle of the takeover, Tom Burnett somehow found a way to call his wife, Dina.
I said, are you okay? And he said, no, I'm not. I'm on United Airlines flight 93,
Newark to San Francisco, and the plane has been hijacked. I need you to call the authorities.
He said the hijackers had a bomb and had stabbed a passenger.
My body just stood still, and I could not believe that what I was watching on television
and I thought was 2,000 miles away was now happening in my living room.
And I started fumbling through the phone book, trying to figure out who do I call, who do I call.
I called 911.
At 9.32, a hijacker tried to deliver a message to the cabin,
but pressed the wrong button and ended up speaking to the controllers.
He turned the plane around and set course for Washington, D.C.
The cockpit voice recorder recovered at the crash site reveals what happened next. There was a woman we believe was a
flight attendant who was in the cockpit who was brutally murdered. The recording itself hasn't
been released but a transcript has been made public. She's begging for her life. She's begging
not to be hurt and they ignore her and one says it's finished. Huddled in the back of the cabin,
the passengers grabbed the earphones built into the back of their seats
and started making calls, about 30 of them in the next 25 minutes.
In an era before smartphones or social media,
it was their best way to communicate.
At 9.35, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw
reported the hijacking to a United
maintenance facility. The person she reached described her as shockingly calm. A couple of
minutes later, Jeremy Glick called his wife. He had said there were some very bad men that had
come onto the plane. He said that they were Arabic-looking men. I think he said that they were wearing red headbands.
Passenger Todd Beamer picked up a phone
and dialed Zero.
He told an air phone supervisor named Lisa Jefferson
what he knew.
She talked to us back in 2001.
The hijacker with the bomb
pulled the curtain to in first class so they couldn't see what was going on.
But he did see two people that were on the floor in the front of the plane appeared to be hurt.
He couldn't tell if they were dead or alive.
While they were talking, the plane lurched.
His voice went up a little bit because he said, we're going down, we're going down.
No, wait, we're coming back up.
At this point, I don't know where we're going.
I don't know. I really don't know.
Oh, Jesus, please help us.
Then he told me, he said, in case I don't make it through this,
would you please do me a favor and call my wife and my family and let them know how much I love them.
So I told them I would.
The passengers weren't just relaying information in these calls.
They were learning things, too.
Thanks to that earlier delay on the runway,
they had time to find out that their hijacking wasn't an isolated event.
Tom Burnett again called Dina.
That's when I told him that there were planes being hijacked up and down the East Coast,
that they were being used as missiles going into buildings.
And he turned and told people around him what I was saying.
At this point, you're beginning to piece together the broader picture of what's happening.
Yes.
We're looking at live pictures of the Pentagon where there is billowing smoke.
Not long after they hung up, news of a third plane crash.
At 937, American Flight 77 en route from D.C. to L.A. smashed into the Pentagon.
Dina fell apart.
I was certain that it was Tom's flight
and just began to wail,
absolutely wail in grief.
I was glued to the television
trying to figure out could there have been survivors.
But she says Tom called yet again.
He was alive and he told her something astonishing.
He began telling me that they were going to take back the plane and not to worry.
Everything was going to be okay.
It was almost impossible to worry. Everything was going to be okay. It was almost impossible to believe. On a plane
hijacked at 35,000 feet, a group of strangers was teaming up and making a plan to strike back. On the morning of September 11th, Tom Burnett's young daughters could see something was very wrong.
Their mom was distraught.
I remember seeing my mom absolutely wailing.
And being five years old, it's incredibly traumatic.
It scared me.
And so I got up from the breakfast table, and I just remember hiding behind the couch,
just kind of watching what was going on, but having no idea what was happening.
Dina Burnett says her husband told her something extraordinary.
He and the other passengers were talking about how they could fight back against the terrorists.
Listening to him talk about taking back the cockpit or moving forward or
attacking these hijackers was very frightening. But not entirely surprising,
she says Tom collected books about American military history. And he would
say, you know, I wonder if I would have that kind of courage.
I wonder what it would be like to march into battle
knowing you were going to die.
He reflected on these sorts of things.
Tom Burnett wasn't the only person on that flight
you'd want in your corner.
You had one after another,
people who were type A+, some people described them as.
Among them, Mark Bingham was a rugby player who stood six foot four.
Jeremy Glick was a one-time judo champ.
And CeCe Lyles patrolled some rough streets in her days as a police officer.
I've literally seen her chase people.
And, I mean, men her own size, you know, bigger.
She's not the type that was going to sit by without putting up a fight.
No way.
She's in the front, and they're going to do what they have to do.
And passenger Don Green had a skill that may have been crucial to the team.
He got his pilot's license before he got his driver's license.
Green worked in aviation and flew this amphibious plane
in his spare time.
Often with his son, Charlie.
Could you have imagined him
at the controls
and safely bringing that plane back?
With help from a control tower,
there's no question that he would have
been able to land that aircraft.
In the back of the jet,
the passengers and crew
started to band
together and compared notes about all those horrific reports from loved ones on the ground.
They sort of collectively realized that what happened in the North Tower, what happened in
the South Tower, what happened at the Pentagon is about to happen to them. As they debated what to do, passengers began leaving messages for their families.
At 9.39 a.m., Lauren Grant-Colas called her husband, Jack.
Honey, are you there? Jack, pick up, sweetie. Okay, well, I just wanted to tell you I love you. We're having a little problem on the plane. I'm totally fine.
I just love you more than anything.
Just know that.
Just a little problem.
So I just love you.
Please tell my family I love them too.
Bye, honey.
Just a little problem.
Jack only heard the message after he woke up that morning.
She was protecting me. She was calm as could be.
It was probably the bravest message you could ever expect.
Minutes after Lauren's call, at 9.46, Linda Gronlund phoned her sister Elsa and left her own message.
Elsa, it's Lynn. I only have a minute. I'm on United 93 and it's been hijacked by terrorists who say they have a bomb.
Mostly I just wanted to say I love you and I'm going to miss you. My stuff is in the safe.
The safe is in my closet in my bedroom.
I love you and I hope I can talk to you soon.
Bye.
Elsa got home minutes later and saw her answering machine blinking.
At that moment, I just wanted to go back.
I wanted to go back in time, like 10 minutes, you know, then I would have been able to speak with her myself.
As the passengers struggled to say their goodbyes, they decided to take a vote.
In a matter of minutes, a group of strangers came together and said, let's vote on an action. I mean, my God, what a powerful endorsement of democracy.
With that, they quickly formed an attack plan.
Jeremy Glick told his wife what they were thinking.
At first, she was worried. It was too risky.
You know, I finally just decided, honey, you need to do it.
And then he joked. He's like, okay, I have my butter knife from breakfast, you know, which is totally like Jeremy.
Liz sat and prayed as Jeremy kept the phone line open.
We said I love you a thousand times over and over and over again,
and it just brought so much peace to us.
Dina says Tom called her one more time. In a remarkable bit of foresight,
he said they were waiting to get over a rural area before they mounted their assault on the
hijackers. My flight attendant training kicked in and I just yelled at him and I said, no, no, no,
sit down, be still, be quiet, don't draw attention to yourself.
But that's not him.
That was not who he was. And he yelled back at me and said, if they're going to fly this plane
into a building, we're going to do something.
The fight to take back Flight 93 was about to begin.
9.57 on the morning of September 11th, chaos enveloped Lower Manhattan as the Twin Towers burned, while the third attack at the Pentagon spurred evacuations at the White House and U.S. Capitol.
It had been barely a half hour since the terrorists had hijacked Flight 93 and redirected the plane toward D.C.
Now, its passengers and crew members were girded for battle. They don't know what the destination is, but they know how the story ends.
And they decide we're going to change the script.
In one of the last calls from the plane, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw called her husband Phil, a pilot himself.
And she's like, Phil, my flight's just been hijacked by four guys with knives.
And we're all in the back of the airplane boiling water to throw on them.
Do you have any ideas for me?
And I'm like, do what you got to do to get control of that airplane.
The minutes were ticking by, and Sandy had no time to spare.
The last thing she said was, Phil, everybody's running to first class.
I got to go. Bye.
And that was it.
Todd Beamer had remained on the phone with operator Lisa Jefferson. As they spoke,
Jefferson could hear screaming in the background. Beamer asked her to pray with him.
He wanted me to recite the Lord's Prayer with him, and he did. After that,
he had a sign in his voice. He took a deep breath. He was still holding the phone, but he was not talking to me. He was talking to someone else. And he said, you ready? Okay. Let's roll.
Let's roll. Beamer's words would become a rallying cry in the wake of the 9-11 attacks,
marking the moment when the team decided to charge the cockpit.
There's a single aisle on a 757. It's about 20 inches wide.
So they realize that it's going to be a single-file attack.
We don't know exactly what happened next,
but the cockpit voice recorder and its transcript reveal clues. So in the last minutes of the flight, we have English-speaking voices and the Arabic voices, including some in Arabic of the hijackers, sort of almost in dialogue.
Federal investigators permitted families of the passengers and crew to listen to the recording.
Linda Gronlund's sister, Elsa, was among them.
Why was it important for you to listen to that?
Truth.
You know, I wanted to hear what she went through during the last moments of her life.
I knew that it would give me a more clear answer as to what happened after he hung up that phone on the last phone call.
According to the transcript, at 9.57 a.m., the hijackers talked about a fight taking place with a series of male screams outside the cockpit.
Tom Burnett's wife, Dina, believes the passengers were attacking and killing one of the hijackers.
The way he was screaming, you had the idea that his head was being beaten.
And we often wondered if perhaps it was being beaten with a fire extinguisher, something very, very heavy.
9.58 a.m., more sounds of struggle, screaming.
One passenger yells, in the cockpit.
Dina believes that was her husband.
On the recording, I heard Tom say, in the cockpit, in the cockpit.
I also heard him at one point say, I'm injured.
Moments later, another male voice.
Saying, gotta get into the cockpit.'s get in there if we don't
we'll die then at 10 a.m a key moment in the passenger's assault according to investigators
a male passenger's voice can be heard shouting roll it as a command likely referring to the
plane's beverage cart that's followed by loud sounds of plates and glass
crashing. After listening
to the recording, pilot Phil
Bradshaw says the cart
could have been an effective battering
ram. You got a couple hundred pounds
just pushing it. It would have
easily broken through the door.
This was a determined group of people.
It was an absolutely amazing
group of people. It's it was an absolutely amazing group of people.
It's never been certain whether the team finally breached the cockpit,
but the hijackers were clearly becoming desperate.
It's just all chaos.
When all that started happening, the hijackers were panicking.
The terrorist pilot was wildly shifting the direction of the plane. He goes up and down. He goes hard left and hard right.
And another pilot in a small private plane
sees this happening over the fields of Pennsylvania.
Okay, what's he doing now, sir?
Looks like he's rocking his wings.
It's going to my observer.
Roger.
Keeps rocking back and forth.
Finally, at 10.02,
one of the hijackers screamed in Arabic,
pull it down, pull it down, and began chanting, Allah is the greatest.
The pilot has effectively given up, and he is pointing the nose of the plane down,
and we know that the passengers are never stopping.
They fought to the end.
They fought to the end.
They went down fighting, no doubt about it.
And they fought with honor.
At 10.03, the cockpit recording cuts out. Traveling at about 575 miles an hour,
United 93 crashed into that field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Air Traffic Control Headquarters in, began receiving intel. Okay, there is now on that United 93,
there is a report of black smoke in the last position I gave you, 15 miles south of Johnstown.
On a day when America faced the deadliest terrorist attack in its history, 40 ordinary
men and women fought back and defeated the hijacker's plan, an extraordinary
act of heroism that would stun us all.
The flight became a legend of sorts, but the story was all too real for the families left
behind. The news came quickly that terrifying morning.
Two jets had crashed into the Twin Towers.
A third had hit the Pentagon.
Then the towers collapsed.
It is a day of catastrophe.
I was anchoring at MSNBC when we got word of a fourth plane.
A large plane crashed just north of the Somerset County Airport, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
After all her calls with her husband Tom, Dina Burnett got the news she dreaded. The phone dropped, and I just remember feeling as though I was never going to be able to move again.
She gathered strength later in the evening to tell her three young daughters.
It doesn't get any tougher, does it?
It does not get tougher than that.
Than to look into the face of a child and let them know that their parent is dead.
Do either of you have a sense that he may walk in the door again?
Yes.
I had no idea what death was.
My mom has always said that I, in particular, always would be like,
oh, is he coming back from his trip? Is he going to come home next week?
Cece Lyle's sons, Jerome and Javon, say after that day, they were never the same.
Did either of you experience moments of anger?
Right now.
Right now?
Right now, in this moment. Yeah, I mean I mean, listen, I mean, let it out.
I mean, man, almost every day thinking about it. And then you got to think about the fact that God will never give you nothing you can't handle. And our mom was super strong. And it turned out
they discovered something a few days after the crash.
During the flight, their mom had left a final message on their answering machine for the boys and their stepfather.
I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much.
And I'm so sorry, babe. I don't know what to say.
I hope to be able to see your face again, baby.
I love you.
Bye.
I can imagine a message like that as a blessing and a curse.
Right.
But yet something that you want to cherish.
And to hold on to.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
For many of the families, their grief has never really gone away.
Phil Bradshaw says the moment when he lost his wife feels like it just happened yesterday.
You drop to your knees and you cry like a baby, because that's what I did.
You know, it's bad losing someone, but to lose them suddenly, it's even worse.
Not a day goes by I don't think about Sandy.
The day is imprinted in my head.
For Jack Grancolis, that day meant facing the loss of his wife, Lauren, and their unborn child.
Everybody deals with grief in their own way.
It sounds like it took you down a really deep and dark hole.
It did.
I remember looking in that deep abyss and saying,
this is not the way I want to go.
But more importantly, it wouldn't be the way Lauren would want me to live on. And that was what saved me. I can just hear her spirit and her spirit kept me going.
And it's the spirit of United 93 that spurs the families on to commemorate this 20th anniversary.
I think of Jody's age and her generation, there's a good chance that a lot of her peers have vague or no recollection of 9-11.
Is that concerning to you?
Well, it's important to keep the legacies of these people alive, all these souls that were lost on that day.
Nearly 3,000 people died on 9-11. That number might have been even higher if the passengers and crew on Flight
93 hadn't been willing to sacrifice their own lives. Investigators believe their selfless act
prevented the terrorists from reaching a fourth target, either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
Flight 93 symbolized the human spirit rising up against terror, rising up and saying,
we're not going to sit idly by while you take our lives and the lives of others. I think that
they're all heroes, every single one of them. Over the summer, we brought some of the children
of Flight 93 together. The Green family, the Burnetts, and the sons of CeCe Lyles. Many of
them had never met before. You could tell they shared a special bond and a sense of mission
as the next generation. I'm on the board of the Friends of Flight 93. It is an organization that
is working towards that mission of making sure that on the 30th anniversary or the 37th
anniversary, people are still talking about Flight 93 with that narrative of 9-11.
Jerome, do you feel a responsibility to talk about it, to share the story?
Yes, I do.
It is our duty. It is our job to keep this legacy, to keep our story, to remember those people that
gave their lives heroically.
Anna Claire, what do you think we should be holding on to as we move forward?
Unity and just trying to live our lives in their legacy.
The other message is one of resilience, knowing that resilience is a muscle.
So much of what happened on that day, I think over the years,
we've been able to reflect on as being an immense tragedy. But on the 20th anniversary, there's something, and maybe it's just sitting
on this couch with you all that maybe feels a little bit different. I agree. Yeah, when I think
about 9-11 and Flight 93 in particular, I think about a day of immense darkness.
I think about the great hope and bravery that was demonstrated by the passengers of Flight 93.
And that in the midst of darkness, there's still light pouring in. Many of the children plan to be in Shanksville tomorrow to observe the 20th anniversary with their families.
That's all for this edition of Dateline.
I'm Lester Holt.
For all of us at NBC News, good night.