Heroes of Flight 93 remembered for their courage 25 years on from 9/11: “I can’t ever thank them enough”

The Flight 93 National Memorial outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, is remote. Yet every year, more than 300,000 people make the pilgrimage here to walk the flight path and stand in the presence of the 40 souls who lost their lives at the far edge of this field on Sept. 11, 2001. 

“It’s gratifying for us to know that people take the time to get off the turnpike and come up and spend a few hours here to learn about the story,” Gordon Felt, who lost his 41-year-old brother Edward Felt on United Airlines Flight 93, told CBS News. 

Gordon Felt attended a National Park Service ceremony Friday held at the memorial to honor the victims of Flight 93. 

His brother’s final moments — and the final moments of all those innocent passengers and crew members aboard Flight 93 — are a story he wants people to learn.

It is a story that I told on that first day as a CBS News reporter assigned to cover the crash. At the time, it was a mystery as to why the plane had crashed in that specific location.

Twenty-five years ago, just hours after the crash of Flight 93, in an attempt to solve that mystery, I stood in the field where the plane went down near Shanksville, holding a map of the U.S.

From flight data, I knew the plane changed course somewhere near Cleveland, Ohio. So I drew a line from Cleveland to Shanksville, and then continued a hypothetical flight path that led right to Washington, D.C.

And it was then that I got this gut feeling, like a hunch, that in the sky above me, just hours earlier, something had happened. Something not only terribly wrong, but incredibly righteous.

“The good guys won that day,” Gordon Felt said. “The bad guys were defeated.”

We now know from phone calls to the ground that Edward Felt and the rest of the passengers and crew bravely decided to storm the cockpit that morning, preventing the terrorists who had taken control of the plane from flying it to its intended target, most likely the Capitol building.

“The hope that I think we had moving forward from September 11th was our flag was still flying proudly and defiantly above the Capitol,” Gordon Felt said.

Paul Pisano was working at the Capitol building that day.

“If they hadn’t taken the action they had and stood up … It’s horrific to think about,” Pisano said. 

On Friday, he stood before the memorial’s Wall of Names, pausing with his hat in hand before each stone.  

“I can’t ever thank them enough,” Pisano said.

On 9/11, we all wondered when America would strike back, only to learn later that we already had.