Panel to select finalists for Flight 93 memorial
From Phil Hirschkorn
CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Nine jurors have begun reviewing proposals for a permanent memorial for the 40 passengers and crew aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked September 11, 2001, and crashed in a Pennsylvania field after a passenger uprising.
The jury convened Monday in Somerset, Pennsylvania, where it will spend three days looking at nearly 1,011 proposals from across the United States and 28 other countries.
The memorial will sit on 2,200 acres of what will become a national park when the Park Service completes its purchase from eight private owners who control more than half the land.
A temporary memorial on the reclaimed strip mine where the plane crashed drew 130,000 visitors last year.
The hijacked 757, with 33 passengers and 7 crew, crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 125 miles from Washington, where it was headed.
Four hijackers who commandeered the Newark-to-San Francisco jet 45 minutes into the flight had made a U-turn over Cleveland, Ohio, and were believed to be targeting the Capitol in Washington.
Their plans were foiled by passengers who rushed the cockpit after learning from phone calls of the other three hijackings that resulted in crashes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in northern Virginia.
Faced with an imminent passenger takeover, hijacker-pilot Ziad Jarrah intentionally crashed the plane, according to excerpts from the cockpit voice recorder published by the 9/11 Commission.
Five finalists in the design competition will be announced February 4. Each will receive $25,000 to build models and refine their ideas.
A second jury will convene over the summer to choose a winner that will be announced in September.
The proposals can be seen in an exhibition in Somerset, Pennsylvania, and on a Web site: www.flight93memorialproject.org.
The Heinz Endowments and John S. and James Knight Foundation are underwriting the competition.
Shanksville is the last of the three major attack sites to develop a memorial scheme.
In lower Manhattan, a memorial plaza will feature two pools of water where the towers used to stand and an underground museum. A foundation has been created to raise an estimated $200 million in private funds needed to build it.
At the Pentagon, about a third of the $17 million in private funds needed to build its memorial have been raised. The design calls for filling a two-acre field on the west side of the building with a grove of trees and bench-like marker for each victim.
