At Flight 93 Crash Site, a ‘Last Funeral’

@nytimesThe New York Times

At Flight 93 Crash Site, a ‘Last Funeral’

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — Jerry Bingham, whose 31-year-old son was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed near here a decade ago, has participated in so many memorial services for his son Mark that he can barely remember them all.

Now, he is preparing for one more. Not the 10th anniversary public tributes this weekend that will include President Obama and former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, with thousands of onlookers.

But on Monday, when the crowds are gone, the families of the 40 passengers and crew members who were killed when the plane was hijacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, will hold a private service to bury the unidentified remains of all of those who were on board.

Those remains have been kept in an above-ground crypt for the last 10 years by the Somerset County coroner, Wallace Miller, awaiting a final resting place. They will be laid to rest in three steel coffins at the patch of earth — sodden now from endless rains — where the plane rammed into the ground.

“This will be our last funeral,” Mr. Bingham said.

Not much, of course, was left after the crash except debris from the aircraft and some personal belongings. Mr. Miller said that only 8 percent of the human remains were ever recovered because the plane, roaring down at more than 570 miles per hour, exploded when it crashed. “Everything vaporized on impact,” he said.

At least some remains were recovered and matched for all 40 on board (in fact, for all 44, including the four terrorists). But the amounts were tiny — much less, even in total, than those that were unidentified.

The matching of remains for everyone killed here distinguishes this site from the scenes of the two other Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, where not all of the remains have been identified.

At the World Trade Center in New York, the remains of more than 1,100 of the nearly 2,700 victims have still not been identified. They are being stored now in climate-controlled conditions near the medical examiner’s office in Manhattan. There are plans to place them in an underground repository at a new museum at ground zero that is to open next year, but some families have opposed that idea and the dispute is continuing.

At the Pentagon, the remains of five, of 184, could not be identified and were buried in 2002 at Arlington National Cemetery.

With Monday’s service, the crash site here, which is off-limits to the public, will officially become a cemetery. This communal grave occupies one small corner of a 2,200-acre park nestled in the rolling hills of the Laurel Highlands that is now part of the National Park Service. The crash site, renamed the “field of honor,” lies at the edge of an open field near a stand of maples and hemlocks.

Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, who lost his cousin Louis Nacke II in the crash, said he viewed Monday’s burial as a reunion, of sorts, of “what until now has been a disconnection, a physical separation between the ‘them’ in the three caskets and the ‘those’ who are in the ground.”

“I view it as the first — and last — reuniting of people who have a shared destiny and a now common history,” Mr. White said.

Their destinies merged on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as they left Newark intending to fly to San Francisco. The plane was hijacked at 9:28 a.m., and air traffic controllers in Cleveland picked up a Mayday call from the pilot. The passengers and crew were forced to the back of the plane, where they began using the Airfones on the seatbacks to report the attack. At that point, they learned that a broader terrorist attack against the United States was under way.

The terrorists had turned the plane toward Washington, and later evidence revealed that their target was probably the United States Capitol. The passengers and crew quickly devised a plan to storm the cockpit; the cockpit voice recorder picked up the screaming and mayhem of the insurrection.