REMINDER: Rotary Club of Hattiesburg will not have its regularly scheduled noon meeting. Instead, the club will have an evening social later tonight at Holiday Inn at 5:30 p.m. Our speaker will be our own Past President, Mark Killingsworth, who will give a personal recount of his experiences the day of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Next Saturday will mark the 20th anniversary of those attacks. Congressman Steven Palazzo is also scheduled to attend tonight's social and may provide remarks of his own.
From Wikipedia:
The September 11 attacks, often referred to as "9/11," were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the militant Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United States of America on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
On that morning, four commercial airliners traveling from the northeastern United States to California were hijacked mid-flight by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists. The hijackers were organized into three groups of five hijackers and one group of four. Each group had one hijacker who had received flight training and took over control of the aircraft. Their explicit goal was to crash each plane into a prominent American building, causing mass casualties and partial or complete destruction of the targeted buildings.
The first plane to hit its target was American Airlines Flight 11. It was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan at 8:46 am. Seventeen minutes later at 9:03 am, the World Trade Center's South Tower was hit by United Airlines Flight 175. Both 110-story towers collapsed within an hour and forty-two minutes, leading to the collapse of the other World Trade Center structures including 7 World Trade Center, and significantly damaging surrounding buildings.
A third flight, American Airlines Flight 77, flying from Dulles International Airport, was hijacked over Ohio. At 9:37 am, it crashed into the west side of the Pentagon (the headquarters of the American military) in Arlington County, Virginia, causing a partial collapse of the building's side. The fourth, and final flight, United Airlines Flight 93, was flown in the direction of Washington, D.C. This flight was the only plane not to hit its intended target, instead crashing in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 am. The plane's passengers attempted to regain control of the aircraft away from the hijackers and ultimately diverted the flight from its intended target. Investigators determined that Flight 93's target was either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
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