After 24 Years, a Sign of 9/11 Heads for Permanent Preservation

Every September, the Port Authority pauses to reflect on 9/11. The day is inseparable from the agency’s history. On that day, 84 Port Authority employees died. Each year the agency honors them, along with the four agency employees and unborn child who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, through staff and retiree volunteer programs as well as a solemn church service for staff, retirees, and their families after the larger public remembrances at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

The traditions aim to keep legacies alive as one generation grows older and another grows up with no memory of that day. But sometimes, reminders from the past surface in other ways. That happened last month at Newark Liberty International Airport.

Construction of Newark Liberty’s new Terminal A marked a major milestone on Sept. 30, 2021. It was the last day of operations for a section of the old Terminal A, the circular concourse that housed gates A10 to A18. That area had to be demolished in order for the final stages of construction on the new Terminal A to continue. Amid the low ceilings and dated décor that would soon be lost to time, Port Authority staff preserved a piece of history.

On 9/11, 37 passengers made their way to Gate A17 to board United Airlines Flight 93 to San Francisco. Once the plane took off at 8:42 a.m., passengers on one side of the cabin could look out their windows at the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan a few miles away. That view changed forever just four minutes later.

American Airlines Flight 11 was crashed by terrorists into floors 93 to 99 of the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 struck floors 77 to 85 of the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.

Over the next 83 minutes, the Flight 93 passengers learned of the scale of the unfolding attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., through phone calls with loved ones. They realized their flight was also part of the plot. In response, they acted. Together, they fought back against the hijackers, forcing the plane down in a field near Shanksville, Pa., instead of its intended target.

Twenty years later, Port Authority staff saved the gate sign those passengers walked under before their act of extraordinary courage.

“As we closed the old Terminal A to make way for the new Terminal A, the Port Authority made a deliberate, seemingly obvious choice to preserve the sign, not simply as a physical artifact, but as a lasting tribute to the heroism it has come to embody,” said Aidan O’Donnell, the airport’s general manager. “Its meaning endures far beyond the structure it once occupied.”

The sign has made the same journey those passengers did, headed to the United Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville following a formal transfer from the Port Authority to the National Park Service last month.

“The story (the sign) will help us to tell future generations is incredibly impactful,” said Adam Shaffer, chief of education and interpretation at the Flight 93 National Memorial. “Our mission moving forward is making sure that future generations of Americans and those visitors from around the world will be able to recognize that common citizens right underneath this gate, who thought they were going to go about their ordinary day, transformed into extraordinary heroes.”

Flight 93’s departure from Newark, and the wider impact of 9/11, also left a permanent mark on the airport itself. In 2002, then Govs. Jim McGreevey of New Jersey and George Pataki of New York proposed renaming the airport as a permanent memorial to the heroism and sacrifice of that day. Newark International Airport became Newark Liberty International Airport.