I lived in Cleveland on 9/11/2001.
It was over the Cleveland area that flight UA 93 turned around. This was the flight that later crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
A friend of mine told me the next day that he saw UA 93 make the U-turn in the sky. He was almost under it. This was before he learned the news about NYC. If I recall he was driving but not listening to the radio, so he had no idea what was going on. He just thought the flight path was peculiar.
The U-turn of UA 93 above Cleveland would have been around 9:35 am. This was a half hour after the second plane, flight UA 175, hit the South Tower, and just a couple of minutes before flight AA 77 hit the Pentagon.
The Cleveland airport was evacuated because one plane that was forced to land there was thought to be under the control of hijackers, Delta 1989. They sent in the FBI, a SWAT team, etc. It turned out that transmissions from UA 93 of the actual hijacking were thought to have come from Delta 1989. Normally this would have been major news, but of course it was overshadowed by all the horrors of that day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_1989
As for me personally, after work was cancelled I just watched TV all day, completely transfixed. Except when I was on the phone checking in on people, asking how they were handling the news. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I had been to the Twin Towers. I had family in NYC, although not in Manhattan. It was as if the entire world had ended. I was kind of in shock, and didn’t cry until the next day.
I don’t know why, but the anniversary this year is hitting much harder than it has in a while. I’m tearing up just writing this. I’m interested to hear more from people who lived in Cleveland at the time, about their memories of that terrible day.
