A former Inquirer photographer's commitment to telling the story of Flight 93

When former Inquirer photographer Laurence Kesterson set foot in the Pennsylvania field where United Flight 93 crashed 20 years ago, he would become so connected to the story of its passengers and the town of Shanksville that he would continue covering it for more than a decade. “The day of and the day after and for weeks after, Shanksville, Flight 93, was a sidebar. It was a sidebar to New York,” Kesterson said. Now it’s known that once the 40 passengers and crew members knew their flight to San Francisco had taken a turn toward Washington, D.C., they hatched a plan to overtake four hijackers who were part of a larger scheme to crash planes into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, the Pentagon, and, presumably, the U.S. Capitol or the White House. About six minutes after passengers stormed the cockpit, Flight 93 crashed into the ground. No one survived. “I always felt, especially at the beginning, that they didn’t really get their due,” Kesterson said. “They were heroes. And the longer the story went on, the more we found out and the more we realized just how important they were.” Kesterson feels like the passengers on Flight 93 represent a cross section of America that’s reflected in the kinds of people who visit the memorial, which was completed in 2015. “I found in the coverage, the more important pictures were the pictures of the people who came out there. And how do you photograph something that’s bigger? That has always been the struggle,” Kesterson asked. “I think we did a pretty good job of it.”