MOUNT POCONO, Pa. — Had it not been for a schedule change, flight attendant Eileen Lovell of Tannersville would have been on Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, headed to San Francisco, one of the airplanes hijacked on September 11, 2001.
"That was my route," Lovell said. "Along with my friend Debbie Welsh—she was the purser on Flight 93—and I was a new flight attendant at the time, so I received a call from crew scheduling that they needed me on another flight. So, I went on another flight. And while we were on the flight, I received a message from the captain saying that he had received a fax from the ground saying that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center. At the time, we thought it was a Cessna, like a small plane, but we found out sadly otherwise it wasn't."
Lovell said after the flight crew learned that a second plane hit the Twin Towers in New York City, her flight was ordered to land.
"We landed in Omaha, Nebraska, and it was like chaos. People were running through the airport. There were buses and shuttles running by. People were jumping on shuttles just to get out of the airport, and over a loudspeaker, we heard were at a time of was, 'Get out as fast as you can,'" Lovell recalled.
At the time, she didn't know the flight she was supposed to be on had gone down in Shanksville, in western Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board.
"We didn't know what to do. We were scared beyond belief, and then all of a sudden, I saw on the TV what was going on, and I tried to find out my friends on that flight, Flight 93, and it was dead silence."
Lovell shared her story with Michael Desrosiers, another flight attendant, inside the Women Veterans Museum in Mount Pocono as a reminder that the flight crews who fought on 9/11, relaying information and taking matters into their own hands, potentially saved thousands of lives.
"This changed our job and our lives, and because of this, we have new safety protocols. When you get on an airplane, you don't know what goes on behind the scenes. We were the nation's first responders," Lovell said.