Flight museum’s 9/11 exhibit serves as reminder on 20th anniversary
Display includes names of victims, piece of an I-beam from the World Trade Center
Alex Camacho felt like a sixthgrader again, hearing the news of the planes hitting the Twin Towers during an early morning class as he visited the Lone Star Flight Museum’s new exhibit on Saturday commemorating the approaching 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
He can still feel the tension in the Dickinson school that day, as teachers cried and parents picked up students early.
“It’s important for letting the new generation know, because a lot of them don’t understand what it meant,” Camacho said of the exhibit. “They just see it maybe in the textbooks, so they don’t understand what that is in our history.”
The exhibit, at 11551 Aerospace Ave., displays the names of the victims who died that day and a piece of an I-beam from the World Trade Center that is on loan from the city of Bellaire.
Museum leaders said the milestone anniversary needed to be memorialized.
“It’s important just to take a moment to recognize the people that are no longer here and then the families that it affected and then the path it has directed the rest of the United States,” said Shelly Finley, Lone Star Flight Museum director of membership, public programs and ticketing.
Finley was getting breakfast at the federal building for her job at the Houston Grand Opera when the first plane hit.
“It’s hard to believe it’s already been 20 years. It doesn’t feel like that,” Finley said. “We get so many kids in here, they don’t know about it.”
Visitors can leave messages on a tree display on the museum wall, an idea that came from a
pear tree that survived under the rubble of the World Trade Center and still stands at the memorial site. The tree features positive messages from visitors about finding hope and loving others.
One visitor, Sharon Griffith, said the exhibit reminded her of that day, when she was at work when the first plane hit the building. They thought it was an accident at first, she said, until the next plane hit.
“Everybody was crying,” Griffith said. “It was one of the most horrible days I’ve ever gone through.”
The 13 soldiers killed recently killed at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan are a reminder of the conflicts in the Middle East that began after the attacks, she said.
“They’re fixing to release some of the classified papers, so now maybe we will find out who was actually behind all of this,” Griffith said.
Patrick Thompson, another visitor, called the exhibit impressive and important.
“We’re still seeing ramifications of this, and I think we’ll see ramifications for the rest of my life and probably another 100 years from now,” Thompson said.
The exhibit will run through Jan. 2, Finley said, with more programming planned for the weekend of 9/11. Billy Farney, a Houston resident who survived the 9/11 attacks, will be speaking at the museum, and a Q&A from the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, in which students got to ask questions to survivors and family members of victims, will be shown.