United Airlines Flight 93 saw 71x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

United Airlines Flight 93 was an American domestic passenger flight from Newark International Airport in New Jersey to San Francisco International Airport in California that was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists on the morning of September 11, 2001, as part of the September 11 attacks. The hijackers planned to deliberately crash the plane into a federal government building in the national capital of Washington, D.C., but their mission failed when the passengers and crew members fought back, forcing the terrorists to crash the plane into a field near Shanksville in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, preventing them from reaching al-Qaeda's intended target but killing everyone aboard the flight. The airliner involved, a Boeing 757 with 44 passengers and crew, was flying United Airlines' daily scheduled morning flight from Newark International Airport to San Francisco International Airport, making it the only plane hijacked that day not to be a Los Angeles–bound flight.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "United Airlines Flight 93", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 9 edits to this article on 2026-09-12, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Cockpit transmissions and recordings
• Passenger and crew phone calls

What changed that day

The article lost 1,223 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 58 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-09-12 in Wikipedia's own diff view — that is where the reason for a surge is usually visible, written and sourced by the editors who were following the story.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.