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A former flight attendant is remembering those killed in the September 11 terror attacks by pushing an airline beverage cart to the World Trade Center site in New York.
Paul Veneto had friends and colleagues who were killed during the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, and is currently walking the 220-mile distance between Boston’s Logan Airport and the 9/11 memorial site, which was the flight path American Flight 11 took before it was flown into the one of the towers.
It is the fourth iteration of the challenge, with Veneto has branded “Paulie’s Push”. Each year he has followed a different flight path, including a walk from Newark, New Jersey, to Shanksville, Pennsylvania — the path of Flight 93 — last year. That was the longest of the walks, which required him to push his cart 300 miles.
He undertook his first trip in 2021, which followed the flight path of Flight 175, which was the plane carrying his friends and co-workers.
Paul Veneto recently passed through Connecticut en route to the 9/11 memorial. (2020 The Patriot Ledger)
Veneto was working on the day of the terror attacks, and had just arrived in Boston around 8pm on September 10. If the attacks had been planned for a few hours earlier, he might have been among those killed on 9/11.
“I came in the night before. I landed at 8 p.m. in Boston,” he told News12 Connecticut. “I got off the airplane the next morning. I knew the crew that was on that plane that hit the second tower.”
Veneto recently passed through Connecticut, where Middletown police and a fire truck joined him as he walked through the city.
Once Veneto finishes this push, he will have completed all of the flight paths. In the future, he hopes to continue the event but to include communities in the push.
“Let the community push for the cart for three days – school kids, anybody,” he said. “And then it goes to the next town, and the next town, so everybody gets involved in it.”
