Captain John D Yamnicky Sr.

Inscribed

Pentagon Group Burial Marker Panel 5 JOHN D YAMNICKY Sr CAPT USN Ret

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

National September 11 Memorial South Pool · Panel S-71 John D. Yamnicky, Sr.

Also kept at

salute.nw ↗ Captain · Naval Test Pilot School, Patuxent River - and Squadron 172

1930 2001

Barren Run, Pennsylvania The PentagonSeptember 11, 2001

Lived in Waldorf, Maryland. Aboard Flight 77, Passenger. Served with Naval Test Pilot School, Patuxent River - and Squadron 172.

United States of America

His life

Captain, United States Navy, retired - a test pilot's test pilot, aboard American Airlines flight 77 on his way to work on a missile programme at China Lake.

He was a schoolboy football star at McKeesport, played in the Scholastic Orange Bowl on Christmas Day 1947, and was a key member of the Naval Academy team that beat Army in 1950. Shortly after graduating he was an assault wave commander putting Marines ashore in Korea.

He flew three combat tours over Vietnam and, after the Gulf of Tonkin, some of the first strikes in the North. He took a year at the Naval War College and a master's in international affairs, and came back to Squadron 172 as executive officer and then commanding officer.

He made more than nine hundred carrier landings. Fellow aviators called him an exceptional fighter pilot - the man you wanted on your team when the chips were down. He graduated from the Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River and later directed it, and was elected to the Society of Experimental Test Pilots for his work there. He retired in 1979 and consulted for the test centre afterwards.

He turned down a major command so that he could be at home while his four children were growing, and to help his wife after so many years of sea duty. He was a past grand knight of the Knights of Columbus and sat on the board of two schools, and was instrumental in their merger.

Twelve hundred people came to his memorial service. Some of them stood on the pavement outside.

Survived by

His wife Jann and their children John David, Lorraine, Mark and Jennifer.

The Pentagon

September 11, 2001

American Airlines flight 77 struck the western face of the Pentagon at 9:37. A hundred and twenty-five people inside the building were killed, and fifty-nine aboard the aircraft.

They were military and civilian alike - officers, analysts, budget staff, contractors, a group of schoolchildren and their teachers travelling on a National Geographic trip. No police officer died here.

The nation afterwards set aside Arlington's own rules of eligibility and buried the civilian dead in national ground, together with the remains that could not be identified, in Section 64. It had decided that on this day the distinction did not apply.

Everyone taken by The Pentagon →

September 11, 2001

On a clear Tuesday morning, four airliners were taken. Two were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one into the western face of the Pentagon, and one came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers and crew went forward at the cockpit door.

Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven people were killed. Three hundred and forty-three were firefighters of the New York City Fire Department. Seventy-one were law enforcement officers. Eight were paramedics and emergency medical technicians. One hundred and twenty-five died at the Pentagon, military and civilian together. The rest - some two thousand four hundred of them - had gone to work, or boarded a plane, and belonged to no service at all.

None of them began that morning as heroes. A great many of them ended it as heroes: men and women who carried strangers down stairwells, who stayed with people who could not walk, who held a door, who went back up. Four men on a flight over Pennsylvania, who had thirty minutes of telephone calls and knew what had already happened, decided where their aircraft would come down.

At Arlington, the nation set aside its own rules of eligibility and buried the Pentagon's civilian dead in national ground. It had decided that on this day the distinction did not apply.

Everyone taken by September 11, 2001 →

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