United Airlines Flight 93
History repeated itself for a fourth time more than an hour after the hijacking of American Flight 11. Forty-six minutes after United Flight 93 took off, as it cruised at 35,000 feet over eastern Ohio, the plane abruptly dropped1 685 feet. Eleven seconds into the descent, at 9:28 a.m., Captain Jason Dahl or First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr. screamed into the cockpit radio: “Mayday!2 . . . Mayday! . . . Mayday!”
A second raspy shout from one of the pilots revealed that the source of the emergency wasn’t mechanical or electrical, but human: “Hey—get out of here!”
Barely five minutes had passed since United dispatcher Ed Ballinger had warned the pilots of Flight 93 to beware of a cockpit intrusion, followed by Jason Dahl’s unanswered ACARS response that asked Ballinger to “cofirm latest mssg plz.” The narrow window of opportunity to guard the cockpit against a hijacking had closed.
As the terrorists fought to displace Jason and LeRoy, one or both pilots must have kept his hand pressed on the talk button of the radio microphone: sounds of the struggle in the cockpit were heard by FAA ground controllers and by pilots of planes on the same radio frequency. Thirty-five seconds after the Mayday distress calls, LeRoy or Jason again screamed: “Hey, get out of here—get out of here!”
The messages reached Flight 93’s ground controller, John Werth in the FAA’s Cleveland Center. Already he was balancing an almost unimaginable burden, far beyond the sixteen flights on his radar screen. He’d heard about the first two hijackings and was calling pilots3 as they flew through his airspace, asking if they’d seen any trace of a missing plane: American Flight 77.
Some of those pilots had picked up bits and pieces about the World Trade Center and quizzed Werth for more details. Werth had spent three decades guiding planes through the skies over Ohio, but he struggled with what to say, worried that he might panic them.4 He told the pilots to call their airlines, and purposely never said the words “hijack” or “trip.” All the while, Werth kept searching for American Flight 77 on radar and keeping close watch on Delta Flight 1989, which he’d been told was another suspected hijacking. The Delta flight took off from Boston, bound for Las Vegas, around the same time as American Flight 11 and United Flight 175.
Amid the chaos, Werth didn’t immediately know the source of the Mayday call he heard, and he could only make out what he thought were “guttural sounds.”5 He responded into his mic: “Somebody call Cleveland?”6 Then he noticed Flight 93’s rapid descent and heard the second panicked call: “Get out of here!” In his headset, Werth heard screams from the cockpit.
“I think we’ve got one!”7 Werth called to his supervisor, Mark Barnik, a former police officer.
To be certain which of his flights was the latest hijack, Werth called every plane on the frequency, and he heard back from all but Flight 93. He hailed Jason and LeRoy seven times in less than two minutes with no reply. Aware of the New York crashes, Werth instantly concluded that it was a suicide hijacking. He thought the terrorists’ target might be a nuclear plant forty miles from the plane’s current position. As other controllers moved nearby flights out of the way, Werth instructed Barnik: “Tell Washington.”8
Instead, Barnik alerted the United Airlines headquarters in Chicago, where a staffer on the operations desk spoke for everyone: “Oh God, not another one.”9
Although the hijackers on Flight 93 had one fewer man and waited longer to act, they followed nearly the same script as the hijackers of Flights 11, 175, and 77. As some stormed the cockpit and attacked Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr., others moved the passengers10 to the rear of the plane. The hijackers tied red bandannas around their heads, claimed they had a bomb, and stabbed at least one person other than the pilots.
Three minutes after Jason or LeRoy yelled his final “Get out of here!” controller John Werth heard a new male voice from Flight 93, with a halting command of English and a Middle Eastern accent. The man breathed heavily,11 apparently from exertion, perhaps from fighting with the pilots or from dragging them from the cockpit. The man said: “Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain.12 Please sit down, keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So, sit.”
The voice almost certainly belonged to Ziad Jarrah, the only hijacker aboard Flight 93 with pilot training, who’d been in the first-class seat closest to the cockpit. He had practiced on simulators but had never before flown13 an actual 757. Like the other hijacker pilots, Jarrah’s apparent lack of experience with the cockpit radio resulted in a threat meant to be delivered over the public address system to passengers being conveyed instead to ground controllers. The cockpit’s voice recorder soon picked up the voice of a second hijacker,14 whom Jarrah would address as “Saeed,” making it evident that a fellow terrorist at the controls was Saeed al-Ghamdi.
Listening from Cleveland Center, John Werth heard Jarrah say “a bomb.” At 9:32 a.m., a Cleveland Center staffer called the FAA’s Command Center in Virginia to report that United Flight 93 from Newark had become the morning’s fourth hijacked plane and that it might have a bomb on board.15
Werth tried to keep the hijacker pilot talking: “Er, uh . . . calling Cleveland Center . . . You’re unreadable. Say again, slowly.”
Jarrah16 didn’t answer. In the meantime, Werth asked other pilots in his sector to tail Flight 93, to keep eyes on the hijacked plane.
Just as with the other hijacked flights, it’s unknown how the terrorists gained access to the cockpit. One possibility was that they used knives to force a first-class flight attendant, either Deborah Welsh or Wanda Green, to open the cockpit door using a key17 kept in a storage compartment near the front of the plane. Unlike the other flights, however, one of those flight attendants might have become a cockpit hostage.
Over a thirty-one-minute period starting at 9:32 a.m., the plane’s cockpit voice recorder18 captured the statements of Jarrah and at least one other hijacker, likely Ghamdi. For part of that time, it also recorded comments and pleas by one or two other native English-speaking people who weren’t hijackers.
The presence of a hostage or hostages in the cockpit could be discerned at first from a stream of harsh commands Jarrah issued in English after his “Here the captain” announcement. One or two other voices later emerged, along with evidence of resistance, followed by violence. At times, it wasn’t clear from the recording who was speaking or what was happening, but the placement of microphones in the cockpit revealed that Jarrah did most of the talking and that the cockpit of Flight 93 became a scene of captors brutalizing a captive or captives.
Immediately after Jarrah claimed to have a bomb on board, he turned his attention to a hostage who had evidently bravely refused to comply with the hijackers’ orders. Jarrah issued a stream of commands:
“Don’t move. Shut up.”
“Come on, come.”
“Shut up!”
“Don’t move!”
“Stop!”
Next came the sounds of a seat being adjusted. Someone in the cockpit apparently continued to resist Jarrah’s orders. He resumed his tirade:
“Sit, sit, sit down!”
“Sit down!”
Another hijacker, in the copilot’s seat, chimed in: “Stop!”
“No more,” someone pleaded,19 as a hijacker simultaneously ordered, “Sit down!”
In Arabic, a hijacker said, “That’s it, that’s it, that’s it,” then switched to English: “Down, down.”
Jarrah shouted: “Shut up!”
A radio call from air traffic controller John Werth interrupted the rant: “We just, ah, we didn’t get it clear. . . . Is that United Ninety-Three calling?”
Seconds later, after several unexplained clicking noises, a hijacker spoke the words of the Basmala, an Arabic verse often recited by observant Muslims before they take an action: “In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.”
After some mumbling in Arabic, someone said: “Finish. No more. No more!”
Then came the words, “Stop, stop, stop, stop!”
Someone pleaded, “No! No, no, no, no!” And again, “No, no, no, no!”
A hijacker answered: “Down! Go ahead, lie down. Lie down! Down, down, down!”
The back-and-forth continued with shouted demands—“Down, down, down!”—and desperate pleas—“No more. . . . no more.”
At 9:34 a.m., the recorder captured the voice of a native English-speaking woman,20 possibly one of the first-class flight attendants. She beseeched her abusers: “Please, please, please . . .”
A hijacker shouted: “Down!”
“Please, please, don’t hurt me,” she moaned.21
“Down! . . . No more.”
The woman cried out: “Oh God!”
“Down, down, down!” a hijacker answered.
“Sit down!” said Jarrah.
“Shut up!” said another hijacker.
More commands followed. With them came the sounds of a warning bell that indicated Jarrah was trying to disconnect the autopilot, to change the plane’s destination to one of his choosing. A knock on the cockpit door by another hijacker briefly interrupted the abuse. Jarrah answered in Arabic: “One moment, one moment.”
Then, “No more.”
Then, “Down, down, down!”
Someone begged, “No, no, no, no, no, no . . .”
The answer came: “Sit down, sit down, sit down!”
“Down!”
“Sit down! Sit down! You know, sit down!”
Next came a question from the woman that might have indicated that she wasn’t the only hostage in the cockpit. She asked, “Are you talking to me?”
The answer: “Down, down, down, down!”
Almost four minutes into the assault, the woman pleaded for her life: “I don’t want to die!”
But the hijackers had decided her fate.
“No, no. Down, down!” one of the terrorists answered.
“I don’t want to die,” the woman repeated. “I don’t want to die.”
“No, no. . . . Down, down, down, down, down, down.”
She pleaded again, “No, no, please.”
A snap reverberated in the cockpit, captured on the voice recorder.
The woman cried.
“No!”
Her crying continued. She struggled for her life. Ten seconds passed, then twenty, then thirty. More than a minute went by after the woman began to cry, the longest gap without anyone speaking in the cockpit. Finally, in Arabic, Jarrah broke the silence. He said, “That’s it. Go back.” Then, in English, “Back.”
“That’s it!” a hijacker, possibly Jarrah, said in Arabic. Then, in English, he gave an indication that the hostage still refused to surrender: “Sit down!”
Nine minutes had passed since the takeover of United Flight 93. At 9:37 a.m., a hijacker reported in Arabic that they wouldn’t have any more problems from their hostage: “Everything is fine. I finished.”
The woman’s voice wasn’t heard again.
In the final section of the four-page instruction letter in the hijackers’ possession, a passage read:
[A]pply to them the prisoners law. Take prisoners and kill them.
As the Sublime said, “There is not a prophet who takes prisoners
And goes forth with them on the earth.”
Beyond Flight 93, chaos reigned. The violent silencing of the woman in the cockpit coincided with the moment that American Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. President Bush was en route to the airport in Sarasota, Florida, and Vice President Cheney had almost reached the entrance to the emergency bunker under the White House. Major Kevin Nasypany and his team at NEADS struggled to position fighter jets to find hijacked planes and to protect and defend against more disaster. The North Tower of the World Trade Center had been burning for nearly an hour, the South Tower for more than a half hour. Ron Clifford, the businessman in the yellow tie waiting for his big meeting at the North Tower, had already become a hero, but he didn’t yet know that tragedy had struck closer than he could have imagined.
Police and other first responders streamed toward Lower Manhattan, while Twin Tower workers rushed down stairwells and fled uptown or toward bridges and waiting ferries. Grim-faced, determined, burdened by gear and buoyed by a rescuer’s code, scores of New York firefighters climbed the stairs of both towers, helping those they could, even as some trapped workers on upper floors jumped or fell to their deaths, or floated a plea for help in a note tossed from a broken window, or made desperate phone calls seeking rescue or solace.
Amid the apparent murder of the woman in the cockpit, terrorist pilot Ziad Jarrah pulled back the control wheel and brought the plane into a climb, reaching 40,700 feet.22 He dipped the wing and began a left turn, first heading south and then, as the turn continued, southeast. Within minutes Jarrah completed a sharp U-turn, pointing the 757 back toward the East Coast on a heading that would take it north of Washington, D.C.
Jarrah hadn’t turned off the transponder, so FAA controller John Werth saw the turn on his radar screen. The turn was so abrupt, Werth thought anyone at the back of the plane who wasn’t strapped in must have been tossed like a rag doll.23 He moved westbound planes out of the way to avoid midair collisions. He called Flight 93 again and again, at one point hoping that the original pilots remained in control and could punch in a transponder code of 7500, to confirm the hijack.
“Ah, United Ninety-Three, if able, ah, squawk ‘trip,’ please,”24 Werth radioed.
Jarrah ignored him.
At 9:36 a.m., less than ten minutes after the hijacking began, a supervisor at Cleveland Center followed Werth’s original instructions and called the FAA’s Command Center in Virginia. He reported that Flight 93 was over Cleveland and asked whether anyone at the FAA had asked the military to scramble fighter jets. If not, he suggested that he’d be more than willing to call a local military base. He was told not to do that, because “that’s a decision that has to be made at a different level.”25
At the same moment, after FAA controllers belatedly and haphazardly told the military about hijacked American Flight 77 as it bore down on Washington, D.C., Major Nasypany ordered the Langley F-16s to fly supersonic—“I don’t care how many windows you break”—to be in a position to protect the nation’s capital.
Despite Cleveland Center’s suggestion about involving the military; despite the crash one minute later of American Flight 77 into the Pentagon; despite the World Trade Center crashes; still no one at the FAA’s Command Center in Virginia or at FAA headquarters in Washington informed Nasypany or anyone else at NORAD, NEADS, or the Defense Department that a fourth transcontinental passenger jet had been hijacked and was heading toward the capital.
At 9:39 a.m., Jarrah delivered another threatening message on the cockpit radio, again thinking incorrectly that he’d be heard by the plane’s passengers and crew members: “Ah, here’s the captain.26 I would like to tell you all to remain seated. We have a bomb aboard and we are going back to the airport, and we have our demands. So please remain quiet.”
Controller John Werth tried to engage him: “Okay, that’s United Ninety-Three calling?” And then, “United Ninety-Three. I understand you have a bomb on board. Go ahead.”
Jarrah didn’t respond. As Werth tried repeatedly, Jarrah pushed forward on the control wheel. The plane descended sharply, at a rate of 4,000 feet per minute.27
“This green knob?” one hijacker asked the other in Arabic.
“Yes, that’s the one.”
With that move, Flight 93’s terrorist pilots followed Atta’s script and turned off the transponder. Nevertheless, Werth continued to track the plane using primary radar, although he had to rely on reports from other planes in his sector to estimate its altitude and speed.
As the descent continued, shortly before 9:42 a.m. the cockpit voice recorder captured another person speaking. A native English-speaking man said two words in a low-pitched tone, perhaps a moan: “Oh, man!” Apparently, someone else remained in the cockpit with the hijackers. Before the woman was silenced, she’d asked: “Are you talking to me?” The sudden emergence of the voice of an English-speaking man gave new meaning to her question. The woman’s inquiry might have indicated that someone else, most likely either Captain Jason Dahl or First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr., remained alive in the cockpit and also refused to follow Jarrah’s commands to “sit down.”
Far more than the passengers and crew members on the other hijacked planes, men and women aboard Flight 93 almost immediately recognized that their seatback Airfones28 could be lifelines to call for help and advice. Many also understood that they could use the phones as a source of comfort, for themselves and for the people they cared about most.
Without interference from the hijackers, over a span of a half hour, passengers and crew members attempted to make at least thirty-seven phone calls to United Airlines, to authorities, and to their loved ones and friends. Two calls were made using cellphones, but the rest were made using built-in Airfones from the last twelve rows of the plane. The technology allowed only eight outgoing calls29 at a time, and poor reception caused twenty Airfone calls to drop immediately or within seconds. The calls that connected formed a spoken tapestry of grace, warning, bravery, resolve, and love.
The content of many of the calls from Flight 93 reflected the fact that the hijackings were no longer nearly simultaneous. The forty-two-minute delay before takeoff, plus the forty-six minutes of flight prior to the hijacking, meant that word of the earlier attacks and the terrorists’ suicidal tactics had spread widely on the ground. Almost as soon as telephone calls began to flow from Flight 93, passengers and crew members learned that their crisis wasn’t unique. They also learned how the earlier hijackings had ended.
That knowledge became a powerful motivator. It transformed them from victimized hostages into resistance fighters.
Around 6 a.m. Pacific Time, or 9 a.m. Eastern, Deena Burnett padded around her home in San Ramon, California, wearing the robe of her husband, Tom,30 as she always did when he traveled as a top executive for a heart pump manufacturer. She watched television as she made cinnamon waffles for their five-year-old twin daughters, Halley and Madison, and three-year-old Anna Clare.
When the screen showed a second plane hit the World Trade Center, her mind raced to her husband, who she thought was still in Manhattan on business: “What hotel is he staying in, anyway?” she wondered. “Is he at the Marriott in Times Square this time? How far is Times Square from the World Trade Center?”
Deena’s mother saw the same terrifying scenes and called her with the same fears about Tom. Deena reassured her, but then Deena remembered that Tom said he’d take an earlier flight if he could, to be home by noon. Creeping worry set in. Tom’s mother called next, then the call-waiting beep sounded. Deena answered the pending call.
“Hello?”
“Deena.”
“Tom, are you okay?”
“No, I’m not. I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked.”31
He gave her a few details: the hijackers claimed to have a bomb and had knifed a passenger. Tom asked her to call the authorities. He hung up and Deena called 9-1-1. Tom called back minutes later. Word that Flight 93 wasn’t the only hijacked plane had apparently filtered through the cabin from other calls. Speaking in a quiet voice, Tom went into analytical mode. He asked Deena if she’d heard about any other planes.32 She said yes, two planes had flown into the World Trade Center. He asked if they were commercial planes, and she replied that specifics hadn’t been released. Tom told Deena the hijackers were talking about flying the plane into the ground somewhere.
At 9:35 a.m.,33 flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw grabbed the Airfone in Row 33, the second-to-last row in coach. She speed-dialed “f-i-x” and reached the United maintenance center in San Francisco, just as a flight attendant aboard United Flight 175 had done forty minutes earlier.
Sandy’s call was the first notification to United from inside the plane. Composed and professional, she told a maintenance manager that hijackers were in the cockpit and had pulled closed the curtain in first class, which was emptied of passengers. She said the terrorists claimed to have a bomb. They had a knife, she said, and had killed a flight attendant whom she didn’t name.
In the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, Alice Hoglan woke to a ringing phone in her brother and sister-in-law’s house, where Alice was staying after giving birth to triplets34 as their surrogate. Her sister-in-law ran to Alice’s room with the phone. Alice heard her son’s voice, clear and strong, but the first words he spoke revealed that something had rattled the former collegiate rugby star.
“Mom, this is Mark Bingham,”35 he said, using his first and last names. “I want to let you know I love you. I love you all.” Based on what he’d heard or seen, Mark told her that three men had hijacked his flight and that they claimed to have a bomb.
“Who are they, Mark?” asked Alice, a longtime United flight attendant. Mark didn’t answer. A few seconds later, he said, “You’ve got to believe me. It’s true.”
“I do believe you, Mark. Who are they?”
After another pause, Alice heard voices and murmurs in the background. The line went dead.
Alice called 9-1-1 and was connected to the FBI. Meanwhile, her brother Vaughn turned on the television, where replays of the South Tower crash played in a seemingly endless loop. Word of the Pentagon attack soon followed. Alice and Vaughn understood: the hijackings were suicide missions, and Mark’s plane would almost certainly be next. Vaughn urged Alice to call Mark’s cellphone,36 to let him know the situation and to urge him to take action.
Mark didn’t answer, so Alice left a message: “Mark, this is your mom. . . . The news is that it’s been hijacked by terrorists. They are planning to probably use the plane as a target to hit some site on the ground. If you possibly can, try to overpower these guys, ’cause they’ll probably use the plane as a target.” In her fright, Alice couldn’t find the word “missile.” She told Mark that she loved him and said goodbye. But first Alice repeated her message: “I would say, go ahead and do everything you can to overpower them, because they’re hell-bent.”
Mark didn’t retrieve his mother’s voicemail, but the call to action came through nevertheless, from other telephone conversations happening all around him.
At the same time that Mark Bingham spoke with his mother, former national collegiate judo champion Jeremy Glick called his in-laws’ white clapboard farmhouse in upstate New York. He knew that’s where he’d find his wife, Lyz, and their infant daughter, Emerson. Lyz and her parents watched the World Trade Center burning on live television when the phone rang. His mother-in-law, JoAnne Makely, answered the call.
“Jeremy,” she said. “Thank God. We’re so worried.”37
“It’s bad news,” he replied. He asked to speak with Lyz.
“Listen, there are some bad men on this plane,”38 he told her. Lyz began to cry as he shared details. They repeatedly told each other “I love you.”
Jeremy interrupted and told his wife, “I don’t think I’m going to make it out of here. I don’t want to die.” Through her tears Lyz reassured him that he wouldn’t die that day. Jeremy was doubtful. “One of the other passengers said they’re crashing planes into the World Trade Center,” he said. “Is that true? . . . Are they going to blow up the plane or are they going to crash it into something?”
“They’re not going to the World Trade Center,” Lyz said.
“Why?”
“Because the whole thing’s on fire.”
As Jeremy and Lyz spoke, JoAnne called 9-1-1 and reached a New York State Police dispatcher. After confirming Jeremy’s name and flight number, the dispatcher coached JoAnne into helping Lyz to pump Jeremy for information. Jeremy told Lyz—who relayed the information through JoAnne to the dispatcher—that the hijackers were “Iranian-looking” men who’d put on bandannas when the hijacking began. He said one had a “red box” that he claimed contained a bomb and had threatened to blow up the plane.
Like Mark Bingham and several other callers, Jeremy said he saw only three hijackers. It’s not known why they didn’t count all four, but it’s possible that Ziad Jarrah didn’t participate39 in the initial attack, to avoid potential injury that would have prevented him from flying the plane. In that scenario, Jarrah might have slipped unseen into the pilot’s seat after the three other hijackers seized the cockpit and forced remaining passengers and crew to the rear of the plane before closing the first-class curtain.
Jeremy asked a question, relayed by Lyz, that signaled deliberations had already begun among passengers and crew members about fighting back. “Okay,” JoAnne told the dispatcher, “his question to you is—he’s a big man; he’s thirty years old; he’s a big athlete. They want to know whether they should attack these three guys, rather than . . . Hello?”
The dispatcher remained on the line, but he didn’t answer the question. If the passengers and crew members chose to strike back against the attackers, they’d have to decide for themselves. To do so, they’d have to be relatively certain that this was unlike any hijacking any of them had ever heard about. They’d also need to believe that the possibility of success outweighed the risk of the hijackers’ detonating a bomb or crashing the jet before the counterattack could succeed.
As JoAnne spoke with the dispatcher, she kept one eye on CNN: “Oh, no,” JoAnne blurted to Lyz. “Turn off the television. . . . They just crashed one into the Pentagon.”
Standing beside her, Lyz shared news of the third crashed plane with Jeremy. JoAnne pulled away from the 9-1-1 call and comforted Lyz, who only three months earlier had become a first-time mother. “I know,” JoAnne told her. “Be brave. The police are trying to do what they can.”
Jeremy remained calm, but Lyz could hear confusion in his voice. In the midst of a spreading crisis, in the sky, in New York, outside Washington, and now in her own home, JoAnne displayed a presence of mind and a maternal instinct that she used to guide Lyz through her fear so she could give Jeremy the boost he needed.
JoAnne told Lyz: “Make him . . . make him brave.”
She repeated the phrase, almost like a benediction: “Make him brave.”
Soon the 9-1-1 tape picked up the sound of Lyz’s voice, speaking to JoAnne: “Some guys are rallying together, and they want all the men to go and attack these . . .” Lyz said Jeremy wanted to know if she thought that was a good idea. She said she didn’t know. Lyz asked him if the hijackers had guns. Jeremy said no, then he tried to ease Lyz’s fears. In a joking tone, he told her that he and four other men were “going to get butter knives.”
JoAnne told the dispatcher about a possible counterattack, then added: “And Jeremy doesn’t know whether it’s a good idea.” The dispatcher changed the subject. He asked JoAnne to spell her name and to have Lyz ask Jeremy what he could see out the window, land or water, and whether the plane was circling or banking to turn.
Jeremy grew serious. He told Lyz that he and the other men had voted, and they’d reached a decision. Aware of the potential consequences, Jeremy asked for Lyz’s reassurance. JoAnne’s message about how Lyz could help Jeremy took root just when he needed it most.
Lyz told Jeremy: “I think you need to do it. You’re strong, you’re brave. I love you.”
Jeremy told Lyz he loved her, too. “You’ve got to promise me you’re going to be happy,” he said. Jeremy asked Lyz not to hang up the phone.
Tom Burnett reached his wife, Deena, again. He told her the passenger who’d been knifed had died. The victim likely was import consultant Mickey Rothenberg, who’d been seated among the hijackers and was the only first-class passenger who didn’t try to make a phone call. When the plane took off, hijacker Ahmed al-Haznawi sat directly behind Mickey. On American Flight 11, virtually the same seating arrangement had placed terrorist Satam al-Suqami behind the tech wizard and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin.
Tom knew about the Pentagon. He asked Deena, a former flight attendant, if she thought the hijackers had been able to smuggle a bomb onto the plane or whether they were bluffing. She didn’t answer. Tom said he doubted they had a bomb. Only knives.
At 9:43 a.m., software salesman Todd Beamer tried to call his wife, but it didn’t go through. He dialed 0 on an Airfone in Row 32 and reached an operator. Todd explained the situation and asked her to get a message to his wife that he loved her. The operator grew upset and called over her supervisor, who coincidentally had the same first name as Todd’s wife: Lisa.
“I’ll finish the call,”40 supervisor Lisa Jefferson told the operator. She and Todd established an immediate rapport. Todd told Lisa that two people were on the floor of the first-class cabin, injured or dead. Lisa overheard a flight attendant tell Todd they were the captain and first officer. Todd asked Lisa if she knew what the hijackers wanted. Lisa answered that she didn’t.
Todd described a hijacker with a red belt and what looked like a bomb strapped to his waist. He said two hijackers with knives had entered the cockpit and closed the door behind them. As the call continued, the plane dived sharply.
“Oh my God, we’re going down!”41 Todd yelled. “We’re going down. Jesus help us.” Lisa heard a man in the background cry, “Oh my God, Jesus! Oh my God!” A woman screamed. Todd yelled again: “Oh, no! No! God, no!”
The plane leveled off and Todd regained his composure: “Wait, we’re coming back up.” He asked Lisa if she would say the Lord’s Prayer with him. From a call center outside Chicago and from a hijacked plane over Pennsylvania, Lisa and Todd prayed together: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” They wouldn’t be the last to recite those words this day.
“Jesus, help me,” Todd said. “I just wanted to talk to someone, and if I don’t make it through this, will you do me a favor? Would you tell my wife and family how much I love them?” Lisa promised she would.
She offered to connect Todd with his wife, but he declined. Todd explained why he hadn’t already asked for that. “I don’t want to upset her unnecessarily,” he said. “She’s expecting our third child in January, and if I don’t have to upset her with any bad news, then I’d rather not.”
Tom Burnett reached his wife, Deena, again, this time with a momentous decision: “A group of us are getting ready to do something,” he told her.
Tom said he might not be able to call back.
Some passengers tried calls that didn’t connect, while others reached answering machines. Advertising executive Lauren Grandcolas, pregnant with her first child, chose words she thought would comfort her husband, Jack. In a soothing tone, she told him in a voice message: “Okay, well, I just wanted to tell you that I love you. We’re having a little problem42 on the plane. . . . I’m comfortable and I’m okay for now. I’ll, I . . . just a little problem. I love you. Please tell my family I love them, too. ’Bye, honey.”
Attorney Linda Gronlund left a message for her sister, Elsa Strong. “Apparently, they, uh, [have] flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already, and it looks like they’re going to take this one down as well.” Her voice choked with emotion. Linda fought tears as she told her sister that she’d miss her. She sent her love to their parents and gave Elsa the combination to a safe containing her important papers. With a deep sigh, Linda said, “Mostly I just love you43 and I wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not.”
Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles tried using an Airfone to resume her never-ending conversation with her police officer husband, Lorne. Roused from sleep after his overnight shift, Lorne saw unavailable on the caller ID, so he rolled over and didn’t answer. CeeCee left a message: “Hi, baby.44 I’m . . . Baby, you have to listen to me carefully. I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked. I’m on the plane. I’m calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much, and I’m so sorry, babe. I don’t know what to say. There’s three guys. They have hijacked the plane. I’m trying to be calm. We’re turned around, and I have heard that there’s planes that have been—been flown into the World Trade Center.” Her voice, steady until then, began to crack. “I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Goodbye.”
Census worker Marion Britton reached an old friend, Fred Fiumano. He tried to comfort her by saying the hijackers would probably land in another country.45 Struggling to hold her emotions in check, Marion said she didn’t buy it. She told Fred she knew about the World Trade Center, and she predicted that her plane would crash, too. Marion’s census coworker Waleska Martinez called a friend’s Manhattan office, but the call didn’t go through.
Marion shared the Airfone with Discovery Channel Stores’ district manager Honor Elizabeth Wainio, whose friends called her Lizz and who looked younger than her twenty-seven years, with big hazel eyes and brown hair framing her fair, lovely face. She reached her stepmother, Esther Heymann, at her home outside Baltimore: “Hello, Mom,”46 Elizabeth said. “We’re being hijacked. I’m calling to say goodbye.” Through her shock, Esther suggested that they find a way to be together in the moment. “Let’s just be in the present,”47 Esther said. “We don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Let’s look out at the beautiful blue sky and take a few deep breaths.”
Their call continued for four and a half minutes. Esther told her: “Elizabeth, I’ve got my arms around you,48 and I’m holding you, and I love you.” Elizabeth said she could feel Esther’s embrace, and she loved her, too. Like several others, Elizabeth focused not on herself but on the pain she anticipated among the people she feared she’d be leaving behind: “It just makes me so sad knowing how much harder this is going to be on you than it is for me.”49 They remained silent for a while, then Elizabeth said, “I should be talking. I’m sitting here being quiet, I’m not even talking.” Esther reassured her: “We don’t have to talk, we’re together.” After another pause, Elizabeth seemed at peace. She told Esther she knew that her late grandmothers were waiting for her.
Joseph DeLuca called his father to say he loved him and goodbye.
Flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw told her husband, Phil,50 a US Airways pilot, that she saw three hijackers put red bandannas on their heads as the attack began. He told her what happened in New York. “Where are you?” he asked.
“We’re over a river,” Sandy said.
“Which way are you headed?” Phil asked.
“I don’t know.”
Phil thought a moment and asked, “Well, where’s the sun?”
“It’s in front of us,” Sandy said.
“All right,” Phil said. “You’re headed east.”
She told him that passengers were getting hot water from the galley as they prepared to take action. She asked him for any suggestions for fighting hijackers, but Phil’s mind went blank. But he did have an idea if they regained control: Phil told Sandy to call him back when they seized the cockpit from the terrorists. He knew how to fly a 757, and he’d talk someone through it. They expressed their love for each other. Sandy told him to raise their kids right.
Andrew “Sonny” Garcia, the former air traffic controller, connected with his wife for only one second before the call dropped. He spoke her name: “Dorothy.”
The plane descended to an altitude low enough for computer engineer Ed Felt to use his cellphone to dial 9-1-1 from inside a locked lavatory. Felt’s call connected to an operator in the Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, emergency dispatch center. “Hijacking in progress,” Felt said, his voice shaking.51 He provided the flight number, the aircraft type, and its original itinerary, from Newark to San Francisco.
CeeCee Lyles couldn’t stop trying to reach Lorne. With the plane flying low, she caught a cellphone signal. This time Lorne saw CeeCee’s number on the caller ID and picked up, still in bed, half-asleep after his overnight shift.
“Babe, I need for you to listen to me,” CeeCee said. “My plane has been hijacked.”52
“Stop playing,” Lorne said.
“I’m not playing.”
In the background, he heard people yelling.53 He thought he must be having a nightmare, but CeeCee’s voice made it all too real.
She told him the plane had turned around and that she didn’t know what would happen. CeeCee told Lorne she hoped she’d see his smiling face again. She asked him to tell her sons that she loved them. “I love you, I love you, Babe,” she said. “Take care of the kids.”
Lorne heard an edge of panic in her voice. They prayed together.
But CeeCee wasn’t giving up. Before the call ended, she told Lorne, “We’ve got a plan.”54