Flight 93 Cockpit Voice Recorder
At 8:42
a.m., Flight 93 took off, light with passengers, heavy with 11,000 gallons of
jet fuel for its cross-country flight. Nicole Miller's boyfriend watched it
leave from his own plane, as it sat on the tarmac.
Six minutes later, the north tower of the World Trade Center erupted in flames
For the next 30 minutes, it appears, Flight 93 soared west across
Pennsylvania as havoc erupted behind it. Flight attendants, passenger accounts
suggest, poured coffee and served breakfast.
At some point, before the plane reached Cleveland, the hijackers took over the
plane, armed with knives and the threat of a bomb.
Around 9:30 a.m., air traffic controllers in Cleveland heard someone in the
cockpit say, "Hey, get out of here!" a source said. Then a voice, in what was
described as a thick Arabic accent, was heard that appeared to be addressing
passengers, even though it was radioed to air traffic control.
"This is your captain," the man said. "There is a bomb on board. Remain in your
seats. We are returning to the airport."
How the hijackers overpowered the pilots remains unclear. One passenger would
report in a telephone call that two people lay on the floor in the first-class
cabin, either injured or dead. They appeared to be the pilot and co-pilot, he
said, relating information from a flight attendant. Another told a friend that
two people's throats were slit but didn't identify them. A third saw only one
injured.
At least five passengers and flight attendants described the hijackers in their
calls in similar terms: three men, wearing red bandannas, one with some sort of
box strapped around his waist that he claimed was a bomb.
By
9:36 a.m., United Flight 93 had suddenly changed course, according to
flight-path information provided by Flight Explorer, a firm that supplies
real-time radar tracking data. The plane had made a U-turn and headed back
toward Washington.
In the cabin, passengers frantically began making calls, 23 from the seat-back
phones alone from 9:31 to 9:53 a.m. Others passed cell phones to people who had
been strangers just minutes before.
Some of the telephone calls were short — no more than a few rushed words of fear
or love.
Deena
Burnett was feeding her three daughters breakfast and watching the news in
horror when the telephone rang in her home in San Ramon, Calif.
"Are you OK?" she asked her husband, Tom, 38.
(Tom Burnett)
"No," he said. "I'm on the airplane and it's been hijacked."
He told his wife the hijackers had stabbed someone. He told her to call the
authorities, and he hung up.
When he called back, she was on the line to the FBI. She told him about the
World Trade Center, the first he knew of the attack. He paused. "Were they
commercial airplanes?" he asked.
Deena Burnett didn't think so. Cargo or private planes, she said.
"Do you know anything else about the planes?" No, she said.
"Do you know who was involved?" Again, she said no.
He told her the man who was stabbed had died.
The hijackers are talking about running the plane into the ground, he said. Then
he said he had to go.
His third call came about 9:41 a.m., shortly after a plane had hit the Pentagon.
"OK," he said. "We're going to do something."
In his fourth and final call, just before 10 a.m., Burnett said he was sure the
hijackers didn't have a bomb, that he thought they had only knives.
"There's a group of us who are going to do something," he repeated.
She told him she loved him. She felt he thought he was coming home that night.
This was simply a problem that he was going to solve, as he had solved many
others.
As Burnett talked with his wife, three other men who may have joined him in
whatever plans were being hatched made calls of their own.
Across the aisle in Seat 4D, Mark Bingham, 31, called his mother. He was so
rattled that when Alice Hoglan got on the line, her son told her, "This is Mark
Bingham."
(Mark Bingham)
His message was brief: The plane had been hijacked by three men and he loved
her.
In the
rear of the plane, Jeremy Glick, also 31, a sales manager for a Web site firm
and former judo champion, called his wife from a seat-back phone. He described
three Middle Eastern men brandishing knives and a red box.
(Jeremy Glick)
His wife told him about the attacks at the World Trade Center. He tried to grasp
the hijackers' plans — to blow up the plane or fly it into a target?
The passengers had taken a vote among themselves, he said. They had decided to
try to take back the plane.
"I told him to go ahead and do it," Lyzbeth Glick said on "Good Morning America.
"I trusted his instincts, and I said, 'Do what you have to do.' I knew that I
thought he could do it."
Beamer, 32, an account manager for Oracle, called a stranger. He picked up a seat-back phone and hit "0," and at 9:45 a.m., he was connected first to a dispatcher for GTE Airfone, and then to Lisa Jefferson, the operator's supervisor.
(Todd Beamer)
For 13 minutes, Beamer told Jefferson everything he could, passing along
information he gleaned himself and from a flight attendant. The passengers
remained in their seats, she said he told her, and the flight attendants were
forced to sit in the back of the plane.
He told her how much he loved his pregnant wife and two sons, and he asked her
to call them. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and 23rd Psalm with him.
Moments later, Beamer told Jefferson about the plan, that the passengers were
going to run up the long, narrow aisle to the first-class cabin and attack the
hijacker there.
"I'm going to have to go out on faith," Beamer said.
He turned to someone else, and he said, "Are you ready?" Then, in the last words
Jefferson would hear from him,
"OK.
Let's
roll."
At
10:03 a.m., a black crater bloomed in the soft earth of a field 80 miles
southeast of Pittsburgh.
The wife in California, the father-in-law in New York, the operator in suburban
Chicago still held onto their phones.
They held on, waiting and hoping in the silence.
