I dropped my sister at the airport. She had a flight booked for Flight 93. United Airlines Flight 93 had forty passengers and crew members on board, travelling non-stop from Newark to San Francisco. The passengers ranged in age from twenty to seventy-nine. They were from New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Germany, Japan, Minnesota, Maryland, Florida, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New York. Among them was a federal wildlife biologist, a former bookkeeper, a toy-company executive, an arborist, a retired bartender, attorneys, college students, and an ironworker who had helped build the World Trade Center.

 

Forty-five minutes into the flight, at around 9:30 a.m., air-traffic controllers received two radio transmissions—a frantic “Mayday!” and the sounds of violent struggle, followed by “Get out of here!” United 93 plummeted seven hundred feet, over eastern Ohio. A hijacker, one of four, was heard announcing that there was a bomb on board. Using autopilot, the hijackers pointed the jetliner toward Washington, D.C. Its transponder was disabled, and the flight became harder to track. The plane’s cockpit voice recorder captured the sound of a woman struggling with a hijacker; she then went silent.

The crew and passengers, herded into the back of the plane, used the onboard phones, and their personal cell phones, to call people on the ground. Learning that other hijackers had just flown jetliners into both towers of the World Trade Center, they held a vote. Unarmed civilians, unbound by duty, they included a college judo champ, a former air-traffic controller, and a retired registered nurse. In an act that has become American lore over the past twenty years, the passengers and crew members chose to attack the knife-wielding hijackers and “retake the plane.”