The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [26]
So began the minutes of brave resistance, the clearly defined act of courage that has lived on in the national memory. Glick and others were equipped in more ways than one to confront the hijackers. He was six foot one and a former college judo champion. Burnett, at six foot two, had played quarterback for his high school football team. He admired strong leaders, had busts of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Churchill in his office, liked Hemingway’s books and Kipling’s poetry. Mark Bingham was a huge man, six foot four and at thirty-one still playing rugby. A few years earlier, he had fended off a mugger who had a gun. His mother got the impression, as he talked from Flight 93, that her son was talking “confidentially” with a fellow passenger. She felt that “maybe someone had organized a plan.”
At 9:42, a GTE-Verizon supervisor based near Chicago began handling a call from yet another powerfully built Flight 93 passenger. Todd Beamer, a star Oracle software salesman, was married with two sons, and his wife was expecting again. He first dialed his home number, but either failed to get through or thought better of it. Instead, explaining that he did not want to upset his pregnant wife, he asked phone supervisor Lisa Jefferson to pass on a loving message.
As they talked, Beamer suddenly exclaimed, “Shit! … Oh, my God, we’re going down … Jesus help us.” From the passengers around Beamer came prolonged shrieks of terror. Then he said, “No, wait. We’re coming back up. I think we’re okay now.”
Today we have an explanation for those moments of panic. The Flight Data Recorder shows that, as Beamer and operator Jefferson talked on, the plane had gone into a rapid descent.
Shaken, Beamer asked Jefferson to say the Lord’s Prayer with him. “Our Father, who art in heaven …” Across the airwaves, they prayed together. Then Beamer began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want … Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”
Just before Beamer and the operator had begun talking, Cleveland control lost Flight 93’s transponder, the signal that indicates an airplane’s location and altitude. “We just lost the target on that aircraft,” controller John Werth exclaimed, and began struggling to find it on radar. He was in contact, too, with an executive jet still in flight in the area, which reported sighting 93. At 9:55, the recovered flight recorder shows, the hijacker pilot dialed in a navigational aid relating to the plane’s direction. He was heading, it indicated, for Washington, D.C.
For some six minutes, a female passenger named Marion Britton had been talking to a friend on one of the seatback phones. She said she thought the plane was turning and going to crash. There were sounds of screaming again, and the plane did turn. But there was no crash, not yet.
Jeremy Glick, still on the phone to his wife, Lyz, said, “I know I could take the guy with the bomb.” Then, joking—he had mentioned that the hijackers had knives—“I still have my butter knife from breakfast.”
Todd Beamer, continuing his conversation with GTE supervisor Jefferson, told her that he and a few others were getting together “to jump the guy with the bomb.” Was he sure that was what he wanted to do? “Yes,” came the response. “I’m going to have to go out on faith … I don’t have much of a choice.”
There was, it seems, more to the passengers’ plan than merely overpowering the hijackers. If the legitimate pilots were out of action, that alone would have been pointless. Beamer, however, talked as if there was someone on the plane who could act as pilot if they overpowered the hijackers. He gave Jefferson “the impression their plan would be to try to land it safely.”
There was indeed a pilot among the passengers. Donald Greene, a senior executive