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Jere Longman
Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Among the Heroes
Like millions of other Americans on September 11, I was at home. I'm based in Philadelphia for The New York Times. My instinct was to get to New York City, but all the roads and bridges and tunnels were closed immediately. Soon there was word that a plane from Newark headed to San Francisco was missing or may have crashed in western Pennsylvania. When that was confirmed, another Times reporter, Sara Rimer, and I drove four hours west of Philadelphia to the tiny town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. When I got there, there were hundreds of reporters on the scene, but there was none of the normal tension you would expect between reporters and law-enforcement officials. Everyone was so stunned about what had happened that people just got along. They even put us on a bus and took us to a bluff overlooking the crash site, several hundred yards away. But there was not much to see - just a smoking hole in the ground.
I spent a few days in Shanksville reporting and went home. I never considered writing a book. Then, a couple of weeks later, I got a call from my editor at HarperCollins who said, "What do you think about this flight? Would you like to write a book about it?" I said, "I don't know." Reporters are often portrayed as insensitive people, but I can tell you, there's no assignment that a reporter is more reluctant to take than one talking to grieving families. There's nothing that I could say that would comfort anyone. Family members don't want notebooks or cameras thrust in their faces; it's not the time for it.
But my wife was convinced that people wanted to know: Who were these people on the plane? What was it about them that allowed them to behave in this heroic manner, to attempt to take back control of this plane? On this day of unthinkable defeat, they had provided the solace of victory, preventing the terrorists from reaching their target.
As a sportswriter, one thing you learn about quickly is how to write about people. The games are repetitive - the same thing happens over and over - but the people change. You also learn how to write quickly. So, I reconsidered. As it turns out, the people on this plane have always been portrayed as ordinary people caught in an extraordinary circumstance, but in fact I found them to be rather remarkable people. On an early-morning, cross-country flight you would expect to find a lot of business people: type-A personalities, people who kept score in their lives and who knew how to make a plan and carry it out. There was no one younger than 20 years of age. There were several college students, business people, some people traveling for leisure - but a remarkable group of people.
Reliving the Tragedy
Flight 93 was scheduled to leave at 8:01 a.m. on September 11 and was delayed for 42 minutes. There are three airports in the New York area, and delays are common. That was important for two reasons. One, at 8:24 a.m., 18 minutes before Flight 93 took off, Muhammad Atta came on the intercom of American Flight 11 and tried to impersonate the captain. It became quickly apparent that he was hijacking the plane. That was 18 minutes before Flight 93 took off, so a lot of family members from Flight 93 want to know why it was allowed to take off in the first place. One answer is there was a lot of confusion and no one ever suspected that a hijacked plane would be used as a missile.
Second, the plane took off 40 minutes late and went all the way to Cleveland before it made a turn toward Washington, giving the passengers time to find out what was going on. They began making phone calls, several dozen at least, right away. They were asking questions: Is this a normal hijacking? Where are they taking us? Family members told them about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mark Bingham called Alice Hoglan, his mother, at 9:44 a.m. Eastern, 6:44 a.m. Pacific Time. They spoke briefly, then Alice made a call back, which Mark apparently never got. Alice is a United flight attendant and said, "You'd better try to take control of the plane. It's not a normal hijacking. It's a suicide mission. You'd better try to take control."
We don't know why the passengers were allowed to make phone calls. It was obviously a huge mistake for the hijackers. The other three hijacked planes that day had five hijackers. This one had four, though all the telephone calls reported seeing only three. Tom Burnett, who was from San Ramon, California called his wife and talked about a plan to take control of the plane. Todd Beamer made a reference to it. Jeremy Glick, a passenger from New Jersey, did. So, it became evident that this plan was underway.
Four, five or six people have become well known for being heroes, but it's reckless to assume they were the only ones. There were people with various skills that may have come into play that day. Donald Greene, one of the passengers, had a pilot's license. Andrew Garcia had trained as an air traffic controller. Lauren Grandcolas was an emergency medical technician, as were Linda Gronlund and Jean Peterson. Jean Peterson and her husband Donald were crisis counselors. Richard Guadango was a federal agent and had received anti-hijacking training. CeeCee Lyles, one of the flight attendants, was a former policewoman.
The idea we have in our heads is that five people rushed abreast toward the cockpit. That didn't happen on Flight 93, because a Boeing 757 is a single-aisle airplane. Essentially the plane is built to squeeze as many people as you can into the smallest amount of space. Forty people couldn't have rushed the cockpit, but there were a lot of other jobs to do: making plans, comforting people. I believe everyone did what they could on that plane, which was one reason I wanted to write about everyone.
It's assumed by many people that the pilots were killed immediately. ABC obtained a tape from the Cleveland air traffic control center, played last November, in which you can hear the pilots screaming, "Get out of here! Get out of here!" But at one point on the voice recorder, the hijackers make a reference to bringing the pilot back in. Of the four flights, this was the one that actually changed its destination. After the plane turned in Cleveland and turned southeast toward Washington, it changed its destination from San Francisco International to Reagan National. It's unknown why that happened and whether the hijackers had the ability to know what to do to program that into the computer. Did one of the pilots do it? Was one of the pilots trying to alert someone or was he forced to do it?
In April, the family members were allowed to hear the cockpit voice recorder after putting pressure on the government. The voice recorder tells the last 31 minutes of the flight. The flight was hijacked at 9:28 a.m. and crashed at 10:03. So there were 35 minutes to make and carry out this plan. I was never allowed to hear the voice recorder, and I did not see a transcript, but I talked to government officials who had. The family members were allowed to take notes, and so a number of them, on the condition of anonymity, agreed to tell me what they had heard on the tape. It's clear, while we don't know exactly what happened, that the passengers and crew members did put forth this valiant effort. Sandra Bradshaw, one of the flight attendants, called her husband, Phil Bradshaw, a US Airways captain, and said, "I'm boiling water. We're going to throw it on the hijackers and try to take control of the plane." Near the end of the flight, CeeCee Lyles, one of the flight attendants, called her husband and said, "They're running toward first class." Sandra Bradshaw and Elizabeth Wainio said the same thing.
In the final five minutes in the voice recorder, a fierce struggle begins. A federal prosecutor in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman accused of being the intended 20th hijacker, told family members he believes that the passengers and/or crew got into the cockpit. It's his theory that they used the food cart as a battering ram to get through, based on a digital enhancement of the tape. In the last five minutes you hear a lot of crashing sounds that appear to be plates and glass. Some family members told me you could hear a thumping sound, screaming in English and Arabic and then words like cockpit. There are garbled words, but essentially they're saying, "If we don't get in, we'll die." The hijackers can be heard praying. Near the end of the tape, voices that were sort of muffled and distant became louder and clearer and apparently closer. At the end, you heard words like roll it up, lift up, turn up. We don't really know what that means, but it's been interpreted as meaning an attempt to take over control.
If in fact the passengers and crew got into the cockpit, we don't know whether the hijackers drove the plane into the ground on purpose, which they talked about doing on the tape, or whether it crashed in the chaos of the moment. No one, as far as I know, has seen the data recorder - the second "black box" - which would tell what inputs were made into the controls of the plane, giving some idea of what the plane was doing. But the plane crashed going 570 miles per hour and turned upside down in the final minutes, crashing into a reclaimed strip mine outside of Shanksville. It's very porous ground, so it basically telescoped down on itself.
While we don't know what happened, it's clear that this was the one flight where passengers had the knowledge of what happened on the other flights and had time to do something about it. We always thought we had control of our lives, inside our secure borders; that day we realized we lost that control. The people of Flight 93 literally tried to take control back for us. It's going to be remembered as a defining American moment for a long, long time.
