The Real-Life Heroes of United Airlines Flight 93
© Ellen Ross
According to various sources, at least two passengers made cell phone calls before the plane went down, alerting loved ones to the hijacking and to the passengers' attempts to take control of Flight 93.
The Washington Post reports that one passenger, Jeremy Glick, reportedly called his wife to say that he and several other passengers had come up with a plan to resist the hijackers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/art...
Radio station KCBS interviewed the wife of another passenger, businessman Thomas Burnett, who may have helped to plan and carry out the resistance.
http://www.kcbs.com/pages/kcbs/news/news...
The San Francisco Chronicle and The Pittsburgh Channel have reported that Thomas Burnett told his wife: "I know we're all going to die - there's three of us who are going to do something about it."
http://www.sfgate.com/today/0912_chron_c...
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/pit/...
We may never know the full story of what happened on board the hijacked Flight 93 before it crashed, killing all aboard. There are unconfirmed reports that a number of passengers voted to act together in an attempt to overpower the hijackers after hearing from family members, on their cell phones, about the attacks on the World Trade Center.
MSNBC reported on the many cell phone calls made by the doomed passengers on the various hijacked flights.
http://www.msnbc.com/modules/exports/ct_...
It seems virtually certain that Flight 93 would have been used by the hijackers, as were three other planes, to crash into buildings, causing far greater loss of life. Some of the passengers may well have prevented this by causing the plane to crash before it reached its intended target.
We do not know how many of the passengers who fought back understood that the plane was about to be used as a flying bomb, and that they had no chance of survival. Perhaps they were already aware that they had nothing to lose, and perhaps not, but their actions may have kept the plane which was already a death trap from becoming a weapon of mass destruction as well.
Somewhere in the air over Pennsylvania, it appears that some of the passengers on Flight 93 made the transition from victims to heroes.
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