9/11 crash: what happened to the passengers on United Airlines flight 93?

Officials say the remaining wreckage of United Airlines flight
93 will be returned later this year to the Pennsylvania memorial,
marking where it crashed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Flight 93 National Memorial superintendent Stephen Clark says
the wreckage will be buried in a restricted area of the Shanksville
park that’s accessible only to loved ones of the victims.

A final search of the debris found “a number of items that will
be added to the memorial collection, including an orange passenger
call button”, reports NBC News.

The National Park Service will release a full report of the
items collected later this year.

United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked by four Al-Qaeda
terrorists, as part of the 9/11 attacks. It crashed into a field in
Somerset County, Pennsylvania, during an attempt by the passengers
and crew to regain control. All 44 people aboard were killed,
including the four hijackers, but no one on the ground was
injured.

Of the four aircraft hijacked on 11 September 2001, United
Airlines flight 93 was the only aircraft that did not reach its
hijackers’ intended target, believed to be the Capitol building in
Washington DC.

The then vice president Dick Cheney, in a bunker deep under the
White House, authorised flight 93 to be shot down, but upon
learning of the crash, is reported to have said: “I think an act of
heroism just took place on that plane.”

But what exactly happened to the passengers on flight 93 that
day?

What happened during the flight?

The 9/11 Commission Report released in 2004
found that at least ten passengers and two crew members contacted
family, friends or others on the ground during the flight. The
passengers reported that the hijackers, roughly 45 minutes into the
flight, assaulted the cockpit and forced people to the back of the
plane claiming a bomb was aboard, according to the report.

The passengers learned from conversations with their loved
ones that the World Trade Center in New York City and The
Pentagon in Virginia had already been attacked.

It was at this time that passengers Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer,
Tom Burnett and Jeremy Glick formulated a plan to overpower the
hijackers, according to accounts from the phone calls.

“They’re talking about crashing this plane into the ground. We
have to do something. I’m putting a plan together,” Burnett told
his wife, Deena, on the phone.

“Who’s helping you?” his wife asked, to which Burnett replied:
“Different people. Several people. There’s a group of us.”

Glick told his wife, Lyz, according to NewsWeek, that he and four or five other passengers
were thinking of making a rush to “jump the hijackers”.

One of the more storied calls comes from Beamer, who had a long
conversation with airphone operator Lisa Jefferson.

“Are you ready?” a fellow passenger asked Beamer towards the end
of the call. “Let’s roll,” Beamer replies, according to Jefferson’s
account of the call.

What happened just before the crash?

Recordings from the plane “reveal the passengers’ counterattack
on the cockpit began at 9.57 AM”, says CNN.

At that time outside the cockpit, voices are heard on the flight
deck’s recording device saying, “In the cockpit. In the
cockpit.”

A hijacker then says in Arabic, “They want to get in here. Hold,
hold from the inside. Hold from the inside. Hold.”

The passengers then make another run for the cockpit. “In the
cockpit! If we don’t, we’ll die,” an unnamed male passenger
says.

Seconds later, another passenger yells, “Roll it,” which was “a
possible reference to a drink cart passengers might have used to
ram the cockpit door”, adds CNN.

At 10.03 am, the hijacker put the plane down and it crashed into
a field near a reclaimed coal strip mine in Pennsylvania, just 20
minutes in flight time from Washington DC.

There is some controversy between some of the family members of
the passengers and the investigative officials as to whether the
passengers managed to breach the cockpit. The 9/11 Commission
Report concluded that “the hijackers remained at the controls but
must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from
overcoming them”.

But many of the victims’ relatives believe that the passengers
breached the cockpit and killed at least one of the hijackers
guarding the cockpit door.

“Without a doubt, the passengers breached the cockpit,” Randall
Greene, whose brother Donald, a pilot of smaller aircraft, was on
board told Fox News in 2008. “I’m surprised by the theory
that the passengers did not take control of the aircraft.”