National Park Service.Įqually important were the flight timelines of the four airliners hijacked that day and how those timelines altered the execution of the plot carried out by nineteen terrorists sent by Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Val McClatchey, who lived on a farm in Shanksville, PA, photographed the cloud of smoke from the crash of Flight 93 just after it happened. The passenger revolt is only the last of those happenstances. Capitol came to destruction that day, and how much its survival intact is due to happenstance. It is little understood how close the U.S. The lore of that amazing group, however, has come to so dominate American knowledge and understanding of that flight that the larger terror and implications of the fourth plane have been obscured. On that terrible day of September 11, twenty years ago, the revolt of the passengers on Flight 93 resulting in the plane hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest heroic events in American history. Richard Whittle is the author of The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey and Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. Reston wrote the cover article for our June issue on the Vietnam Wall and is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. is the author of 18 books including his just published novel about 9/11, The 19th Hijacker. “That plane was headed for a target, and it wasn’t a field with nobody there in Pennsylvania.Editor’s Note: James Reston Jr. pen for the job he loved and two other items to represent his spiritual and family life.ĭavid Beamer, 59, called his son a “freedom fighter.” “Obviously there was a struggle, but I can tell you who lost,” he said. Lisa Beamer plans to leave a Chicago Bulls hat, a pack of M&Ms, an Oracle Inc. On Monday, the Beamer family will join relatives at a memorial service near the crash site. Hopefully the story that comes out of Flight 93 will give people hope.” There’re not too many bright stories coming out of this.
“Certainly when the chips were down, his character, his faith, his love for his family and his love for his fellow man showed through. “It gives us something we can hand down to our little boys. “This doesn’t change the future of my family, but it sure gives credence to the person I know Todd was,” Lisa Beamer said. She is expecting a third child in January. Someday, Lisa Beamer said, she will tell the story to sons David, 3, and Andrew, 1. At this point Todd started reciting the Lord’s Prayer.” “The last thing Todd said to me was to call his wife for him and to pray for him. “Some of the passengers on the flight had decided to `jump on’ the hijacker with the bomb and try to get him down,” the memo says. He was “not sure if they were dead or alive,” Jefferson wrote. He said two people were hurt - the pilot and co-pilot, according to Lisa Beamer. “I asked him if there were any children on the plane.
on the flight hijacking the plane, two with knives and one with a bomb strapped around his waist with a red belt,” Jefferson wrote. “Todd told me that there were three people. (Her memo had put the larger number of passengers in front Lisa Beamer said Jefferson corrected that in their conversation.) In her account, Jefferson wrote that Beamer told her the hijackers divided passengers into two groups: 10 in front and 27 in back, which would account for all but one passenger. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it.”
Thomas Burnett told his wife: “I know we’re all going to die. “I thanked her for that.”Īccording to previous accounts, passenger Jeremy Glick told his wife he believed they could overpower the hijackers. “I told her she must have been such a pillar of strength for him,” Beamer said. She described the operator as soft-spoken and professional, seemingly keeping her emotions in check as she recounted hearing her husband’s even-tempered voice over the sound of screams in the background.
“When I heard that part of the conversation, I knew that was Todd.” “He uses that with our little boys all the time,” she said Sunday. Oak Brook-based GTE-Airfone faxed a summary of the 15-minute conversation to Beamer’s wife, Lisa, of Cranbury, N.J., Friday, an account she supplemented in a call from the operator.īeamer said she recognized “Let’s roll” as the words of her husband, who was raised in Wheaton. “Without question, the attack would’ve been much worse if it hadn’t been for the courageous acts of those individuals on United 93.” “What they did was to foil, I think, the attack on Washington,” Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
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