Jeremy Glick, 31, another passenger involved in the apparent revolt, was a college rugby player and judo champion. Beamer stood 6-foot-1 and weighed 200 pounds. It was the hijackers' bad luck that they chose a plane with a number of large men on board. "I know I'm not going to get out of this." He asked Jefferson to recite the Lord's Prayer with him and she did, Lisa Beamer said.īeamer then said, "Let's roll," and Jefferson could hear chaos in the cabin until, minutes later, the line went dead. "We're going to do something," Beamer, a father of two from Cranbury, N.J., told Jefferson. The remaining passengers and crew were broken up into two groups some were herded together in the first-class compartment, but most were told to sit on the floor in a galley at the rear of the 757-200's 110-foot cabin, Beamer told Jefferson.īeamer said that he and a group of men in the rear of the plane planned to "jump on" one of the hijackers who was standing guard over them, with what he said was a bomb attached to his waist. The United pilots, Jason Dahl and Leroy Homer, had also been injured, Beamer told Jefferson, though he did not say how seriously. By that time, the hijackers aboard Flight 93 had stabbed one passenger to death. Lisa Beamer said her husband called Jefferson on a GTE Airfone at 9:45 a.m., after the passengers aboard his flight had learned that Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center. The US Airways plane's collision-avoidance system detected the approaching plane and advised the US Airways pilot to descend, which he did, averting a collision.Ĭontrollers scrambled to direct other planes out of the way of both United 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 - which also originated in Boston - as they headed toward the twin towers. Shortly after that, the hijacked plane was headed straight for a US Airways flight. The hijacker pilot "knew what he was doing," a controller said. However, the hijacked plane leveled off for a moment, perhaps to avoid the Delta aircraft, then began its descent again. One controller reported to investigators that he realized the plane had turned head-on toward a Delta aircraft, "and was descending into his face." The Delta plane began a turn, but the other aircraft also turned, and their radar targets merged on the screen, sources said. In one case, the hijacker controlling the plane appeared to maneuver the flight to avoid a collision, according to government sources.Īnother aircraft descended rapidly after being warned of an imminent collision with a hijacked plane by the on-board collision warning system.Īs it flew toward Manhattan, United 175 turned to the left and began descending. United Flight 175, a Boeing 767 headed from Boston to Los Angeles, was on a collision course with at least two other airliners after it veered off course and descended toward Manhattan. New details also emerged yesterday about the final moments of the two hijacked airliners that slammed into the World Trade Center. In other phone calls, two passengers told people on the ground they were planning to try to overpower the hijackers.
The phone call, first reported yesterday by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, offers the most detailed evidence yet of the passenger revolt aboard Flight 93 that may have caused the plane to crash short of its intended target - believed to be Washington. Lisa Beamer said Jefferson told her she was on the line in Chicago with Todd Beamer for the final 15 minutes of the flight, which was headed from Newark to San Francisco and crashed just after 10 a.m. Jefferson, heard screams and a scuffle before the line went dead, according to Beamer's wife, Lisa, who heard the account from Jefferson. "Are you guys ready?" the operator heard the 32-year-old Beamer ask fellow passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh on Tuesday. Todd Beamer told the GTE Airfone operator he knew he was going to die, asked her to pray with him and uttered his last, defiant words.
0 kommentar(er)
