Flight 93 Passengers Voted to Fight Back and Saved a Target in Washington

There was no general to give the order, no statute that required it and no oath that bound them to the task. They were flight attendants, passengers and thirty-odd other strangers who had boarded a plane for San Francisco. And within about half an hour of the hijacking, they did what the Founders' generation would have understood without a word of explanation: they took a vote and acted.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93 became the only people that day to stop a hijacked airliner. They did it with no weapons, almost no information and a few minutes. This is the story of how, told from the record, and of why it belongs in the same chapter as Lexington Green.

The Flight

United 93 was scheduled to leave the gate at Newark Liberty International Airport at 8:00 a.m. for San Francisco. It did not take off until 8:42, more than twenty-five minutes behind its usual schedule, held up by the morning's heavy traffic. There were forty-four people aboard: seven crew members, thirty-three passengers and four hijackers. The captain was Jason Dahl and the first officer was LeRoy Homer Jr.

That delay is the pivot of the story. The other three hijacked flights had been in the air long enough that the people aboard were captured before anything was known. By the time United 93 was taken, the first two planes had already hit the World Trade Center. The delay meant the passengers would have information, and information is the raw material of choice.

The Hijacking

The first forty-six minutes of the flight were routine. At 9:24 a United dispatcher's warning about cockpit intrusions reached the plane, and two minutes later the captain answered with a note of puzzlement, asking for the message to be confirmed. The hijackers had only four men where the other three flights had five, and they struck 46 minutes after takeoff. The Commission that investigated the attacks, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, reconstructed the flight from air traffic control records, the cockpit voice recorder and the phone calls made from the plane. It found that at about 9:28 a.m., air traffic controllers heard the sound of a struggle from the cockpit, and that a few minutes later a hijacker's voice came over the radio announcing that there was a bomb on board. The hijackers took over the plane, turned it around over Ohio and pointed it east, toward Washington.

The hijackers herded the passengers to the back of the aircraft. They did not seem to anticipate what would come next, which was that those passengers had phones.

The Calls

Between about 9:30 and 9:57, at least ten passengers and two crew members made phone calls from the aircraft, using seatback phones and cell phones. The record of those calls is the heart of the story, and it is a record of love as much as of courage.

Passenger Tom Burnett told his wife by phone that he and others planned to do something about it. Flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw told her husband she was filling pitchers with boiling water in the galley, and flight attendant CeeCee Lyles said goodbye to hers. Todd Beamer spoke with a telephone operator named Lisa Jefferson, and the operator reported that he told her the group intended to act. She later reported that, as the call ended, she heard him say, "Let's roll." I mention that account with the care it deserves: it comes from the operator, not from a recording.

Here is what mattered. In an earlier age, men in a hijacked vehicle would have been told to be calm and wait. These passengers were told by people who loved them what the hijacking was for. They understood that there was no landing, no negotiation and no rescue coming. They understood the plane was a weapon, and that they were the only ones who could stop it.

The Vote

The 9/11 Commission reports that, according to one of the calls, the passengers voted on whether to rush the hijackers and retake the plane. Read that again. A group of strangers on an aircraft, with their lives at stake, took a vote. They did not wait for a leader to emerge or an authority to arrive. Each of them had a voice, and each of them used it, and then the group acted.

That is why the title of this piece uses the word "voted." It is the most American detail in the whole record. Of all the ways people can respond to a mortal threat, this group chose a decision procedure: discuss, consent, act together. The Declaration of Independence says that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." The passengers governed themselves for about twenty minutes, in the air, with no instruction manual, and the form of their government was a vote.

They also prepared. According to the calls, one flight attendant was filling pitchers with boiling water in the galley. Beamer, at his request, prayed the Lord's Prayer with the operator.

The Revolt

The cockpit voice recorder recovered from the crash site gives the final minutes in sound. Starting at about 9:57 a.m., the passengers began their assault, and the recording captures the struggle: shouting, loud thumps and crashes, breaking glasses and plates, and a hijacker in the cockpit asking another whether it was time to finish it off. The hijacker who was flying the plane rolled it from side to side, pitched it up and down and tried to throw the passengers off their feet. The Commission determined that the plane crashed at 10:03 a.m., moving at about 580 miles an hour, rolled onto its back, into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Everyone aboard was killed.

The Target

The Commission concluded that the hijackers' likely target was either the U.S. Capitol or the White House. At the moment of impact, the aircraft was roughly twenty minutes of flying time from Washington. The Commission also found that the military's command center learned of the hijacking only at about 10:03, the moment of the crash. No fighters were positioned to intercept it, and the government's defenses were not in place. The only defense that day for the capital on that flight path was the passengers.

I will say plainly what follows from that. A building full of people, or the seat of government itself, or both, was not hit, and the reason is that thirty-three passengers and seven crew members chose to fight. We cannot know exactly what the hijackers would have struck. We do know what the passengers prevented, and we know they made the decision knowing that it would probably cost their lives.

Why They Stand With the Minutemen

On April 19, 1775, the militia of Lexington and Concord stood against British regulars. They were farmers, tradesmen and shopkeepers. Nobody had commissioned them for the task. They acted because the moment demanded it, and they have been remembered ever since. You can read what happened that day in Why Lexington Green and Concord Bridge Started a War on April 19, 1775.

The Second Amendment says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The idea behind it is not merely about firearms. It is about the character of a free people, who are themselves the first line of their own defense and cannot hand the whole task to professionals. The passengers had no firearms. What they had was the same civic reflex: ordinary citizens acting in common for the common defense, without waiting to be told.

Three features connect them to the Minutemen:

1. They were ordinary citizens. No one on board had been trained for this particular task.
2. They acted together and by consent. Many militia companies chose their own officers, and the passengers voted.
3. They acted to protect others. The passengers could do nothing to save themselves once the plane was in the air, but they could prevent the plane from being used to murder others on the ground. The sacrifice was for strangers.

The Strongest Objection

A careful skeptic will raise a fair objection. The record of the flight is not complete. The calls were short, the recorder captured only sound, and some of what is widely told rests on the accounts of people who heard secondhand. If we tell a story more confident than the evidence, we risk replacing history with legend.

I agree with the premise and reject the conclusion. The premise is right: a responsible account distinguishes what the Commission established from what rests on a single witness. That is why this piece attributes the "Let's roll" account to the operator, and the vote to one of the phone calls. But the core facts are not in doubt. The plane was hijacked. The passengers learned by phone what had happened. They organized an assault on the cockpit, and a cockpit recorder captured the fight. The aircraft crashed in a field in Pennsylvania instead of in Washington. Each of those facts has physical or documentary support. The honest way to honor the passengers is to say what is known, mark what is reported and refuse to embellish. The people on that plane do not need embellishment.

What It Means for Citizens

There are four things a free people can learn from Flight 93.

1. Information is power. The passengers acted because they had the facts. A government that suppresses information weakens its citizens' ability to defend themselves. The press, the telephone and the free exchange of news saved a building on September 11.
2. Self-government is a habit. People who have practiced voting, discussing and deciding in community life will do those things under pressure. People who have not will wait for instructions. The passengers' vote was the work of a civic habit, built in an American childhood.
3. Defense begins with citizens. The government failed to stop the planes before they hit. The passengers did what it could not. A republic is wise to prepare its people for emergencies and to trust them with information.
4. Courage is available to anyone. The record does not show a group of soldiers or special agents. It shows passengers, flight attendants and a number of other ordinary people. The capacity is ordinary and it is deep.

These conclusions fit with what we find in other accounts of citizens answering a call, such as The Firefighters Who Climbed the Towers and the 343 Names the FDNY Still Reads and the broader record in September 11, 2001 Hour by Hour From the First Plane to the Last Rescue. The topic of terrorist travel and the failures that let the hijackers board is covered in Terrorist Travel and the Visa Lessons the 9/11 Commission Laid Out.

The Memorial

The crash site near Shanksville in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, is now a national memorial. Congress established the Flight 93 National Memorial in September 2002, and the site includes a memorial plaza and a wall inscribed with the names of the forty passengers and crew. It is a quiet field, and that is the point. The place where citizens saved a capital they could not see is not a monument to power but to a choice.

The case in brief

1. United 93 left Newark more than twenty-five minutes late on September 11, 2001, so its passengers learned of the attacks in New York and Washington by phone before the hijackers could finish the job.
2. The 9/11 Commission documented the calls, and according to one of them the passengers voted on whether to fight.
3. The cockpit recorder captured the revolt starting about 9:57, and the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field at 10:03 about twenty minutes from Washington, probably short of the Capitol or the White House.
4. The passengers belong beside the Minutemen because they were ordinary citizens who acted together, by consent, to defend others without waiting for orders.
5. The honest account marks what the record establishes and what rests on a single witness, and it needs no embellishment.

What you can do: visit the Flight 93 National Memorial if you can, or read the Commission's chapter on the flight, then teach a young person how a group of citizens made a decision under pressure and why the habit of voting and discussing matters before the emergency.