Flight 93 Pilot Had Intrusion Warning
Passengers on Plane Eventually Thwarted Hijackers
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times
WASHINGTON (July 22) — The idea of a hijacking on Sept. 11, 2001, was unbelievable, even to many of the people who could have responded in time to change the course of events. One of those was Capt. Jason Dahl of United Flight 93, which had taken off from Newark on a flight to San Francisco.
Flight 93 became part of American lore when passengers banded together to try to storm the cockpit of the hijacked airliner, which crashed in Pennsylvania. New details of the hijacking and the passenger uprising were made public in the report released today by the 9/11 commission.
A United Airlines dispatcher near Chicago who knew that Flight 175 had been hijacked and crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center sent a message to the other planes he was following that morning, one of them United 93. In a text message, the dispatcher, Ed Ballinger, told Flight 93 at 9:23 a.m.: "Beware any cockpit intrusion two a/c hit World Trade Center."
At 9:26, Captain Dahl sent a message back, in quick, abbreviated and slightly mistyped language: "Ed, confirm latest mssg plz Jason."
Two minutes later, the hijackers attacked Captain Dahl and his first officer.
Unlike the three other hijackings, Flight 93 continued transmitting over the radio during the struggle in the cockpit. The captain or first officer declared "Mayday," and 35 seconds later, one of them shouted, "Hey, get out of here get out of here get out of here." Later, passengers reported seeing two bodies outside the cockpit, injured or dead, probably the pilots.
Once the hijackers were in control, they knew that passengers were using cell phones and seat-back phones to call the ground "but did not seem to care," according to the report. Yet clearly what the passengers learned in those phone calls inspired their counterattack on the cockpit.
The report said it was "quite possible" that the hijacker flying the plane, Ziad Jarrah, knew that the attack on the World Trade Center had succeeded; he could, for example, have read the text messages intended for Captain Dahl.
"It might not have occurred to him that they were certain to learn what had happened in New York, thereby defeating his attempts at deception," the report said.
"Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye."
-Flight 93 Passenger
Of the 33 passengers on the plane who were not hijackers, at least 10, and two crew members, spoke to people on the ground. At least five of the calls included discussion of the World Trade Center. At 9:57, about seven minutes before the end, one of the passengers ended her conversation saying: "Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye."
The report indicates that Mr. Jarrah, at the controls of United 93, did what many airline pilots have fantasized about since the hijackings: tried to maneuver the plane sharply, rolling and pitching, to keep control of the cockpit. It apparently did not work; the plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
The report does not clarify whether the hijackers' goal for Flight 93 was the White House or the Capitol, but indicates that the hijackers tuned a cockpit radio to the frequency of a navigation beacon at National Airport, just across the Potomac River from the capital, erasing any doubt about the region of their intended destination.
At three seconds after 10 a.m., Mr. Jarrah is heard on the cockpit voice recorder saying: "Is that it? Shall we finish it off?"
But another hijacker responds: "No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off."
The voice recorder captured sounds of continued fighting, and Mr. Jarrah pitched the plane up and then down. A passenger is heard to say, "In the cockpit. If we don't we'll die!"
Then a passenger yelled "Roll it!" Some aviation experts have speculated that this was a reference to a food cart, being used as a battering ram.
Mr. Jarrah "stopped the violent maneuvers" at 10:01:00, according to the report, and said, "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!"
"He then asked another hijacker in the cockpit, `Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?' to which the other replied, `Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.' "
Eighty seconds later, a hijacker is heard to say, "Pull it down! Pull it down!"
"The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them," according to the report, which seems to indicate that the hijackers themselves crashed the plane. "With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington, D.C," according to the report.
Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company.
