Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
At this point, Hoglan says, a struggle mounts in the rear of the plane. It's the moment when Todd Beamer, an account manager for Oracle, utters the now famous line, "Let's roll." A few seconds later, Hoglan says, "you hear somebody being killed, probably strangled. And then you hear Todd Beamer saying something like, 'God help us.'
"That's when they run forward and you hear this 'rrrraaahhh' getting closer to the cockpit. You visualize guys running forward and yelling, trying to get their blood up. They're unarmed and they're going after these guys they know have killed people and have knives. You hear them say, 'In the cockpit, in the cockpit, in the cockpit!' Then you hear this terrible bloodscream. I know it's silly, but it sounds like somebody who is a non-native speaker, probably the terrorist by the door. Next you hear this terrible crashing of a food cart, and I'm a flight attendant, so I've heard crashing carts before.
"They ram the door with the cart and all of a sudden you hear these voices in English getting louder. Remember, the terrorists are at the controls, and the plane is heaving back and forth at very low altitudes. If you've ever tried to walk in turbulence, you know how tough that is. I think the hijackers are now in this terrible struggle and know they are going to be subdued by the passengers, so they start thrashing the airplane around, more than ever."
Hoglan says that an Arabic voice inside the cockpit then asks, "Finish her now?" The answer comes back, "No, not yet." Then, she adds, "maybe a minute later, with more scuffling and struggling in the background, the very last thing you hear is a low voice spoken in English: "Pull it up, pull it up." It probably signals the last struggle, they are probably trying to get control of the airplane. Maybe their hands are on the controls when the plane goes into the ground."
Reams have been written about the heroes on Flight 93, and heroes they most definitely are. But in passing years a stem of resentment has risen from the hallowed ground around Flight 93, with some family members claiming exhaustion at the story of only a handful of passengers, led by Bingham and Beamer, leading the revolt. Hoglan herself is careful not to promulgate the myth of a hardy few. Sincerely, she says, "everyone on the flight was a hero to me. I can recite the names of all 40 of the passengers and crew on Flight 93."
She knows she has been criticized for bragging about Bingham to the press, but, she says, can you blame her? "Mark was everything to me. He set me on the spiritual quest that I've been on for most of my life. It was really my son who forced me to deal with most of the issues in my life. It was my son who has grown me up."
When the subject turns back to why their loved ones had to die on Flight 93, Hoglan and many of the family members remain distraught. Even now, there are unanswered questions. The National Commission report contains scads of important insights, but it remains sketchy on just what happened inside the hijacked planes, despite all the evidence amassed from phone calls made by passengers and crew members to friends and airline headquarters.
Most distressing to Hoglan and other family members are phone calls made by flight attendants on American Flight 11, the first jet to hit the World Trade Center. The calls by Madeline (Amy) Sweeney, who identified the hijackers as Middle Eastern men with a bomb, and Betty Ong, to American's flight center, came at least 20 minutes before Flight 93 took off. Immediately after the valiant women's calls, shouldn't the airlines or FAA have acted to ground all planes, including Flight 93?
One of the ten commissioners, former Sen. Bob Kerrey, suggested as much during the hearings. Of all the facts presented, Kerrey said, the one that "caused scales to fall from my eyes was listening to Betty Ong ... talk to the ground and hear the ground surprised by a hijacking. I mean, not only were we not at a high state of alert in our airports, we were at ease." He went on: "And it's baffling to me why some alert wasn't given to the airlines to alter their preparedness to go to a much higher state of alert. It seems to me a lot of things would have changed if that would have happened."
Does Hoglan, who has more than 20 years in the airline business, and who has studied the minute-by-minute actions of all four jets that were hijacked on Sept. 11, believe that Flight 93 could have been prevented from taking off? "Yes, I do," she says. "Clearly, there was an awful lot of blame before that, and I doubt that any quick action or well-intended action on the part of these people at American would have prevented what happened. But it might have. They might have been able to get word to the FBI and get the planes grounded."
More adamant is Bonnie Greene Le Var, 56, director of a New York nonprofit group, Corporate Angel Network, that arranges for children with cancer to fly on private jets to clinics; her brother, Donald Greene, was on Flight 93. Yes, Greene admits, her conviction that the plane could have been grounded is fed by the pain of her loss. But at the same, she knows a thing or two about the airline business. Her and Donald's father, Leonard, invented safety flight instruments -- stall warning indicators, to be exact -- now installed on virtually every commercial airliner. Donald was executive vice president of the family company, Safe Flight, when Flight 93 crashed.
Transportation authorities "could have grounded my brother's plane," Le Var says, her brusque New York accent underscoring her anger. "They knew who was hijacking those planes that hit the World Trade Center. They knew exactly what was going on. But they wasted time grounding all the planes. Remember that scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11" with Bush sitting in the school for seven minutes? You might say seven minutes isn't much -- but it's a lot. You know how many planes take off in seven minutes every single day? I don't know. Maybe Albert Einstein wouldn't have known how to react, known to immediately ground all the planes. But somebody should have. Somebody should have had the smarts to figure that out."
The commission report fails to deliver a conclusive answer to whether Flight 93 could have been grounded; rather, it states that personnel at the FAA and North American Aerospace Defense Command were unprepared and "struggled under difficult circumstances to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet." The report does conclusively state, though, that "We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93. Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the Capitol or the White House from destruction."
You will get no argument from Hoglan or any of the family members associated with Flight 93 on that point. But praise in the long run will get you nowhere with people you've betrayed. Especially newborn activists like Hoglan. "People ask me, 'Don't you want closure?'" she says. "And the truth is, I'd like to go to my death tortured by the events of Sept. 11. I want to be angry about it."
