As United Airlines Flight 93 entered its last desperate moments aloft,
there was terror and violence on board – but also heroism.
Minutes before the giant airliner smashed into a field southeast of
Pittsburgh, passenger Jeremy Glick used a cell phone to call
his wife at home in New Jersey and told her that he and several other
people on board had come up with a plan to resist the
terrorists who had hijacked the plane, according to Glick's brother-in-law,
Douglas B. Hurwitt.
"They were going to stop whoever it was from doing whatever it was they'd
planned," Hurwitt said. "He knew that stopping
them was going to end all of their lives. But that was my brother-in-law.
He was a take-charge guy."
Anticipating his own death, Glick, who celebrated his 31st birthday
on Sept. 3, told his wife, Lyzbeth, that he hoped she would
have a good life and would take care of their 3-month old baby girl,
Hurwitt said.
Glick explained to his wife that the plane had been taken over by three
Middle Eastern men wearing red headbands. The
terrorists, wielding knives and brandishing a red box they claimed
contained a bomb, ordered the passengers, pilots and flight
attendants toward the rear of the plane, then took over the cockpit.
The story of Glick's words adds to the account of passenger resistance
already given by another passenger's mother on NBC's
"Today" show this morning. Alice Hoglan of California says her son,
Mark Bingham, also spoke of a plan to tackle the
hijackers in a last-minute cell phone call to her.
Flight 93 was the only one of four hijacked planes that did not smash
into a major target on the ground, and some officials are
already saying that the actions of people on board may have prevented
an even greater tragedy.
Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the Congressional
Defense Appropriations Committee, said at the
crash site that he believes a struggle took place in the plane's cockpit
and that the plane was headed for a significant target in
Washington, D.C.
"There had to have been a struggle and someone heroically kept the plane from heading to Washington," he said.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company