Soft Targets
25 years after 9-11
N591UA, flown on 9-11-2001 as Flight 93
Before September 11, flight crews—pilots and flight attendants—carried cockpit keys. Flight attendants opened the locked door routinely: to deliver food and drinks, address a problem, or simply talk when time allowed. Every year in recurrent security training we were told the same thing: in case of a hijacking, stay calm, comply, don’t fight, give hijackers whatever they want.
The terrorists understood this system better than we did.
All they needed to do was overpower the flight attendant at the front of the airplane. They chose to murder them with box cutters—tools permitted through security—take the cockpit key, unlock the door, and overwhelm the pilots. Even when locked, the cockpit door offered little resistance.
On United Flight 93, the hijackers gained control of the airplane. Passengers and the remaining flight attendants were forced to the back of the cabin and ordered to remain seated. Through cell phones and onboard Airphones, passengers learned what had already happened in New York. Then they learned about the Pentagon. Some quietly said tearful goodbye to loved ones as the situation became unmistakably clear.
The other three hijacked aircraft carried five attackers. Flight 93 had four.
That left only two to control the cabin while the other two flew the airplane toward Washington, D.C. The pilots were dead. Two hijackers stood in first class, assuring passengers that everything would be fine once their demands were met. It was a lie. They displayed what appeared to be an explosive device and shouted, “Stay in your seats or we’ll detonate the bomb.”
They had been taught that Americans would comply.
Thirty-seven passengers and four flight attendants formed a plan. They armed themselves with what they could find—ice hammers, wine bottle openers, and a fire extinguisher. Ordinary people became a coordinated force, united by a shared determination: this flight would not reach its target.
“Let’s roll,” was heard through a cell phone conversation. It became a national rallying cry.
As the passengers surged forward, the hijackers threatened to blow up the aircraft. The threat no longer mattered. The balance of power had shifted.
The cabin descended into chaos. Screams and shouts were captured on the cockpit voice recorder as the sounds of hand-to-hand combat came through the cockpit door. The terrorists in the cabin were overwhelmed and neutralized. Whether killed or beaten senseless did not matter, they no longer controlled the outcome.
Inside the cockpit, the remaining hijackers violently maneuvered the airplane—rolling it side to side, pitching up, then diving. Passengers were thrown against the walls and ceiling, but they fought on. The immediate threat had been removed. The cockpit was the objective.
Passengers and flight attendants crossed a line from which there was no return. It was fight or die— or maybe just die fighting. The terrorist plot must be defeated.
With the speedbump of two hijackers cleared, the group moved forward together. There was no time for hesitation. Strangers acted as one.
Racing the clock, they used a food cart as a battering ram, breaking through the cockpit door and poured into the confined space, fighting for control of the aircraft.
The hijackers intended to kill everyone on board, including themselves. They screamed—not from fear of death, which they accepted for their martyrdom—but from fear of failure. As the passengers entered the cockpit, the hijackers rolled the Boeing 757 inverted and drove it toward the ground. With two big engines pushing it faster and faster, recovery was impossible.
United Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
By choosing to fight, knowing they would not survive, the passengers and flight attendants of Flight 93 stopped the terrorists from using a fourth weapon. In doing so, they saved lives of people they would never know—very likely at the Capital building in Washington, D.C.
Their actions marked the first battle of what would become the Global War on Terror, a conflict lasting more than two decades and costing hundreds of thousands—perhaps more than a million—lives. These passengers prevented another airliner from being used as a weapon of mass murder.
That day, four cockpit keys proved to be an Achilles’ heel. Institutional complacency within the airline industry and regulatory system contributed to the loss of 2,977 innocent lives.
When I returned to work, change came quickly. Hardened cockpit doors made of bullet-resistant Kevlar were installed across the fleet. Keys were replaced with coded access systems, and those codes could be disabled from inside the cockpit. New procedures governed every door opening. We were no longer complacent. Everyone assumed another attack was imminent.
Some critics—among them pilots—declared the problem solved. “Now we don’t need armed pilots,” they said.
I disagreed.
Congress did too. They fly commercial.
Not long after September 11, I attended a required annual security class. The room was filled with angry pilots and flight attendants demanding answers.
“Why were we told to capitulate to hijackers?”
“Why was there no warning?”
The instructor had no answers. He deflected the questions, saying, “Now is not the time for that.”
There would never be a time.
It wasn’t just our airline. Every carrier, under FAA direction, had been given the same guidance: cooperate, don’t resist, take hijackers wherever they demand. Flight attendants were instructed to prevent passengers from intervening. “Don’t let anyone try to be a hero.”
Before September 11, the FBI had investigated Middle Eastern men in Phoenix who wanted to learn how to fly—but not how to land. Several of the hijackers had been on the government’s radar for years. That information was never effectively shared. A bureaucratic barrier known as “the wall,” erected in the 1990s, prevented meaningful cooperation between the FBI and CIA. Intelligence had to be routed through the NSA and the FISA Court, rendering timely action nearly impossible. (Office of the Inspector General, 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 5, D. I. b., September 2004).
The cost of that failure was written in smoke, fire, and silence.
The heroes of Flight 93 proved to be a lot harder targets than the terrorists thought.