r/interestingasfuck • u/General_Athlete5807 • 10h ago
The heartbreaking voicemail left by a flight attendant before she tried to fight back against hijackers on 9/11
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u/General_Athlete5807 10h ago
This is CeeCee Lyles, a flight attendant aboard United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. After the plane was hijacked, she left a voicemail for her husband telling him she loved him and that the plane had been taken over. She later joined the other passengers and crew in an attempt to fight back against the hijackers. Flight 93 ultimately crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before reaching its intended target.
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u/alotofpisces 10h ago edited 8m ago
I had no idea they hijacked another plane! So there were 4 overall?
EDIT: Im not American!!!
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u/PaisleyRock 9h ago
Yes, four. Three hit their targets (the two towers and the Pentagon) but the passengers on Flight 93 took their plane down before it could. They all died preventing a fourth strike — they knew they would probably not survive but did it anyway, like true heroes.
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u/FreeIDecay 9h ago
A guy from my home town was on flight 93. Jeremy Glick.
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u/ragnarok635 8h ago
His wife has a Ted Talk about dealing with tragedy and grief: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwyR4cx-W3Y
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u/kmp633 6h ago
There were two fighter pilots who were instructed to "take down the plane" - I was listening to an interview with the female one yesterday. They had no weapons, they couldn't just shoot it down, so her and her male colleague decided to ram the aircraft with their planes. They knew it was a suicide mission. The plane came down, via the passengers taking back over, before they were able to reach it to execute their plan. She is full of guilt that she wasn't able to save the plane's worth of people who died, although let's face it, the end result would have been exactly the same, just with two more dead pilots.
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u/Embellishment101 5h ago
That interview with the fighter pilot gave me goosebumps. The people on that plane who fought back were heroes.
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u/d5509 2h ago
Why didn’t the fighter pilots have weapons? Is that explained?
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u/kmp633 2h ago
Yeah it later in that interview - they had missiles but they take time to put together and load, and they just didn't have time. She describes them as quite complicated mechano. By the time the communication reached them they just had to go without them. They all knew it was a suicide mission .
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u/Hopefulkitty 2h ago
I think either there wasn't time or they were already planning a training mission. I seem to think that there wasn't time, and they needed someone up as fast as possible.
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u/PolicyWonka 1h ago
Correct. There’s no real need to keep planes armed with weapons on US soil like that. It’s just kind of dangerous and accidents can happen.
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u/GayPudding 7h ago
Few people in history go out like that, one can have nothing but the deepest respect for them.
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u/Batmanischill 3h ago
Yea, they werent fighting for themselves, they already knew their fate, they were fighting for the lives of every one below the plane. Truly the epitome of heroic.
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u/Sumo_Cerebro 3h ago
They made a movie about it actually.
In the film, 1 of the passengers on the plane was actually a retired pilot.And the plan was get to the hijackers out of the cockpit so he could fly the plane.
Hijackers were removed. But they couldn't get the pilot to the cockpit in time.
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u/chillywilly69 9h ago
what was the intended target of flight 93?
edit nevermind. according to AI it was the US Capitol
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u/gundude21 3h ago
Both answers are correct. If Kalid Sheik Muhammad is to be believed. Bin Laden wanted the White House and KSM wanted the Capitol. Its unknown for sure. But the fact is these heroes saved lives no matter what the target was.
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u/PaisleyRock 9h ago
I don’t think that is known, but I’ve heard speculation that it could have been the White House or the Statue of Liberty.
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u/cgc86 9h ago
White House was the intended target
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u/DrEzechiel 7h ago
Actually, that has been disputed. Apparently the White House is hard to find and hit feom above. The Capitol would have been the easier target to hit
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u/Kashek70 1h ago
I live in PA and the big fear at the time of the crash and rumor was they wanted to hit 3mile island. Not sure if that would have caused a meltdown but it was a very real fear here. I visited that hole in the ground about a year later. It was just roped off area at the time I went. I feel Plane 93 is always overshadowed by the towers. It was a tragedy for everyone involved.
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u/LastOfLateBrakers 9h ago
Yes. There was also United Airlines Flight 23 that was on the ground when the pilots received the ACARS message to stay on the ground. While not explicitly confirmed there are strong suspicions that it was the 5th intended target flight.
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u/dkol97 9h ago
"Crew members reported that several agitated young men in first class fled the aircraft when it returned to the terminal. The FBI later questioned the flight crew and reportedly found box cutters and Al Qaeda-linked items in abandoned baggage"
Well I'm certainly convinced it was.
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u/PolicyWonka 1h ago
This is false.
There was never any weapons found on the plane. One of the pilots speculated that there could have been weapons; none were ever found.
Likewise, no al-Qaeda linked items were found in UA 23 luggage. The items were found in luggage of Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers of AA 11 whose luggage failed to make it onto the plane.
Planes still had passenger manifests, which is of course how we did learn about the identities of all the terrorists. There are no “mysterious terrorists who got away” from UA 23.
Just baseless conspiracy theories.
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u/mchilds83 9h ago
Wouldn't those men's ID have been verified and recorded prior to boarding flight? Who are they? Were they questioned?
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u/NotEvil_JustBritish 8h ago
Prior to 9/11 taking domestic flights in the US was more like getting on a train or a coach. You were rarely asked for ID, they would accept no photo ID, and the security screening was a total joke.
In 1999 I flew from Newark to Boston and wasn't asked for my boarding pass, let alone ID. I had a large bottle of whisky in my handbag and I was just waved through without them even looking at it.
And I have a strong Welsh accent so I was clearly not American.
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u/Wolf_Mans_Got_Nards 7h ago
What part of Wales? Because at the moment I've got visions of you walking on the aircraft like "Alright boyo, where to we going?" and it's making me cackle.
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u/NotEvil_JustBritish 6h ago
I grew up in the Valleys, proper mining country, so that's not far off 🤣
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u/GuessingAllTheTime 1h ago
I studied in Wales for a semester in college (Swansea to be specific). Love Wales. Love the Welsh Valleys accent.
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u/Ruu2D2 7h ago
Sadly this happen with lots thing
People on ground will raise concern government / ceo will go on about cost
Majior event happen . There be rush to put thing in place . Government / ceo will apologies say it was outside control. The people who work every day will be like we told you million times there was x risk
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u/NotEvil_JustBritish 6h ago
So true. 9/11 changed America in a profound way. In terms of air travel it changed the whole world.
Obviously a lot of it was necessary, but I can't help but think that much of it was performative and not very well thought out.
For example, I did the same journey in 2003 and was detained for two hours (missing my flight) whilst they ascertained that I was telling the truth about the paracetamol in my bag. I told them it was just the European version of OTC acetomenophine, but they refused to accept it.
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u/Swimmingbird3 8h ago
Ahhhh. To be young enough that you don’t have experience flying before 9/11.
You didn’t even need a ticket let alone an ID to go all the way to a gate before 9/11. There were just metal detectors back then, regional airports maybe not even that. Weapons weren’t strictly banned, some people would fly with unchecked guns in the cabin (as long as it was stored in a case). Basically the Wild West by today’s standards.
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u/5oLiTu2e 7h ago
And back then, you could give or sell your ticket to anyone— if you didn’t feel like going or had a reason you could not go on a flight. We’d sell them on Craiglist at a discount.
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u/CompanyOther2608 5h ago
Oh, my sweet summer child. 9/11 was the origination of airport security as you know it. Before 9/11, security was lax. Family and friends could (and would) go through security so they could say goodbye to their passengers at the gate. Nobody was taking shoes off, putting luggage in bins, having their faces scrutinized. It was a different universe than today.
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u/bullwinkle8088 2h ago
They are starting to allow family to go through security and to the gate again in limited cases now.
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u/the_tytan 2h ago
Even after 9/11 shoes weren’t a thing for a few months. Wasn’t until after Richard Reed tried and failed to set off explosives in his shoes in November or December of that year on board that it became an issue.
I remember flying from Morocco in March 01 with an old ornamental knife in my bag and getting a bit of an attitude when they told me I’d have to check it in. Can you imagine that today?
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u/hoginlly 2h ago
Holy shit, even after 25 years I'm hearing new things. I'll have to read up on this
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u/Wolf_Mans_Got_Nards 7h ago
The problem was with the first flights, up until then hijacking was about using the passengers as hostages, often to get to a specific location. So, if a flight was hijacked, your best course of action was compliance. With United 93, because the passengers were able to reach out to family members, they learnt about the previous attacks and that their best chance of survival was to fight back (or at the very least, stop others on the ground from getting hurt).
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u/glitzglamglue 2h ago
Exactly. And that's why what they did on Flight 93 is so heroic. Imagine if you're a hostage in a bank robbery, everything you have ever seen and been told about bank robberies is that you stay calm and listen to the hostage takers so you can get out alive. It's not about you, it's about money. And that's what you're gonna do. But then you get word that other bank robberies are happening all over the city and the bank robbers are blowing up the building and killing a lot of people. Now you're faced with the choice of whether or not to deviate from decades of "hostage in a bank robbery" protocol and attack the robbers in order to keep the bomb from going off, likely dying in the process.
That's what they did, seemingly with little hesitation. They made what calls to loved ones that they could and then said "Let's roll."
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u/Davey_Jones_Locker 5h ago
The fourth was probably intended to hit the capitol building but the passengers stormed the cockpit to stop it. The hijackers crashed it into a field
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u/ItBeginsAndEndsInYou 3h ago
There’s an amazing movie I watched on it. They really did those passengers justice by showing them storming the cockpit, overpowering the hijackers and ultimately nosediving the plane into a field to prevent it entering a city.
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u/MizneyWorld 4h ago
Flight 93 is pretty famous. Even a major movie release to go along with World Trade Center.
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u/kaytay3000 1h ago
There is a really beautiful memorial in the field where they crashed. My husband and I were trying to avoid toll roads in PA when we realized our route took us nearby and decided to stop. I’m so glad we did. It is thoughtfully designed and gorgeous. As terrible and violent as their deaths were, they are resting in a beautiful and peaceful place.
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u/Melodic_Sherbet_3629 3h ago
Yeah it is believed that plane was meant to hit either the capitol or the white house.
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u/Whateversclever7 2h ago
Curious how you didn’t know. Are you too young to remember 9/11 or maybe from another country? Just wondering, literally no offense meant at all !
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u/alotofpisces 1h ago
Im from a different country. I answered this many times already in this thread haha
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u/LieRepresentative230 1h ago
it's because 9/11 is used as a political playground instead of a memoroitum. It's sad
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u/ExcitablePancake 2h ago
United 93 is a pretty good depiction of the events that took place on that flight. Recommended watch.
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u/anitabelle 14m ago
I was going to ask what you learned about it in school (assuming you’re younger), but then I realized that you probably aren’t American. Having lived through it, I recall almost every detail of that day. The passengers who took down that plane were heroes. They died knowing that we were under attack and that had to have been unfathomably awful.
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u/KiloAlphaLima 5h ago
Just curious, are you from the US? How is that not common knowledge? This is mind blowing to me.
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u/alotofpisces 5h ago
Not from the US. I know the number of people lost their lives, I knew about the 2 planes in the two towers and one in the Pentagon. Didn't know about the fourth one.
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u/Pinklady777 2h ago
The flight was delayed on take off. So that put it behind schedule from the other three planes. After their plane had been hijacked, people started calling loved ones on the ground and found out about the other attacks. Which caused them to choose to fight back. If it had taken off on time, it probably would have hit its target around the same time as the other flights before anyone understood what was going on.
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u/Weimaraner666 4h ago
There‘s lots of documentaries, media and dramatisation on Flight 93 worth watching. This one is informative if you’re interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW0fImpuOCw
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u/Unlucky-Mongoose-160 16m ago
They believe it was intended for the us capitol or the White House. There is a plaque for flight 93 at the capitol.
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u/trulyunreal 14m ago
Visiting the memorial honestly made me cry. The recordings and final words of the passengers is so haunting but beyond courageous. When they realized what was happening both on the plane and elsewhere a lot of them seemed to understand what had to happen to stop more tragedy.
Can't imagine having to make that choice to save others.
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u/Galahad_Lancelot 5h ago
Does anyone know why the passengers couldn't take control? Did the hijackers lock the cabin?
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u/railker 3h ago
IIRC there was one guy still in the cabin and the cockpit did still have a door. They had to get through that dude, who was probably somewhat armed, and the door behind which was two hijackers who had potentially killed a flight attendant already, can't remember if it's theorized they killed the pilots too. All in a tight narrow space and while the dude at the controls was rolling and pitching the airplane.
Even if they got in, hijacker probably strapped in with a full harness, how do you get controls from him? Given enough time maybe they had s chance...
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u/Razzler1973 5h ago edited 2h ago
It's weird to say but I think the people ON the planes that hit the towers don't really get 'talked about' as much
Cause of the scale of hitting the towers and rescue efforts and escapes and the people jumping and waving from windows and staircases being blocked it seems very little is mentioned about the people on the planes that hit the towers
I can't imagine the horror of being on those planes, getting hijacked and gradually being aware of what's happening and right up to impact
Horrible
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u/Sun_on_my_shoulders 9h ago
I listened to her call the museum specifically for her flight. It’s seared into my brain and I will never forget it. Especially “I hope to see your face again.” It’s too tragic for words.
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u/5ubredhit 3h ago
What do you mean ‘call the museum specifically for her flight’?
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u/canonlycountoo4 2h ago
"I listened to her call (at) the museum specifically for her flight (flight 93 memorial)."
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u/Sun_on_my_shoulders 2h ago edited 1h ago
Thank you, I was up late last night and typing half asleep. It’s a very sad, very informative museum, and beautifully designed. The tower of voices nearby is a beautiful place to sit and reflect. It has a different chime for every passenger and crew member, representing their voices. You can stand in the middle and look up at the chimes and think about whatever you need to, to process. https://youtube.com/shorts/wQ8wsDuRuec?si=gJDS041QPEeYRGAM
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u/Notyourtacos 2h ago
Phone Call can be heard at the museum
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u/P0werFighter 2h ago
There's nothing that could bring them back from the dead, but at least those families who got a record from their loved ones can still listen to them to this day.
It's not that much, but it's still important.
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u/Jumpy_Scallion_3108 10h ago
Every time I read or watch something about 9/11, the first question that comes to my mind is: how could anyone do that?
That question still haunts me to this very second.
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u/Evil_Sharkey 9h ago
They convinced themselves that someone else is so evil that killing themselves to take down thousands of “the enemy” is worth it.
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u/BeTheBall- 9h ago
Yep, it's also how wars are started.
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u/Evil_Sharkey 9h ago
Some wars. A lot of them are started for much stupider reasons, like because the leader of one country tried, unsuccessfully, to kill the father of the president of another country.
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u/TinUser 9h ago
Most notably Helen of Troy.
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u/IzCaiman 8h ago
Most notably, not a real event or person.
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u/THE_Celts 8h ago
Some wars. By no means all, or even most. Most wars are started for much more mundane things.
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u/Rnin0913 4h ago
There goal wasn’t to kill people but rather shut down to US government. They targeted the WTC, pentagon, and the capitol/White House. Their goal was to make the US collapse by taking out our economy, our military, and our leaders all at once so we collapse on ourselves
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u/ChemistThat596 9h ago
Religion convinced them*
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u/Evil_Sharkey 8h ago
I think it was more than that. Bin Laden didn’t hate the U.S. just for being sinful. He hated us for also meddling in the Middle East
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u/signmeupdude 7h ago
You are definitely correct, but Islam plays a huge part in the type of suicide style terrorism we see around the world.
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u/_R0Ns_ 4h ago
It's not only Islam. Remember WW2 when the Japanese did the same?
People are willing to give their lives to reach their goal and the more damage you do to your enemy the more meaning your life had.In a war the one side's hero is the other side's terrorist.
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u/PaisleyRock 53m ago
And the pilots who intended to ram Flight 93 - they were willing to die to take it down, but the passengers took care of that first.
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u/signmeupdude 38m ago
I’d argue that those are two pretty different scenarios.
Giving up your life in the context of a military battle is different than blowing yourself up in a public space with the intent to kill civilians.
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u/bigeeee 7h ago
I'm not condoning anything here, but if you take people and kill everyone in their family and torture them from a young age you create a monster that is capable of anything and it is still being done to this day!
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u/InterestingSpeaker 0m ago
Which 9/11 hijackers had everyone in there family killed? Which ones were tortured before the attacks?
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u/HawtforHaldir 2h ago
I think the truth lies in what we aren’t willing to acknowledge as Americans. The US government had/has it hands in so many other countries politics where it need not be.
The people who commit this act and others that are similar are fighting back against the bully they see taunting them.
Thousands, possibly millions of innocent humans all over the globe have lost their lives over “the war on terror” that history could tell who actually started it and why.
We just don’t want to look-perhaps there’s too much shame. Idk
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u/bullwinkle8088 2h ago edited 1h ago
You won’t like the answer but: look at the way the current US administration is loudly stomping on every other country in the world, even our allies. Then realize that we have been doing the same thing, just much more quietly, since the end of WWII.
We earned our enemies. We did do a lot of wrong in the world.
Does that justify anything? No. Does it tell you why we have enemies? Yes.
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u/pennyandpaper 8h ago
Desperate people act desperately :( theres a ww2 documentary on Netflix with a surviving kamikaze pilot, a non exploded kamikaze plane in the met i think? Source: I dont know how to do browser tabs on mobile to fact check so wisdom. How things were vs how things seemed are never the same anyway
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u/SolarFazes 2h ago
You should really go read about how the US has effectively done massive violence to upwards of 70% of the worlds nations. Maybe that would help you understand why blowback is a thing the CIA warned about
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u/TrustworthyPolarBear 10h ago
Not only 9/11. I think that about many terroristic actions. And towards those count bombings/killing of civillians by military too. Our species is fucked in the head.
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u/40_Thousand_Hammers 9h ago
how could anyone do that?
Hopeless people do those kind of things. Imagine losing everything and everyone back home and everyone else is becomes proto-slaves to oil bankers in Saudi Arabia or UAE, no one cares about you or your little tribe, not even country if you think about it. You lived to fight the USSR and then a bloody endless civil war to the end not a single help to come from the outside like last time and you lost everything.
Then this weird guy comes up with a plan to make "the real people above pay if you listen to me", what else you have to lose but your life ? So you sign up and up you go with the planes for vengeance.
The more a people is oppressed (which can vary the methods) the more lenient to crazy "strong man" that will lead them to paradise.
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u/heavy_jowles 9h ago
The hijackers were from affluent families as was Osama. The ironic horrible reality is these wealthy nepo men decided to throw the lives of poor and underprivileged Afghans and Iraqis into the blender. And for what?
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u/40_Thousand_Hammers 8h ago
Reading the life of one of the hijackers: Mohamed Atta, you can see his conservatives views clashing all the time and more and more secluding himself and interesting enough, it was the same time the extremists was winning ground in Afghanistan, Taliban had the country sized fully by 1999 and him was taking training in 1998, some logs point that between 1993-1998 is the time became more secluded and is also the time and rise for Taliban.
The example i gave in my comment above was of others hijackers that weren't as from fortunate families like Atta, you dont make a team with just 1 people.
Other Hyjacker: Fayez Banihammad, was just a random person who was doing humanitarian aid in the middle East before being "recruited".
Not all of them were from rich families.
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u/scoops_trooper 9h ago
Why are you bringing USSR into this story as if ANY of the hijackers were Afghani??
Why are you bringing hopelessness into this story as if most of the hijackers weren’t from affluent families?Anything to blame the West instead of a certain religion that promises 72 virgins for martyrdom, right?
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u/Sophisticated-Tiger 8h ago
Because Bin Laden was there with the Mujahideen (many were funded by America funny enough..billions of dollars went there) to fight the USSR when they invaded Afghan in the 80's....Bin Laden travelled there to help the Muslims fight off the Soviets when they tried to conquer Afghan. I'm assuming that's why they were mentioned bc it's literally what Bin Laden was doing in Afghan before he was involved in attacks against the west...so its part of Bin Ladens history. Other than that I see no reason to mention it.
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u/Knob709 10h ago
How about killing one million Iraqis for no reason?
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u/BeTheBall- 9h ago
Well, Bush had a reason...he was a rabid born-again looking to avenge Saddam's actions toward his dad in the eyes of God, and also install a regime friendly to the US and the needs of our oil companies.
Which made it even more of a fucked up thing.
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u/RontoWraps 9h ago
The religious part of your comment is pure fabrication; that didn’t happen at all lol. The rest is correct though
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u/BeTheBall- 8h ago
Huh? Bush has been a devout born-again for over 40 years. 🤷🏼♂️
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u/RontoWraps 8h ago
He’s been a Christian in the way that all Texas politicians sort of have to be Christians. It was not a defining aspect of his presidency at all. Of course the Religious Right has been an ally of conservatives, but W really didn’t have a strong religious slant besides the expected motions.
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u/BeTheBall- 8h ago
No. There are a few biographies that describe his "awakening" and how it both shaped his life going forward, as well as became the catalyst for his sobriety. He's definitely not pray for show Christian.
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u/RontoWraps 8h ago
Or the Religious Right was a key voting bloc that Republicans needed to keep happy in order to win election; which is why the ghostwritten autobiography of him that you’re referencing was a published campaign book from 1999 to sell the 2000 election. Do you believe everything that politicians say?
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u/Technical_Feelings 3h ago
I’ve seen several posts and comments on other posts about how the poster don’t like that people say “never forgot 9/11” because they things it’s about be rabidly xenophobic. No, it’s about the souls we lost on those planes, in the buildings, and the people that ran toward fear and certain death. It’s about the people that were taken from us
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u/briellebabylol 2h ago
We can and should do both. We should both mourn the loss and the actions and recognize the vitriolic xenophobia and racism that was and is still prevalent.
Humans contain multitudes. Not talking about 1 side of this allows it to fester.
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u/VictorTheCutie 2h ago
Those calls are so painful to listen to, even 25 years later. I can't imagine trying to come up with what to say.
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u/Key-Monk6159 6m ago
They are all heartbreaking. What always gets me is that every one of these final calls were about love which is a good reminder as we go about our normal lives.
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u/Serial7s 5h ago
It's important to remember that every conflict or attack has people just like her in the crosshairs. October 7 Israel, Ukraine daily, Sudan for decades, Gaza for years; everyday innocent people are killed because someone far away decided that their life mattered less than a political cause. Terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. We have to call it out in allies and enemies, and especially in our own borders.
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u/JimboSlyze 10h ago
As heartbreaking as this is. I have a genuine question. If there’s 3 guys hijacking a plane with a box cutter and dozens of passengers. Did no one think to form a group and overtake them? I mean 40-50 people against 3 people could’ve easily beat them down and disarmed them.
Forgive me if I’m missing information that’s just what I know
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u/Greyh4m 9h ago
That's what happened on this flight and the plane ended up crashing in a field rather than the towers.
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u/Evil_Sharkey 9h ago
Before 9/11, hijackers would land the planes somewhere and make demands to let the hostages go. The passengers didn’t know the hijackers were planning to kill everyone until they got calls from family and friends who had seen the news.
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u/Kundrew1 9h ago
That’s exactly what they did on this flight.
Prior to this happening when planes had been hijacked they were flown to somewhere else, landed safely then the hijackers would demand a ransom. Passengers almost always survived, no one on the first three planes thought the hijackers were gonna crash the planes, it just wasn’t something that had really happened at this scale before.
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u/pm_alternative_facts 9h ago
They could have been bluffing and saying that they had a bomb or claiming to wear a suicide vest to keep the passengers in line.
From what I remember once they heard what happened at WTC the passengers probably deduced there is no bomb so they stood a small chance of surviving or at the very least make sure the plane isn't used as the terrorists had planned.
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u/SkullsInSpace 9m ago
You can actually hear the hijackers say "we have a bomb" on one of the phone calls from people on the planes. So this is confirmed to be the case.
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u/ItsTheEndOfDays 9h ago
Initially the passengers had no reason to believe they were going to die no matter what. Listen to the recordings. Flight 93 was able to receive word about what was happening at the pentagon and the towers, they knew they were going to die, no matter what.
You never know how you’re going to react until you’re faced with a life and death situation. Not panicking ain’t easy.
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u/Sorkpappan 9h ago
I believe we don’t know if the passengers ever made it into the cockpit. One of the hijacker’s was a pilot and had taken control of the plane with the rest of them having control of the cockpit.
There are recordings of the hijacker’s discussing whether to crash the plane to avoid the passengers getting control, so we know they tried.
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u/Edmund-Dantes 2h ago
Mind boggling to an older person like me who lived through this how much info is lost over time.
They said they had a bomb, and one of the very first things they did was grab (I think a flight attendant) and slit their throat immediately in front of everyone. Kill one, scare a thousand.
They also had been training for a while. They were strong, fast, were on amphetamines, and had built up their cardio.
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u/okaythiswillbemymain 9h ago
From memory, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but given we're talking about 9/11 probably the details are burned into the egg nog. So from memory;
4 planes, 5 attackers per plane. Except for this one, which had 4 attackers. 19 attackers overall.
Lots of conspiracy theories about the 20th attacker.
3 of the planes hit their intended targets, 1 did not; the one without the 5th man.
Did not having that 5th man make it more difficult for the terrorists? Quite possibly.
When she phoned to say there were 3 men, she probably meant the 3 men she could see. 1 was the pilot in the cockpit, 3 were in the fuselage keeping people quiet with threats of execution.
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u/Pinklady777 1h ago
The flight was delayed so this is the only plane that people already knew what was going on.
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u/Motorcyclegrrl 3h ago
Have you been in a plane? The aisles are single file and there isn't much room anywhere. Be lucky to get 6 people near the cockpit, and maybe less to have room to move to actually do anything effective.
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u/jellywellsss 6h ago
They only had 17 minutes from the first plane striking…you really think average people are going to organize strategically as they’re getting calls about their fate from loved ones?
They were confused, panicking and scared…doubt these were people trained in combat too
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u/Work2Tuff 1h ago
Before 9/11 people had no concept that someone would be crazy enough to hijack a plane and crash it intentionally. Flight attendants weren’t trained to fight back or direct passengers to do so. At worst, they expected it to be hijacked for ransom or something like that. If that’s all they expected there was no reason to risk fighting back.
Source: my mom was an American Airlines LAX based flight attendant at the time and worked flight 11 the day before. This is what she told me about that same question.
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u/anapforme 9h ago
There’s a movie about this flight - United 93, it came out in 2006. It’s worth a watch.
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10h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/neurone214 10h ago
Wtf does this even mean: “this isn’t over?”
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u/jetsetter023 10h ago
That religious zealots are still actively attempting to carry out attacks around the world.
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u/ItsTheEndOfDays 9h ago
you don’t think we’re still a target?
After this stunt we pulled with Iran? Or telling the Saudi’s to f*ck off when they asked for our help with the Houthi’s? Or causing world wide tensions and economic pain?
mate, every day we widen the target on our backs. We have no allies left.
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u/Hikerchic 9h ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if something of this magnitude happens again and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
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u/revilo825 9h ago
Personally, I won’t be blaming myself. I’ll be blaming everyone that has kept their mouth shut and not spoken up or taken action to boycott the corporations and elected officials that profit from these wars.
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u/ItsTheEndOfDays 9h ago
respectfully, no one outside the US is going to care at the rate we’re going. We still have way too many people who aren’t paying attention or don’t know their a** from their eyes.
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u/Vaporeon42069 9h ago
You mean the country that funds all the major terror organizations? Maybe after its government is gone for good, terrorism will see a huge decline
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u/projectmaximus 6h ago
Damn. She was so brave in the voicemail I was shocked by how calm and stoic she sounded, and then right at the last second you hear her voice cracking. Damn, i can't imagine this feeling.