From the back of the plane, Todd Beamer tries to use his credit card on an Airfone installed in one of the seatbacks, but cannot get authorization.
His call is automatically routed to the Verizon customer-service center in Oakbrook, Ill.
Although operators are used to crank calls from seatback phones, it is clear to the operator that Beamer’s report of a hijacking is genuine.
His call is immediately sent to Verizon supervisor Lisa Jefferson who alerts the FBI. When Jefferson gets on the line at 9:45 a.m., she immediately begins interviewing Beamer. “What is your flight number? What is the situation? Where are the crew members?”
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Beamer tells Jefferson that one passenger is dead. He doesn’t know about the pilots. One hijacker is in the rear of the plane, claiming to have a bomb strapped to his body. The conversation is urgent, but calm. Then Beamer says, “Oh my God, I think we’re going down.” Then adds, “No, we’re just turning.” At this point, investigators theorize, one of the hijackers was flying erratically.
The plane plunges from its assigned altitude and the transponder is turned off.
Mark Bingham uses an Airfone to call his mother, Alice Hoglan, who is still asleep at her brother’s home in Saratoga, Calif., having been up late the night before caring for triplets. “Mom, this is Mark Bingham,” he tells her, so rattled he uses his last name.
Bingham describes the situation for his mother, a United Airlines flight attendant. The call lasts about three minutes. Twice during the call, says Alice, “Mark was distracted. There was a five-second pause. I heard people speaking. There was murmuring, nothing loud.” She theorizes that Mark was talking to the other men, and planning to fight back.
"We’re going to do something. I know I’m not going to get out of this".
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At around the same time, Todd Beamer is telling the operator that the men plan “to jump” the hijacker in the back, claiming to have a bomb. “We’re going to do something,” Beamer tells operator Lisa Jefferson. “I know I’m not going to get out of this.” He asks Jefferson to recite the Lord’s Prayer with him. The last words Jefferson hears are “Are you ready guys? Let’s roll.”
It’s unclear when, in all of the telephony, Glick, Beamer, Bingham, Burnett and Nacke hatched their plot. It is also unclear if they attacked just once, or twice, first taking out the hijacker claiming to have the bomb, then storming the cockpit. Crucial evidence, NEWSWEEK has learned, may come from yet another phone call made by a passenger. Elizabeth Wainio, 27, was speaking to her stepmother in Maryland. Another passenger, she explains, had loaned her a cell phone and told her to call her family. “I have to go,” Wainio says, cutting the call short. “They’re about to storm the cockpit” referring to her fellow passengers.
Nacke is the only member of the group who is not known to have made a phone call, although his wife, Amy, did have a message on her answering machine that contained only noise and a click.
United Airlines later told his family that he was apparently one of the fighters. “If you knew Lou,” says Nacke’s father-in-law, Dr. Robert Weisberg, “he never would have been far from the action.”
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This much we know, they were big guys: Bingham was a 6-foot-4 rugby player; Glick, also a rugby player and judo champion; Beamer was 6 foot 1 and 200 pounds, and Nacke was a 5-foot-9, 200-pound weightlifter with a “Superman” tattoo on his shoulder. Investigators are operating on the theory that the men somehow made their way up 100 feet from the rear of the plane into the cockpit. The last transmission recorded is someone, probably a hijacker, screaming “Get out of here. Get out of here.” Then grunting, screaming and scuffling. Then silence.
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