“We’ve Been Told There’s Another Plane in the Air and It’s Heading Here” – Mother Jones

It’s been 25 years since the horrific attacks of 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, there was a hope that this nightmare would compel the nation to adopt a more serious approach to politics and foreign policy. That didn’t happen. President George W. Bush also urged the country to not allow 9/11 to give rise to greater Islamophobia. These days, anti-Muslim bigotry appears to be more prevalent, at least when it comes to Republican politicians and right-wing figures spreading and weaponizing this hatred. Five years ago, I wrote this remembrance of that awful morning to highlight the lessons we should have learned and to honor the passengers of Flight 93, whose courageous actions likely saved many lives, possibly my own.

“They’re attacking. They’re attacking.”  

That’s what a woman shouted when I asked what was happening. I was walking past the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, and Senate staffers were pouring onto the street on a gorgeous September morning. Who? I asked her. Where? “The Pentagon, the Mall, the White House, everywhere!” she exclaimed and hurried past. I rushed to the modest Nation magazine bureau—my one-room office in a building between the Supreme Court and the Senate buildings, half a block east of the Capitol—and flipped on an old black-and-white television set.

The towers were burning. People were leaping from unimaginable heights. The Pentagon had been hit. I called home to make sure my wife knew what was happening. I tried phoning family in New York City but couldn’t get through. I glanced at email. There was a message my editor in New York had sent a few minutes before 9 a.m. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, but she noted that this was unlikely to affect the issue going to press the next day. That was before the second airliner struck at 9:03 a.m. Everything had already changed.

I grabbed a notebook and raced outside into chaos. The Capitol and the office buildings had been evacuated. Legislators and staffers milled about on the streets. No one knew what to do or where to go. No one was in charge. Capitol Hill officers circulated without any apparent direction. Rumors were rampant: George W. Bush was dead. Explosions were going off throughout Washington. A dirty bomb had been detonated.

At the corner of Constitution Avenue NE and First Street, on the edge of the Capitol grounds, I spotted West Virginia Sen.  Robert Byrd. He was the president pro tempore of the Senate, which meant he was third in line for presidential succession, behind the vice president and the House speaker. At the moment, this seemed significant. Accompanied by a single aide, he seemed lost, unsure of how to proceed. As I reached them, they were asking a Capitol Hill officer for guidance. “I don’t know,” the officer said. “But we’ve been told there’s another plane in the air and it’s heading here. So, get in a car and drive as far as you can from here right now.”

Byrd seemed shaken by the news that there was no plan. This was absurd. The aide grabbed Byrd by the arm and said, “C’mon, Senator.” He led him away through the crowd. I looked at the officer. “A plane is coming this way?” I asked. “That’s what they’re telling us,” he said, adding, “That’s all I know.” He then said, “Good luck,” and trotted off.

I dashed back to my building, which housed offices for nonprofit groups and residential apartments, several of which had been occupied by past and present legislators, including former Democratic Sens. Howell Heflin, Al Gore, and John Stennis, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. (Yes, Gingrich and I were neighbors, so to speak, for many years. But that’s another story.) I ran down the halls on each of the five floors of the back half of the building, banging on doors and informing occupants that a Capitol Hill officer had said a plane was flying toward us. “I don’t want to spread rumors,” I said, “But…”

When I knocked on one door and it opened, I saw dozens of people crowded into a living room. This was the apartment for then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who had moved his evacuated staff into it. I passed along the intel from the officer and quickly moved on, as the senator and his staffers scrammed out of the apartment. After warning all I could, I sprinted to my car and drove away from Capitol Hill as fast as possible.

By this point, I believe, Flight 93, the fourth plane, had crashed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It was brought down a few minutes after 10 a.m., when passengers on the flight, having heard of the attacks on the World Trade Center during cellphone conversations with friends and relatives, rushed the cockpit to thwart the al-Qaeda hijackers. As the 9/11 Commission’s final report noted, “Several passengers had terminated phone calls with loved ones to join the revolt. One of the callers ended her message as follows: ‘Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go.’” The report concluded that the intended target for Flight 93 was the Capitol or the White House. The Boeing 757 was 20 minutes flying time from Washington when those brave passengers confronted the enemy.

I often think of these men and women. Their actions prevented even more death and destruction on September 11. Did they save the lives of people on Capitol Hill or the White House? Did they foil an attack that could have decapitated an entire branch of the US government or destroyed the symbol of the American republic? Imagine the consequences of a successful strike on the Capitol when Congress was in session.

One lesson of the many from that harrowing day was that the United States was blind to a profound threat and thus totally unprepared. As the 9/11 report famously observed, “The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.” Yet the report illustrated that there had been plenty of indicators of such an attack—many dots that could have been connected. And while we now live in a world of reinforced cockpit doors and long airport lines and TSA inspections, 9/11 is—or should be—a reminder of how oblivious we can be and of the necessity of thinking creatively about dangers that may lie ahead. That’s true regarding threats beyond those from terrorists, such as pandemics, climate change, and domestic extremism.

A more uplifting takeaway from 9/11 is that just as the actions of a few evildoers can cause immense damage and alter the course of life across the globe, the actions of a small group of noble-minded people can do so much good. The Flight 93 passengers and crew gave their lives to make a terrible day less terrible. All of us who were on Capitol Hill that awful morning may well owe them a debt that cannot be paid. Yet, paradoxically, because they succeeded—they averted an even greater catastrophe in the nation’s capital that day—the crash of Flight 93 has tended to receive less attention in the 9/11 narrative. The iconic images that continue to define our memories of that horror come from downtown Manhattan or the Pentagon, not a verdant field in rural Pennsylvania.

Still, they are remembered. There is a memorial plaque within the Capitol building honoring the 40 passengers and crew members who perished on the flight. It reads: “In memory of the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93, whose brave sacrifice on September 11, 2001, not only saved countless lives but may have saved the U.S. Capitol from destruction.”

In Shanksville, there is a national memorial for them. It includes a 93-foot-tall tower with wind chimes like none other in the world. As the National Park Service explains, “The chime system is designed using music theory to identify a mathematically developed range of frequencies needed to produce a distinct musical note associated with each chime. The applied music theory allows the sound produced by individual chimes to be musically compatible with the sound produced by the other chimes in the tower. The intent is to create a set of forty tones (voices) that can connote through consonance the serenity and nobility of the site while also through dissonance recalling the event that consecrated the site.” You can hear them here.

A live webcam shows the tower 24/7. Every so often, I drop by the website. For a while, on Monday evening at sunset, no one was there. Clouds slowly rolled across a blue sky in the orange glow of a beautiful late-summer day, two decades after the crash. A single person—a man—walked up to the tower. He stood there by himself for several minutes. Did he know he was being watched? He kissed his hand, placed it against the base of the tower, and then left to return to his life.

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