Once the hijackers were in control, they knew that passengers were using cell phones and seat-back phones to call the ground “but did not seem to care,” according to the report. Yet clearly what the passengers learned in those phone calls inspired their counterattack on the cockpit. . . .
“It might not have occurred to him that they were certain to learn what had happened in New York, thereby defeating his attempts at deception,” the report said. . . .
The report does not clarify whether the hijackers’ goal for Flight 93 was the White House or the Capitol, but indicates that the hijackers tuned a cockpit radio to the frequency of a navigation beacon at National Airport, just across the Potomac River from the capital, erasing any doubt about the region of their intended destination.
At three seconds after 10 a.m., Mr. Jarrah is heard on the cockpit voice recorder saying: “Is that it? Shall we finish it off?”
But another hijacker responds: “No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off.”
The voice recorder captured sounds of continued fighting, and Mr. Jarrah pitched the plane up and then down. A passenger is heard to say, “In the cockpit. If we don’t we’ll die!”
Then a passenger yelled “Roll it!” Some aviation experts have speculated that this was a reference to a food cart, being used as a battering ram.
Mr. Jarrah “stopped the violent maneuvers” at 10:01:00, according to the report, and said, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”
“He then asked another hijacker in the cockpit, `Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?’ to which the other replied, `Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.’ ”
Eighty seconds later, a hijacker is heard to say, “Pull it down! Pull it down!”
“The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them,” according to the report, which seems to indicate that the hijackers themselves crashed the plane. “With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington, D.C,” according to the report.
Seems like this article by Brad Todd holds up pretty well, almost three years later.