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Strange phone calls

Barbara Olson,

a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN.

A short time later the plane crashed into the Pentagon. Barbara Olson is presumed to have died in the crash.

Her husband said she called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77, which was en route from Washington Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles.

Ted Olson told CNN that his wife said all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.

She felt nobody was in charge and asked her husband to tell the pilot what to do.

Ted Olson notified the Justice Department command center immediately.

Ted Olson's account of how the call is made is strange and conflicting.

Three days after 9/11, he says, "I found out later that she was having, for some reason, to call collect and was having trouble getting through. You know how it is to get through to a government institution when you're calling collect."
He says he doesn't know what kind of phone she used, but he has assumed that it must have been on the airplane phone, and that she somehow didn't have access to her credit cards. Otherwise, she would have used her cell phone and called me.

But in another interview on the same day, he says that she used a cell phone and that she may have gotten cut off because the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don't work that well.

Six months later, he claims she called collect "using the phone in the passengers' seats."
But it isn't possible to call on seatback phones without a credit card, which would render making a collect call moot.

Many other details are conflicting, and Olson faults his memory and says that he "tends to mix the two calls up because of the emotion of the events.

Some have questioned if Ted Olson can be trusted in his account of the call, since he has stated that lying to the public is justifiable. (Sydney Morning Herald, 3/20/02)

Between his memory and his approval of lying for partisan ends, can Ted Olson's account be trusted?

This is the first call and the only one from flight AA77, and the one which started everything about the "terrorists with the box-cutters".

Let's roll

Todd Beamer placed a call on one of the Boeing 757's on-board telephones and spoke for 13 minutes with GTE operator Lisa D. Jefferson, Beamer's wife said. He provided detailed information about the hijacking and -- after the operator told him about the morning's World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks -- said he and others on the plane were planning to act against the terrorists aboard, Lisa Beamer said.

"They may have realized that (the hijackers) were planning to do the same thing with their plane," Beamer said Sunday in a telephone interview from her Hightstown, N.J., home. "So they chose to do what they could to prevent other people from being hurt."

Before the call ended and with yelling heard in the background, Todd Beamer asked the operator to pray with him. Together, they recited the 23rd Psalm, which includes the passage: "(the Lord) leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake." Then he asked Jefferson to promise that she would call his wife of seven years and their two sons, David, 3, and Andrew, 1. She is expecting their third child in January.

After finally receiving clearance from investigators, Jefferson kept her promise Friday. (!)

After the prayer was finished and the promise was made to call his wife, Todd Beamer dropped the phone, leaving the line open. It was then that the operator heard Beamer's words: "Let's roll."

They were the last words she heard. The phone went silent, and the plane crashed, killing all 44 people aboard.
United issued a statement Sunday saying one of the 37 passengers had purchased two tickets, so the number of people had been incorrectly reported as 45. (sic!)

This report popped up on September 16th. Numerous other phone calls have been reported as well, but this two are surely the most important.

Experiments conducted with cellphones show that cellphones seldom work at all above 10,000 feet. Several of the alleged Flight 93 calls were made when the plane would still have been near its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. (!)

This is the only one of many phone calls on this flight that lasted for about 13 minutes while all the others were only very brief - and it is the only one where the caller didn't talk to somebody close who knew him well, but to somebody unknown ... and it was only released "after finally receiving clearance from investigators"

Oddities with other calls:

Caller: "Mom? This is Mark Bigham."
Caller: "I want you to know that I love you.
I'm on a flight from Newark to San Francisco and
there are three guys who have taken over the
plane and they say they have a bomb."
Alice: "Who are these guys?"
Caller: (after a pause) "You believe me, don't you?"
Alice: "Yes, Mark. I believe you. But who are these guys?"

Do you tell your full name when calling your mother?

Another report goes as follows:

One of the now-famous passengers was Todd Beamer, a 32-year-old employee of Oracle, the corporate software company. He tried to use an Airfone to call his family in Cranbury, N.J., but he couldn't get authorization for his company account. Instead, he was patched through to Lisa Jefferson, a Verizon supervisor in Oak Brook, Ill., at 9:45, after speaking briefly with another operator.

The company faxed his wife, Lisa, a summary of the 15-minute call.

Beamer told Jefferson that the pilot and copilot apparently were dead and the hijackers were flying the plane. He said one hijacker was guarding 27 passengers in the back of the plane with what appeared to be a bomb tied around his waist.

He said two more hijackers were in the cockpit, while the fourth was guarding the first-class cabin.

Beamer asked Jefferson to convey his love to his wife, due to deliver a child in January, and his two sons, ages 3 and 1. They also recited the Lord's Prayer.

Jefferson then heard Beamer ask: "Are you guys ready? Let's roll."

Lisa Beamer recognized it as a phrase her husband used frequently with their sons.

Another passenger, Mark Bingham, was a 31-year-old, 6-foot-5 rugby player. He called his mother, Alice Hoglan, who was visiting a relative in Saratoga, Calif., at 9:42.

"Mom, this is Mark Bingham," he said, nervously. "I want to let you know that I love you. I'm calling from the plane. We've been taken over. There are three men that say they have a bomb."

A third passenger, Jeremy Glick, had been a national judo champion.

Using an Airfone, he called relatives in the Catskills, where his wife, Liz, and daughter, Emerson, were visiting.

He asked his wife whether it was true that planes had been crashed into the World Trade Center, indicating how the story had already spread through the plane.

She told him they had, and he said passengers were taking a vote: should they try to take back the plane."

"Honey, you need to do it," Liz Glick replied.

Thomas Burnett Jr., 38, a businessman and father of three girls from San Ramon, Calif., made four calls home over about a half-hour.

In his fourth call, he told of the group's plans to storm the hijackers. "I know we're all going to die," he said. "There's three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey."

Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant, called her husband, Phil, a US Airways pilot, at their home in Greensboro, N.C. She had been working in coach class, having picked up the trip late.

"Have you heard what's going on? My flight has been hijacked. My flight has been hijacked with three guys with knives," she said.

She also confessed something to her husband: She had slipped into the galley and begun filling pitchers with boiling water.

"Everyone's running to first class. I've got to go. Bye," she said.

Authorities contend the passengers, possibly armed with a fire extinguisher, may have incapacitated a hijacker who was flying in the right-hand seat, normally used by the copilot. They believe the plane flipped over on its back and speared into the ground at about 575 miles per hour.

Why did Thomas Burnett know they were all going to die?

If they planned to overwhelm the 4 terrorists armed with knifes - why should they crash the plane and not trying to land it safely afterwards?

There was even a pilot on board who could have taken over.

Air rage

Airline passengers in the United States are not exactly known for their mild treatment of irritants, and it's hard to believe that on four hijacked planes where the hijackers were armed only with knives, the passengers of only one of the planes tried to do something.

In September 2000, passengers killed a man onboard plane who tried to storm the flight deck - he was beaten, kicked and strangled to death.
report

Air rage incidents have risen dramatically around the world. The Federal Aviation Administration recorded 292 on United States airlines last year, compared with 138 in 1995.