On 9/11, Flight 93’s Passengers Fought Hijackers When a Military Shootdown Order Arrived 28 Minutes Too Late

Passengers stormed the cockpit and fought hijackers for control of United Airlines Flight 93 before it crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. Sept. 11, 2001.

In Washington that morning, a shootdown order that the vice president believed had reached the military never made it to a single fighter pilot in time to matter.

The Shootdown Order That Never Arrived

While Flight 93’s passengers organized their revolt in the plane’s final minutes, a breakdown was unfolding inside the White House and the military’s air defense network, one that the 9/11 Commission would later document in detail:

8:46 a.m. and 9:03 a.m.: Airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers.

10:03 a.m.: Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.

Roughly 10:18 to 10:20 a.m.: Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed a presidential authorization by phone with President George W. Bush, allowing military fighter pilots to shoot down any hijacked commercial airliner that failed to respond to instructions.

10:31 a.m.: Cheney’s order reached the military’s chain of command, the Northeast Air Defense Sector, (NEADS).

Even once Cheney’s order reached NEADS, it never reached the fighter pilots who were airborne over Washington and New York that morning. According to a summary of the 9/11 Commission’s findings published by Middlebury College’s Presidential Power project, the NEADS mission commander and senior weapons director told investigators they chose not to pass the authorization down to the pilots they were directing because they weren’t sure how the pilots would, or should, act on it.

Related: US Military Fighter Pilots Prepared to Ram Into Hijacked Airliner on 9/11

The pilots received no version of Cheney’s order. The only instruction they received was to identify the type and tail number of any suspicious aircraft, not to engage it.

Cheney, unaware any of this had happened, told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at 10:39 a.m., roughly 19 minutes after confirming the order with Bush, that he believed multiple aircraft had already been intercepted.

“There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington,” Cheney told Rumsfeld, according to historian Garrett Graff’s account for History.com, drawing on the commission’s reconstruction of the day.

No aircraft had been shot down. The commission’s report, summarizing the episode, concluded plainly that the vice president was mistaken in his belief that shootdown authorization had been passed to the pilots flying at NORAD’s direction.

Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the commission that the military spent much of that morning responding to false and unconfirmed threats layered on top of the real ones.

“We fought many phantoms that day,” Myers told the panel, according to contemporaneous reporting by CBS News, describing how reports of car bombings and other attacks that turned out to be false spread through the response effort alongside accurate information about the hijackings.

Gen. Ralph Eberhart, then commander of NORAD, told the commission that the military could likely have shot down the hijacked aircraft if the Federal Aviation Administration had passed along word of the hijackings as soon as it learned of them, according to Fox News’s coverage of the panel’s 2004 public hearing.

The commission’s final report did not endorse that assessment, instead documenting a cascading series of communication breakdowns between the FAA, NORAD and the White House that meant no military shootdown ever became operationally possible before Flight 93 crashed on its own, brought down by the passengers who fought for control of it rather than by any military action authorized from Washington.

What the Record Shows

Its passengers stopped Flight 93, not any military response. The order existed — in the sense that a president and vice president believed they had issued and passed it along. It never reached anyone positioned to act on it in time, a failure of communication and command clarity the commission documented.

For a military audience, the shootdown episode has remained a case study in how quickly a chain of command can break down under the pressure of a fast-moving crisis, even when people inside that chain are acting in good faith.

The commission’s report treats it less as a story of individual failure and more as evidence of how unprepared the air defense and communication architecture was for a threat originating from inside the country’s airspace, a gap that contributed to the creation of U.S. Northern Command the following year.

Related: How 9/11 Reshaped the US Military From the Ground Up

Two Veterans, Traveling Together

At least two veterans were reportedly onboard Flight 93 — one had gone on to help build the World Trade Center as a veteran — but any activities the friends may have undertaken that day are apparently unknown.

William Cashman, 60, served as a paratrooper with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, enlisting in the early 1960s. He left the service to become an ironworker, according to the National Park Service’s official memorial biography. His ironwork career took him to Lower Manhattan, where he helped construct the World Trade Center towers.

Cashman was traveling on Flight 93 with a close friend, Patrick Driscoll, 70, on their way to go hiking in Yosemite National Park. Driscoll had served four years aboard a Navy destroyer during the Korean War, according to his own National Park Service biography.

The military connection to Flight 93 has often been remembered in broader terms, tied to the passengers and crew who organized the counterattack against the hijackers after learning by phone that other planes had already flown into buildings in New York. Cashman’s and Driscoll’s service records represent a documented military presence aboard the flight that sits alongside that broader story.

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