The Day the World Stopped Turning

I was sitting in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport when the lady at the front counter said that our flight had been delayed two hours due to inclement weather in Boston. I called my boss and told him I would be a couple hours late to our meeting about the future of our secret agency, no big deal. I already know anything there is to know about being an Air Marshall. My flight was then set to leave on September 11th at 4 A.M. to head towards Boston.

After two hours went by at the airport, I was in line to board the airplane. The four men in front of me seemed to be from the Middle East, and they didn’t speak English. I think they were speaking Arabic, but it doesn’t matter.

I watched these four men because they were acting suspiciously. I hopped out of line and told someone to switch seats so I can sit behind the four of them. The person behind them was willing to give up her seat.

One of the men talked to everybody else like he was giving commands to them, so I went to the back of the plane and called my boss. I told him to watch the cameras from this plane. He told me to stand down until given further orders, so I agreed.

Fifteen minutes later, all four men stood up and headed towards the front of the plane. I kept asking myself why they would all go to the front at the same time. I then heard the flight attendant scream “THEY BROKE INTO THE COCKPIT! THEY ARE HIJACKING THE PLANE!”

Since I’m an Air Marshall, I can carry a gun, so I grabbed it and went to the front. They already killed the pilot, co-pilot, and locked the door to the cockpit. If the door was already locked how did they get to the cockpit? I started to look around, and the door to the lavatory was kicked in, so I looked around and saw a drill and a hole in the wall. They used something  to unlock it from the inside, and the were in control of the plane.

I can’t shoot them because the plane would crash. I had to use my phone to call the National Guard. They said there is nothing they can do because they said if the hijackers see any military jets they will kill everybody on the plane by crashing it. The National Guard also mentioned that this is not the only hijacked plane, but there are no Air Marshals on the others, then I lose connection to the control center.

They have to be working together. Why would they hijack four airplanes? Why the same day? Why even hijack the planes in the first place? I had to find out how to fix this, but I can’t do it by myself. I asked four men, Jack, Matt, Easton, and Chuck, to come to the front of the plane and I said, “There is no easy way to say this, but this airplane has been hijacked, and there are three others that have been hijacked.”

Easton asked me, “How can we believe you? You have no authority.”

I showed my Air Marshal badge and that shut him up really quick.

Jack asked, “How do you know? Wouldn’t the door to the cockpit be locked?”

I said, “Yeah but they drilled a hole through the wall in the lavatory to unlock the door from the inside.”

I took them to the lavatory and showed them, luckily no one has noticed us, yet.

The five of us went to the back, into the kitchen, and we grabbed whatever could help us get the plane back, so we all grabbed kitchen knives.

I went back to the lavatory, and everyone else had the door surrounded. One of the men spotted us watching them so he came out of the cockpit trying to kill us and all four of the men that had the door surrounded stabbed him multiple times in the chest and stomach area then we all charged the people in the cockpit and took over the plane with no casualties. Then, we had Easton and Jack control the plane as I tried to reestablish lost connection with ground control.

I heard a voice over the radio and it was a worker at ground control. I asked him, “What happened to the other planes? Do you know where they landed?”

He said, “The other planes didn’t land anywhere. Two of them crashed into the World Trade Center and the other took out half the Pentagon.”

I said, “We have no way to land this plane, and we are almost out of fuel. We are gonna have to try to crash land the plane.”

I ran to the back and said to the passengers, “We are gonna have to crash land the plane because some hijackers killed the pilot and now we are almost out of fuel…”

The plane lost connection to ground control, but the GPS was working and we were above Pennsylvania.

The no fuel light started to flash, and we were heading down. It was such a short time before we hit the ground, but it felt like it lasted forever. I did what I could with what I had, and it didn’t end as badly as it could’ve been.