questions about departure points and destinations, and each was completely rescreened by TSA. In all, their total inconvenience time was seven hours.
By the time Fisk and Gersten got to the five remaining passengers and one crew member, the balm of free food, relief, and camaraderie had worn thin. Someone made the mistake of telling them about the plane continuing on without them. Now the flight attendant and five passengers just wanted to be someplace else—anywhere but Bangor, Maine.
Fisk was immediately impressed that a group of people this disparate could come together in the heat of the moment and swiftly overwhelm the hijacker. He supposed that this was part of the legacy of 9/11: when faced with an onboard threat, very few airline passengers would risk waiting to let things play out. These five happened to be the first into action.
He knew he risked a backlash if he inconvenienced them much further, but he needed to get some additional perspective on Abdulraheem. Like radioactive matter, eyewitness accounts degraded over time, so he put on his most friendly face and went around the room to each in turn.
The Six, as the preliminary report in his hands had christened them, all gave approximately the same response when asked about their heroic moments in the vestibule outside the cockpit of SAS 903.
Alain Nouvian, a fifty-one-year-old cellist returning to New York from a brief concert tour in Scandinavia, was a small-eyed man with an unruly comb-over of dyed black hair. He approached the questioning with great care, like a man interviewing at a job fair. “I . . . I didn’t think. I didn’t think I had it in me to do what I did. It looked like I was dead no matter what . . . and I wasn’t going to just sit there. To be frank, I’m still coming to grips with my actions. This is the most alive I’ve felt in thirty years. There was a test earlier today, life or death . . . and I acted. As they say, I rose to the occasion. That maniac was going to blow up the plane, for Christ’s sake—or at least crash it into something. Instead, I crashed into him.”
Douglas Aldrich, a sixty-five-year-old retired auto parts dealer from Albany, had been returning from a four-day visit to his daughter and grandson in Göteborg. “Instinct. I don’t even have to think about it. I was more worried about getting some feeling back into my legs at the end of the flight—you know, that thrombosis stuff. I was standing in the aisle trying to stretch out these old muscles when I heard the commotion. I’m a Vietnam vet, which was a long time ago, but today it felt like yesterday. I don’t think of myself as a brave man. There was no orchestra music, you know what I mean? No moment of heroic decision. I—and I think the others—just did what I had to do. The people I’m thinking about right now? Those others on the plane. Who just sat there. All the people in business who didn’t stand up when this terrorist attacked. That’s what’s spinning my mind at this moment. Them getting into their beds tonight. Lying there in the dark with their thoughts. Tell you what—I’m going to sleep like a goddamn baby.”
Colin Frank, forty-five and paunchy, was a journalist working on an assignment for The New Yorker on a piece about the rise in popularity of Swedish crime literature. His reading glasses were perched high on his forehead, one of the lenses showing a threadlike crack. He had not yet come to grips with what happened. “I haven’t the slightest idea why I did it. I’m being honest—I remember nothing. My body was moving without thought. It’s like a switch was flipped. One minute I was in my seat reading Henning Mankell—and the next I was on top of a terrorist at the front of a plane. I went from reading a crime thriller to starring in one—kind of seamlessly. It didn’t seem extraordinary, the situation . . . and at the same time it didn’t seem real either. Like I was still in the book.” He smiled,
By the time Fisk and Gersten got to the five remaining passengers and one crew member, the balm of free food, relief, and camaraderie had worn thin. Someone made the mistake of telling them about the plane continuing on without them. Now the flight attendant and five passengers just wanted to be someplace else—anywhere but Bangor, Maine.
Fisk was immediately impressed that a group of people this disparate could come together in the heat of the moment and swiftly overwhelm the hijacker. He supposed that this was part of the legacy of 9/11: when faced with an onboard threat, very few airline passengers would risk waiting to let things play out. These five happened to be the first into action.
He knew he risked a backlash if he inconvenienced them much further, but he needed to get some additional perspective on Abdulraheem. Like radioactive matter, eyewitness accounts degraded over time, so he put on his most friendly face and went around the room to each in turn.
The Six, as the preliminary report in his hands had christened them, all gave approximately the same response when asked about their heroic moments in the vestibule outside the cockpit of SAS 903.
Alain Nouvian, a fifty-one-year-old cellist returning to New York from a brief concert tour in Scandinavia, was a small-eyed man with an unruly comb-over of dyed black hair. He approached the questioning with great care, like a man interviewing at a job fair. “I . . . I didn’t think. I didn’t think I had it in me to do what I did. It looked like I was dead no matter what . . . and I wasn’t going to just sit there. To be frank, I’m still coming to grips with my actions. This is the most alive I’ve felt in thirty years. There was a test earlier today, life or death . . . and I acted. As they say, I rose to the occasion. That maniac was going to blow up the plane, for Christ’s sake—or at least crash it into something. Instead, I crashed into him.”
Douglas Aldrich, a sixty-five-year-old retired auto parts dealer from Albany, had been returning from a four-day visit to his daughter and grandson in Göteborg. “Instinct. I don’t even have to think about it. I was more worried about getting some feeling back into my legs at the end of the flight—you know, that thrombosis stuff. I was standing in the aisle trying to stretch out these old muscles when I heard the commotion. I’m a Vietnam vet, which was a long time ago, but today it felt like yesterday. I don’t think of myself as a brave man. There was no orchestra music, you know what I mean? No moment of heroic decision. I—and I think the others—just did what I had to do. The people I’m thinking about right now? Those others on the plane. Who just sat there. All the people in business who didn’t stand up when this terrorist attacked. That’s what’s spinning my mind at this moment. Them getting into their beds tonight. Lying there in the dark with their thoughts. Tell you what—I’m going to sleep like a goddamn baby.”
Colin Frank, forty-five and paunchy, was a journalist working on an assignment for The New Yorker on a piece about the rise in popularity of Swedish crime literature. His reading glasses were perched high on his forehead, one of the lenses showing a threadlike crack. He had not yet come to grips with what happened. “I haven’t the slightest idea why I did it. I’m being honest—I remember nothing. My body was moving without thought. It’s like a switch was flipped. One minute I was in my seat reading Henning Mankell—and the next I was on top of a terrorist at the front of a plane. I went from reading a crime thriller to starring in one—kind of seamlessly. It didn’t seem extraordinary, the situation . . . and at the same time it didn’t seem real either. Like I was still in the book.” He smiled,
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