09/11/2026
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll." Those were the last words anyone on the ground heard from 32-year-old Todd Beamer. He said them to the men next to him, not to the phone. Then he set the phone down and went to take back the plane.
Twenty-five years ago this morning, Todd Beamer should have been tired and happy to be home. He and his wife Lisa had landed the night before from a five-day trip to Italy, a reward from his employer, Oracle, for a strong year in sales. Lisa was five months pregnant with their third child.
Their sons David and Drew were three and one.
Todd had a business meeting in California he could not move, so he kissed his boys goodbye before dawn and drove to Newark.
United Airlines Flight 93 was supposed to leave for San Francisco at 8 a.m. It sat on the runway in heavy traffic for more than 40 minutes. Nobody on board could have known that the delay would change history. By the time the plane climbed out over New Jersey, the first tower in New York had already been hit.
At about 9:28 a.m., four hijackers stormed the cockpit. They forced the pilots out and turned the plane back toward Washington. The passengers were herded to the rear of the cabin. Some of them picked up the airfones in the seatbacks and began calling home. Within minutes they learned what the rest of the country was learning. This was not a normal hijacking. Planes were being used as missiles, and their plane was headed east.
Todd tried to call Lisa. The call did not go through. So he dialed zero from the airfone and reached a customer service line. The call was passed to a supervisor named Lisa Jefferson at the GTE Airfone center in Oak Brook, Illinois, outside Chicago.
For roughly 13 minutes, Todd gave her a calm, careful account of what was happening. He told her the plane had been hijacked.
He told her one passenger had been killed. He told her a flight attendant had said the pilot and copilot were forced out of the cockpit and might be hurt.
He gave her the flight number and the route. Jefferson said later that she had trouble believing it was real at first, because he was so steady and so methodical.
Then the plane made a sudden, violent turn, and Todd cried out. When it leveled off, he came back on the line and told her something that she passed along to the FBI in real time. Some of the passengers had a plan. They were going to rush the hijackers and try to take the plane back.
He did not ask her for help. He asked her for two things. He asked her to call his wife and tell her and his boys that he loved them. And he asked her to pray with him.
Todd was a graduate of Wheaton College, the Christian school outside Chicago. He taught Sunday school. He had learned the Lord's Prayer as a boy, and he said it now, with a stranger on the phone, while the men behind him were killing people at the front of the plane.
Then he recited the 23rd Psalm. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Jefferson said other men near him joined in.
Lisa Beamer later said that Todd knew his life was worth more than his 32 years on this earth, and that his soul was secure even when his body was not.
After the prayer, Jefferson heard him take a deep breath. He had turned away from the phone.
She heard him ask the men around him if they were ready. Then she heard him say, "Okay. Let's roll."
Jefferson kept the line open. She heard the struggle in the cabin. She kept listening until the line went quiet.
At 10:03 a.m., United Flight 93 slammed into an empty field in Stonycreek Township, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at more than 500 miles an hour. All 40 passengers and crew died. The plane was 20 minutes from Washington. The 9/11 Commission and most investigators believe the hijackers were headed for the U.S. Capitol, where Congress was in session that morning.
Nobody had to tell those passengers to fight. Nobody in Washington gave the order. They were salesmen and students and retirees and a flight attendant, and they held a vote in the back of a doomed airplane and decided together. They had no weapons. They had a beverage cart and their bare hands and about 30 minutes to work with. They used every one of them. The Capitol dome still stands today because of what they did.
Four months later, Lisa Beamer gave birth to a daughter, Morgan. Todd never met her. All three of the Beamer children grew up and went to Wheaton, their father's school. Lisa sat in the gallery when President Bush gave his State of the Union address in January 2002 and told the country that America had a new creed, and it was Todd's two words.
Those words were not a speech. Todd said them the way he probably said them a hundred times in the driveway, loading the kids into the car. He was a regular guy from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, who sold software and coached Little League and went to church on Sunday. He did not board that plane looking to be a hero. He became one because, when the moment came, he knew who he was and what he owed the people back home.
That is the part worth remembering today.
The men who attacked us believed Americans were soft.
Within 90 minutes of the first strike, a planeload of ordinary citizens had proven them wrong, at the cost of their own lives, on a field in Pennsylvania that most of the country had never heard of.
Today, we remember Todd Beamer, the passengers and crew of Flight 93, and the courage it took to say two small words and mean them.
Never Forget ❤️
