The pilot was Jason Dahl, who had learned to fly before he could drive. CeeCee Lyles had recently joined United after serving as a police officer Sandra Bradshaw had a mind to quit sometime soon, to spend more time with her children. LeRoy Homer's alarm had sounded at 4.45, so that he could put on his dark blue trousers, white shirt and United jacket, to become First Officer Homer. The crew had met an hour earlier to share out duties. It pulled away from the gate, but there was a delay of 41 minutes, leaving its passengers to sit and wait before setting off on what would have been a six-hour journey across the continent to San Francisco. I'm in first class, drinking a glass of orange juice.'įlight 93 was due to take off at 8.01am. Thanks for driving so crazy to get me here. Then he called Matthew on a cell phone: 'Hey, it's me.
He ran to gate 17, down the jetway, boarded the Boeing 757 and sat down in seat 4D, just behind the cockpit. Then he would sit back and think: "but if this is going to do some good for the gay community, then so be it - good".'īingham had overslept on the morning of 11 September and the friend with whom he had been staying, Matthew Hall, drove like a lunatic to get him from Manhattan to Newark, screeching to a halt outside Terminal A at 7.40am.īingham sprang from the car, hauling an old blue and gold canvas duffle bag. 'My feeling is,' says Durzy, 'that if told he would become a gay icon he would laugh. What he did is both inconceivable and great.' And that's lucky for all of us, and unlucky for people who are biased against us. 'It's ironic that in death he is being celebrated for something he did not think was worth politicising. 'He didn't politicise his sexuality at all,' said Bingham's friend and roommate Per Casey. I think he knew himself that was not anyone's idea of a typical gay man'.
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He described him as someone 'who knew how to use his size and would get into situations without thinking about it - which used to amuse us and scare us. Talking to The Observer last week, Bingham's friend Hani Durzy remembered how he had once fought off a mugger with a gun. I simply can't say to myself any more that gays have no place in the military.' Well, as we found out last week, Mark Bingham could cut it. He has become perhaps the first openly gay, great American patriotic idol, and certainly an emblematic figure in the gay community.Ī posting on the website run by Andrew Sullivan, gay former editor of the New Republic magazine, reads: 'The media portrayal of gays (lots of it by gays themselves) is as effeminate, etc, as well as my personal experience with gays my age, most of whom seemed little interested in military service or aggressive pursuits in general. He was a sportsman with, says former employer Holland Cartney, 'a very sensitive, creative side'. He was known and loved on the San Francisco scene, a public relations executive, a graduate of Berkeley. Bingham intrigues because he does not fit the image of the all-American hero quite as neatly as Todd Beamer, a family man from rural New Jersey with a Lord's Prayer bookmark in the Tom Clancy novel he had onboard.īingham was gay. Mark Bingham was last to board the plane, having arrived late and nearly missed the flight. In a nation hungry for heroes Todd Beamer stands out as America's martyr - but there were other figures who played less well known but more crucial parts in the passengers' rebellion aboard Flight 93. The recent release of tapes from the cockpit voice recorder indicates just how close they came to doing so. And in the hopeless claustrophobia of a tubular steel trap 30,000 feet up, they tried to defy death.īy the time Beamer dialled GTE, his aircraft had been re-routed by the terrorists towards Washington, and perhaps on course for the White House, or the Capitol.īeamer and other passengers decided to take on the hijackers and wrest control of the plane.
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For as Flight 93 was gnarled off course, he and other passengers learnt through an extraordinary series of calls they made to relatives and partners that their plane was one of a quartet turned into terrorist guided missiles. He and Jefferson talked for 13 minutes, during which they recited together the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 - 'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.'īeamer had ideas about that valley, and how many dead it should claim. Beamer, who didn't want to worry his pregnant wife, had called GTC, the company that provides the telephone service on United Airlines flights.
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