Gay passenger may have foiled hijackers
Tom Musbach, Gay.com / PlanetOut.com Network
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
Amid sketchy reports about the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, friends and relatives of a gay passenger on the flight believe he may have tried to thwart the plane’s hijackers.
Before the crash, Thomas Burnett, of San Ramon, Calif., phoned his wife and said that he and two other passengers were prepared to take action against the men who had taken control of the plane, which was en route to San Francisco from Newark, N.J.
“I know we’re all going to die - there’s three of us who are going to do something about it,” he told his wife, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mark Bingham, 31, a public relations executive, also made a call from the plane. He told his mother, Alice Hoglan, about three men who claimed to have a bomb before the phone connection failed.
What happened between those phone calls and the plane’s nose-dive into a wooded field near Pittsburgh is still a matter of speculation. There were no survivors of the crash.
Counterintelligence experts speculated that the plane was headed toward a Washington landmark before it crashed. Moments before the tragedy, three other hijacked planes, also traveling from the East Coast to California, destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and a portion of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
“This was the only flight of the four that did not reach its target, which they believed to be Camp David, and that gives us reason to believe that perhaps Mark was able to help save the lives of people on the ground,” Hoglan, a United Airlines flight attendant, told NBC’s “Today” show.
A senior U.S. intelligence official told MSNBC.com that mobile phone communications from Flight 93 suggest that three passengers overpowered the hijackers but were unable to maintain control of the plane.
Friends of Mark Bingham, a former Division 1 rugby player who also played in San Francisco’s gay rugby and basketball leagues, believe he may have been one of the three passengers who confronted the hijackers, but they acknowledge they may never be able to prove it.
Lloyd Kinoshita, who played pick-up basketball games with Bingham, said, “I have no doubt that if there was an opportunity to save lives that Mark would have initiated action. He was a competitor and leader, but even more so, he was a caring individual.”
On the flight, Bingham was seated in the first-class cabin. Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network has not yet confirmed that Burnett, 38, the former chief operating officer for Thoratec Corp., was also in first class.
Friends said Bingham was a large, athletic man who was once gored in the leg while running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. He was the type of person, they said, who wouldn’t be afraid to take on the hijackers.
“Today, in the face of this great tragedy, I am taking a small amount of comfort in the growing body of evidence indicating that Mark was a hero,” said Bryce Eberhart, a PlanetOut Partners employee who played rugby with Bingham.