The passengers began to understand that this was not a conventional hijacking.
The aircraft was part of something much larger.
The telephone calls therefore helped create an extraordinary exchange of information. People trapped in the sky were learning from people on the ground, while people on the ground were learning what was happening inside the aircraft.
Among those calls was one made by Lizz Wainio.
The Call to Her Stepmother
At approximately 9:54 a.m., Wainio called her stepmother using an Airfone.
The National Park Service records the call as lasting approximately four and a half minutes. Its detailed chronology gives the duration as 4 minutes and 29 seconds.
Four minutes and twenty-nine seconds.
In the context of an ordinary day, that is almost nothing.
A short phone call.
A few minutes between meetings.
A quick conversation before boarding a flight.
But on Flight 93, those four minutes represented almost an entire lifetime compressed into a few moments.
According to the FBI interview with the recipient of the call, Wainio told her stepmother that the plane had been hijacked. After several minutes of personal conversation about what was happening and about her fate, she eventually told her stepmother that the passengers were preparing to go into the cockpit.
The National Park Service provides a fuller account based on the FBI's records and trial evidence.
According to that account, Wainio expressed concern for her family and told her stepmother:
“This is going to be harder on you, and I want you to be okay.”
Those words reveal something important.
Her attention was not focused solely on herself.
She knew what was happening.
She understood that she might die.
And yet, during those final minutes, she was thinking about the people who would have to live with her loss.
The National Park Service records her final words to her stepmother as:
“They're getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Good-bye.”
Then the call ended.
There would be no second call.
No opportunity to explain.
No chance to say more.
What We Can—and Cannot—Know About Her Final Moments
There is a temptation, especially when telling stories of tragedy, to fill gaps in the historical record with details that make the story more dramatic.
That is understandable.
But Lizz Wainio's story does not need embellishment.
Some versions of her story circulating online claim that she was handed a phone by another passenger, that she whispered that she was ready to go be with her grandmother, or that she personally charged toward the cockpit.
Those details should be treated cautiously.
The strongest available sources—the National Park Service and FBI records—do not establish all of those claims.
What they do establish is already extraordinarily powerful.
Wainio made a four-minute-and-29-second call to her stepmother.
She told her the plane had been hijacked.
She talked about her fate.
She expressed concern for her family.
And near the end of the call, she told her stepmother that the passengers were getting ready to break into the cockpit.
Then she said she loved her and goodbye.
That is the historical record.
It is important not to turn uncertainty into fact.
We cannot know exactly what Wainio was feeling during every second of those four minutes. We cannot know whether she was terrified, calm, resigned, determined, or experiencing all of those emotions at once.
She was a human being facing an unimaginable situation.
Courage does not require the absence of fear.
In fact, the very idea of courage becomes more meaningful when we remember that fear and courage can exist at the same time.