Wally

Essoteric. Love my wife. Undeserving of the grace God gives me. Pi. F3 Wally. Former AOQ #Scramble

[Russ Joy @JoyOnBroad]

Vince McMahon stood in the middle of the ring just days after 9/11 and delivered one of the best messages in front of the largest assembled crowd after the attacks.

[Samantha Steele Ponder @samponder]

Every year on 9/11 I take the kids to ground zero to write down names engraved in the memorial. Then we go home and look them up to talk about their stories. Today, my youngest was writing a name when a woman walked up and asked her what she was doing. When she explained, the woman gently asked “will you write down my son’s name too?” We spent the next few minutes talking to Morton Frank’s mother about his life. He was 31. When I asked her how she was holding up on the 25th anniversary she teared up and said, “same as every other day.” #neverforget

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Twenty five years ago today, forty people who had never met decided to die on purpose so that strangers in Washington would not have to.

United 93 should have left Newark at 8:00 a.m. It sat on the taxiway in a line of airplanes and did not get airborne until 8:42. Forty two minutes late. That delay handed the people in that cabin the one thing nobody else in the sky that morning was given. Time, and the truth.

When four hijackers took the cockpit at 9:28, both towers were already burning. The passengers picked up the seatback airphones and called home, and their families told them what was happening in New York.

So they knew. That is what separates Flight 93 from everything else that happened that day. Every other victim died without warning. These forty had roughly half an hour to sit with the knowledge that they were already dead, that the only question left was where the airplane would land and how many people it would take with it.

Think about who they were.

Captain Jason Dahl was flying that trip because he had swapped for it, so he could get home for his fifth wedding anniversary. His first officer was LeRoy Homer Jr., Air Force Academy class of 1987, a C-141 pilot who had flown in the Gulf War and into Somalia, a major in the Reserve, with a wife and a ten month old daughter at home. Both men fought for that cockpit and neither of them gave it up willingly.

Todd Beamer's wife Lisa was pregnant with their third child. Jeremy Glick's daughter was twelve weeks old. Tom Burnett had three little girls. Lauren Grandcolas was pregnant and flying home from her grandmother's funeral. Deora Bodley was twenty. CeeCee Lyles was a flight attendant who had been a police detective in Florida and had four sons. Sandy Bradshaw had two small children waiting in North Carolina.

Not one of them had a reason to be brave. Every single one of them had a reason to sit still and hope.

Listen to what they said instead.

Tom Burnett told his wife Deena, don't worry, we're going to do something.

Sandy Bradshaw called her husband from the galley and told him she was filling coffee pots with boiling water. Then she said she had to go and hung up on him.

Honor Elizabeth Wainio told her stepmother, I have to go, they're breaking into the cockpit, I love you.

Todd Beamer stayed on the line with a phone operator named Lisa Jefferson for thirteen minutes, gave her his home number, asked her to tell his wife he loved her, and asked her to say the Lord's Prayer with him. Then she heard him set the phone down and say to the men beside him, are you ready, okay, let's roll.

They took a vote first. On a hijacked airliner, with a man at the front claiming to have a bomb, they held a vote, because they were not going to force anyone else to die for their decision.

At 9:57 they came up the aisle.

The recorder caught six minutes of it. A galley cart driven into the cockpit door. Men shouting. The hijacker at the controls throwing the airplane into rolls and dives trying to knock them off their feet, and failing, because they kept coming. At 10:00 he asks the man beside him whether to finish it. Twenty five seconds later you can hear an American voice screaming, in the cockpit, if we don't we'll die. At 10:02 the hijackers are yelling at each other to put it down.

They put it down. At 10:03 a.m., in an empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 130 miles and twenty minutes short of the United States Capitol, where Congress was still inside the building.

The men who hijacked that plane were willing to die for their cause. So were the passengers. The difference is that the hijackers wanted to take thousands of people with them, and the passengers of Flight 93 made sure the only people who died were themselves.

Forty of them. Salesmen, flight attendants, a college student, a retired ironworker, a judo champion, two pilots fighting to the last second for a control yoke. No weapons, no training, no orders, no chance.

They are the only Americans on September 11, 2001 who saw it coming, understood exactly what it would cost them, and walked into it anyway.

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

It is because of this beautiful young lady we learned who perpetuated this evil on our country. I hope her two young children have grown up to know what a hero their Mama was💔

"We're flying low. We're flying very, very low." Those were the last words ground control heard from 35-year-old Amy Sweeney. She spent her final moments making sure the world knew the truth.

Twenty-five years ago this morning, Madeline Amy Sweeney was not supposed to be at work. She was a part-time flight attendant who kept a light schedule so she could be home with her kids.

Her daughter Anna was five and had just started kindergarten.

Her son was younger still.

But when a colleague fell ill, Amy did what she always did. She stepped up and took the shift.

That simple act of generosity placed her aboard American Airlines Flight 11, departing Boston for Los Angeles.

At 7:15 a.m., before the plane left the gate, Amy called her husband Mike from the cabin. He later said that was unusual for her.

She was feeling low about missing the chance to see Anna off to school that morning. Mike told her not to worry. There would be plenty of mornings ahead to walk their kids to the bus.

Flight 11 took off at 7:59 a.m. with 81 passengers on board. About 15 minutes later, five terrorists hijacked the aircraft. As panic and violence consumed the cabin, Amy Sweeney chose extraordinary courage over terror.

She picked up an onboard phone, dialed American Airlines Flight Services at Boston Logan Airport, and reached manager Michael Woodward. He was a friend, and he knew her voice.

The first thing she told him was to listen very carefully, because her plane had been hijacked.

Calmly, methodically, and under unimaginable pressure, Amy gave ground control the very first intelligence report of the day.

She reported that the flight was hijacked.

She confirmed two flight attendants had been stabbed and a passenger was critically injured.

The passenger was a man in business class whose throat had been cut.

She reported a bomb threat in the cockpit. One of the hijackers had shown her a device with red and yellow wires.

She relayed the exact seat numbers of the hijackers, providing critical evidence for federal investigators. She named seats 8D, 8G, and 10B. Woodward's team pulled those seats up in the reservation system while she was still on the line.

The name in seat 8D was Mohamed Atta. Within hours, the FBI knew who had led the attack, and Amy Sweeney was the reason.

Woodward later said she spoke very calmly and very quickly, the way a professional does when there is no time to waste. She told him one hijacker spoke excellent English and another spoke almost none.

She told him the hijackers had gotten into the cockpit and she did not know how. She told him that passengers in coach still believed there was a medical emergency up front.

Amy had been flying with American for more than a decade, and every bit of that training showed.

Alongside fellow flight attendant Betty Ong, who stayed on her own line for 23 minutes, Amy became the eyes and ears of a nation in its darkest hour.

Betty's call helped lead the FAA to ground every plane in America for the first time in our history. Amy's call helped the FBI put names and faces to the men who did this.

The two of them, working the same cabin with no weapons and no help coming, gave our country the truth before the rest of us knew anything was wrong.
She stayed on the phone as the aircraft sped toward New York City.

She told Woodward that something was wrong and that the plane was in a rapid descent. Near the end of the call, Woodward asked her to look outside and determine where they were.

Looking through the window at the approaching city skyline, her final reported words were:

"I see water. I see buildings. We're flying low. We're flying very, very low."

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

[Dotsthoughts @DorothyStangle]

It was his very first day on the job. By 9:42 AM, he had made an unprecedented decision that altered the course of American history.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Ben Sliney walked into the FAA's command center in Virginia to handshakes and well-wishes from his colleagues. He was 55, a 27-year veteran of air traffic control, and it was his first day as the National Operations Manager - the man running the room that manages the flow of every flight in the entire country.
Then, the unimaginable happened.
At 8:46 AM, a plane hit the North Tower.
At 9:03 AM, as his staff watched in horror, the second plane hit the South Tower.
Sliney didn't wait for permission. He gave his first order: a national ground stop. This meant no plane, anywhere in the country, was allowed to take off. While ground stops are used locally for bad weather, it had never been done nationwide.
But that didn't solve the immediate crisis. There were still roughly 4,500 planes in the air.
"After the second aircraft hit the building, I didn't know how many more there could be," Sliney later recalled. "There could be 30 of them. I didn't know."
At 9:37 AM, a third plane hit the Pentagon.
In the command center, no one above Sliney had ordered anything. No one had told him what he was allowed to do. But five minutes later, at 9:42 AM, Sliney spoke loud enough for the 40 people in the room to hear:
"That's it. I'm landing everyone."
His second order was the bigger one. A ground stop keeps planes down, but this order forced them down. Every single aircraft flying over the United States was instructed to land at the nearest airport, immediately, regardless of its destination.
It was a logistical nightmare that had never been practiced, let alone executed. Controllers had to rapidly sequence jets into small regional airports that had never handled them. Thousands of passengers suddenly touched down in cities they had never heard of.
The result? It took just over two hours. 4,500 planes landed. Zero accidents.
Sliney later admitted that in the chaos of that morning, it crossed his mind to wonder if he even had the authority to ground the entire country. He gave the order anyway, deciding to let the question wait. True leadership is acting decisively when the stakes are highest, even in the absence of a playbook.
The 9/11 Commission's report officially recorded the life-saving order as his. Five years later, when director Paul Greengrass made the harrowing film United 93, he asked Sliney to play himself. He did.
Next month, Ben Sliney turns 81. A quiet American hero who, on his very first day, proved exactly why he was the right person for the job.

[💫🅰️♈️🆔 @ADavidHaleJoint]

BC is about to kickoff its annual Red Bandana game on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Today, my 7-year old brought a red bandana home from school. Her teacher had taught the class about Welles, about what happened on that awful day 25 years ago.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the same mantra was repeated everywhere: “Never forget.”

At the time, I thought, how could we? How could anyone forget what it felt like to have everything you believed to be true and real about the world shift in an instant?

And the answer is: It’s easy. 25 years is a long time, even if it seems like it’s gone by astonishingly fast. Life happens, the world moves on, and memories fade.

I’m about to board an airplane. That should be entirely surreal today, but it’s not. Looking around the airport, it’s like any other day, and a sizable percentage of people here are too young to remember what it felt like when the towers fell. For me and people older, it’s the defining moment of our lives. For them, it’s something out of a history book.

So I’m incredibly grateful to my daughter’s teacher, for BC, and for everyone who remembers.

As I left for the airport, my daughter gave me her banana “for good luck on your trip” and i may have gotten a bit choked up. But it felt good to remember.

[Daniella Greenbaum Davis @DGreenbaum]

Lisa: Yes sir, I’ve been talking with a passenger, a Todd Beamer, on Flight 93 who managed to get to an air phone unnoticed.

Goodwin: Where did this flight originate, and what was its destination?

Lisa: The flight left Newark New Jersey at 8 A.M. departing for San Francisco. The hijackers took over the plane shortly after takeoff, and several minutes later the plane changed course – it is now flying east.

Goodwin: Ms. Jefferson…I need to talk to someone aboard that plane. Can you get me thru to the planes phone?

Lisa: I still have that line open sir, I can patch you through on a conference call…hold a mo…..

Todd: Hello Lisa, Lisa are you there?

Lisa: Yes, I’m here. Todd, I made a call to the FBI, Agent Goodwin is on the line and will be talking to you as well.

Todd: The others all know that this isn’t your normal hijacking. Jeremy called his wife again on his cell phone. She told him more about the World Trade Center and all.

Goodwin: Hello Todd. This is Agent Goodwin with the FBI. We have been monitoring your flight. Your plane is on a course for Washington, DC. These terrorists sent two planes into the World Trade Center and one plane into the Pentagon. Our best guess is that they plan to fly your plane into either the White House or the United States Capital Building.

Todd: I understand…hold on……I’ll…….I’ll be back..

Lisa: Mr. Goodwin, how much time do they have before they get to Washington?

Goodwin: Not long ma’am. They changed course over Cleveland; they’re approaching Pittsburgh now. Washington may be twenty minutes away.

Todd: (breathing a little heavier) The plane seems to be changing directions just a little. It’s getting pretty rough up here. The plane is flying real erratic….We’re not going to make it out of here. Listen to me….I want you to hear this….I have talked with the others….we have decided we would not be pawns in these hijackers suicidal plot.

Lisa: Todd, what are you going to do?

Todd: We’ve hatched a plan. Four of us are going to rush the hijacker with the bomb. After we take him out, we’ll break into the cockpit. A stewardess is getting some boiling water to throw on the hijackers at the controls. We’ll get them….and we’ll take them out. Lisa, …..will you do one last thing for me?

Lisa: Yes…What is it?

Todd: Would you pray with me?

They pray: Our father which art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive our trespassers,
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory
Forever…..Amen
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…
He makes me to lie down in green pastures
He leads me beside the still waters
He restores my soul
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for His name’s sake
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me…..

Todd: (softer) God help me…Jesus help me….(clears throat and louder)

Are you guys ready?……..

Let’s Roll……………………

[Daniella Greenbaum Davis @DGreenbaum]

Proof of the impact a single brave person can have on the world. Let’s roll.

Lisa: Can you tell me how many hijackers are on the plane?

Todd: There are three that we know of.

Lisa: Can you see any weapons? What kind of weapons do they have?

Todd: Yes…. they don’t have guns….they have knives – they took over the plane with knives.

Lisa: Do you mean…like steak knives?

Todd: No, these are razor knives…like box cutters.

Lisa: Can you tell what country these people are from?

Todd: No…..I don’t know. They sound like they’re from the mid-east.

Lisa: Have they said what they want?

Todd: Someone announced from the cockpit that there was a bomb on board. He said he was the captain and to stay in our seats and stay quiet.
He said that they were meeting these men’s demands and returning to the airport… It was very broken English, and… I’m telling you…it sounded fake!

Lisa: Ok sir, please give me your name.

Todd: My name is Todd Beamer.

Lisa: Ok Todd….my name is Lisa…Do you know your flight number?

Todd: It’s United Flight 93.

Lisa: Has anyone been injured?

Todd: Yes, ..they…they killed one passenger sitting in first class. There’s been lots of shouting. We don’t know if the pilots are dead or alive. A flight attendant told me that the pilot and copilot had been forced from the cockpit and may have been wounded.

Lisa: Where is the 3rd hijacker now Todd?

Todd: He’s near the back of the plane. They forced most of the passengers into first class. There are fourteen of us here in the back. Five are flight attendants. He hasn’t noticed that I slipped into this pantry to get the phone. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor in the rear of the plane……….oh Jesus.. Help!

Lisa: Todd….are you ok? Tell me what’s happening!

Todd: Hello…..We’re going down….I think we’re going to crash……Wait – wait a minute. No, we’re leveling off….we’re ok. I think we may be turning around…..That’s it – we changed directions. Do you hear me….we’re flying east again.

Lisa: Ok Todd…. What’s going on with the other passengers?

Todd: Everyone is… really scared. A few passengers with cell phones have made calls to relatives. A guy, Jeremy, was talking to his wife just before the hijacking started. She told him that hijackers had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center……Lisa is that true??

Lisa: Todd…..I have to tell you the truth…..it’s very bad. The World Trade Center is gone. Both of the towers have been destroyed.

Todd: Oh God —help us!

Lisa: A third plane was taken over by terrorists. It crashed into the Pentagon in Washington DC. Our country is under attack….and I’m afraid that your plane may be part of their plan.

Todd: Oh dear God. Dear God…….Lisa, will you do something for me?

Lisa: I’ll try….if I can….Yes.

Todd: I want you to call my wife and my kids for me and tell them what’s happened. Promise me you’ll call..

Lisa: I promise – I’ll call.

Todd: .You have the same name as my wife…Lisa….We’ve been married for 10 years. She’s pregnant with our 3rd child. Tell her that I love her…….(choking up)..I’ll always love her..(clearing throat) We have two boys.. David, he’s 3 and Andrew, he’s 1…..Tell them……(choking) tell them that their daddy loves them and that he is so proud of them. (clearing throat again) Our baby is due January 12th…..I saw an ultra sound…..it was great….we still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy………Lisa?

Lisa: (barely able to speak) I’ll tell them, I promise Todd.

Todd: I’m going back to the group—if I can get back I will…

Lisa: Todd, leave this line open…are you still there?……

Lisa: (dials the phone..) Hello, FBI, my name is Lisa Jefferson, I’m a telephone supervisor for GTE. I need to report a terrorist hijacking of a United Airlines Flight 93….Yes I’ll hold.

Goodwin: Hello, this is Agent Goodwin.. I understand you have a hijacking situation?

[Anthony Bradley @drantbradley]

This is actually “The New Jim Crow.” As a result of the case, his landlord is now trying to evict him and critics are bringing up a previously dismissed case to lynch his character because he disagreed with a room full of white women. Imagine if he had murdered three children?

[MLB Network @MLBNetwork]

Kenneth Marino of FDNY Rescue Ladder 1 loved his children, his wife and baseball - specifically, Ken Griffey Jr.

🎥 MLB Network Special: When America Took the Field - tonight at 10pm ET

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

I didn’t think I could love Ken Griffey Jr. more then I watched this

[☁Baby Blastoise☁ @PatsOnYaBack]

Explaining the Ocarina of Time Remake to Gen Z

[MJ @morganisawizard]

this is some of the most disgusting news reporting i have ever seen.

it’s absolutely insane to think you could be forcibly conscripted into jury duty at any time and have your entire life completely excavated by the media if you vote unacceptably.

the unanimous verdict requirement exists precisely so one person can refuse to go along.

if being that person now means risking all of your laundry being aired out to your community that can easily identify you, we’ve essentially converted unanimity to majority rule by intimidation.

[Whisskier @whisskier]

@TrueNorth444 @annvandersteel @IRONAPE_MMTLP @SECGov What was really going on here?
“Former Ombuds”, misled Congress on a number of occasions, but rewarded & moved her to the PCAOB??
Make it make sense.

[Maggie @maggiemoda]

I have no memory of the attacks on 9/11. Most of Gen Z did not experience it.

This page is doing something really powerful by allowing us to experience how the country received information. Thank you to everyone sharing stories today.

[Wally @ItsJeffsFault]

@jaxacastellano @chapelfowler Scumbag @NCAA , just leave the kid alone.

[Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze]

I didn't editorialize, or put up an opinion. I simply posted what the New York Times chose to publish o 9/11.

And the NY Times Comms is struggling with it.

[Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze]

The New York Times on 9/11.

[Rory Cooper @rorycooper]

Still hits the same

[Wally @ItsJeffsFault]

@JradRabel