When you go through pilot training you spend the whole time trying to imagine yourself in awful situations and figure out how you would save the day. Pilots always put on the old "aw shucks, it's easy" routine, but the fact of the matter is we take the safety of the people in the back very, very seriously. Your worst fear as a pilot is that you will make a mistake and hurt people, or have a solution to a crisis and overlook it.

[if] someone tried to come through the door...... I was damned if I wasn't going to save the day ...or at least try hard enough so that they spoke well of us at recurrent training.

If you're going to kill me and every one else on the plane anyway, we're going in the Hudson River, you dirty son of a bitch. No, those guys were dead or incapacitated.

So David, if you are reading this, you and your CA did save the day for your pax imo.

Interesting speculation, Rob. I agree there is something suspicious about that whole exchange. According to the official story, transponders were turned off and there was no radio contact with all the allegedly "hijacked" flights. Obviously this was not the case with Delta 1989. So, this begs the question, why the prompting for "proper phraseology"?

I truly think this flight was meant to be "highjacked" but something went wrong.

One helluva story by David Dunlap!

Man you could see the training exercise coming through everything. Delta Trip 1989.

The pilot had radioed that there was suspicious activity in the cabin since one of the passengers was speaking urgently on his cellphone and ignored repeated flight attendant requests to stop using his cell phone while in flight. Also, there was an irregularity in the passenger manifest because there were two people [with the same middle eastern name] who were listed but only one aboard.

After our emergency landing, our plane was directed to go to an isolated area of the airport, and we waited for over two hours in quarantine before FBI agents and bomb sniffing dogs came out to the plane. Just after we landed, the pilot gave us permission to make one very brief telephone call before we were banned from any further telephone use. The sixty or so passengers were thus able to gather some alarming details of the unbelievable fates of the other two LA-bound planes and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the suicide bombing of the Pentagon as well as reports of other plane crashes in PA and LA (LA proved unfounded) before we were cut off from any further communication.

One helluva story by David Dunlap!

Man you could see the training exercise coming through everything. Delta Trip 1989.

The pilot had radioed that there was suspicious activity in the cabin since one of the passengers was speaking urgently on his cellphone and ignored repeated flight attendant requests to stop using his cell phone while in flight. Also, there was an irregularity in the passenger manifest because there were two people [with the same middle eastern name] who were listed but only one aboard.

After our emergency landing, our plane was directed to go to an isolated area of the airport, and we waited for over two hours in quarantine before FBI agents and bomb sniffing dogs came out to the plane. Just after we landed, the pilot gave us permission to make one very brief telephone call before we were banned from any further telephone use. The sixty or so passengers were thus able to gather some alarming details of the unbelievable fates of the other two LA-bound planes and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the suicide bombing of the Pentagon as well as reports of other plane crashes in PA and LA (LA proved unfounded) before we were cut off from any further communication.

S/he confirmed that the pilot gave them permission to make one call while they were on the plane. S/he remembers it as being while they were still in the air while her initial letter says that it was after they landed. Either there were 2 calls allowed, their memory (5 years later) differs from what happened, or s/he was incorrect in the initial letter. Remember that s/he wasn't, at the time, writing for posterity but to reassure family and friends. S/he doesn't remember what time s/he was able to make a call(s) that was but for reason thinks it was closer to 1000. It was around the time the first tower collapsed. That was one piece of the information they got while still in the air. They were later able to make more calls after they had landed in Cleveland.
They were told to make one call but people might have snuck more. S/he remembers thinking that it was a very inappropriate joke when someone mentioned one of the WTC towers collapsing.
Although they shared what information they had with other passengers, at the time they did not realize that the flights that hit the WTC towers originated in Boston so didn't realize until later that it could have been them.
In questioning them in 2006, s/he recalls that there was an interminable wait on the plane until agents could come to the plane to take their luggage and them off onto the tarmac. Once they were inside a building they were individually interrogated s/he remembers specifically asking an FBI guy if they could call their [family] and he said okay. They put the agent on the phone to say hi to [them].
I asked them where they were when they we rerouted to Cleveland. S/he is not sure but think that 1989 was Southeast of Cleveland at the time. It was "a good 45 minutes at least" after we were told we would have to make an emergency landing in Cleveland that they finally did. It is unsure whether this was in response to the FAA halting all flights at 0949 or due to their being confused with Flight 93 which was happening closer to 0930 - 0935. The 9/11 Commission Report states that 1989 was closer to Toledo which would have been West. S/he is most likely mistaken since the FAA would have the data given that flight 1989 never turned off their transponder.
S/he said that they did not see any fighters escorting them to Cleveland and in talking to the pilot afterwards in the FBI interrogation line, he was "pleasant and forthcoming" and did not mention any escort -- which, of course, doesn't mean that there wasn't any.
I've asked them for some pictures of the day.

Very interesting Woody.
Thanks for the update!

Thanks for that Paranoia. Right now I can't get those links to work quite right, but I'll keep trying. The Wayback Machine acts like it's trying, but nothing quite comes through.