How many passengers and crew on Flight 93 have been officially credited with attempting to retake the cockpit?
Executive summary
The official record credits a collective "group of passengers and crew" aboard United Flight 93 with mounting an assault to retake the cockpit, but it does not enumerate a definitive headcount of individuals who physically participated in the struggle [1] [2]. Multiple primary and authoritative sources name several participants and document the vote and assault, while also emphasizing that investigators could not—and did not—produce a precise list of everyone who joined the charge [3] [4] [2].
1. What the official records say: a group, not a headcount
Federal investigators and national memorial authorities consistently describe the action on Flight 93 as a coordinated uprising by “passengers and crew” that began after a democratic vote and culminated in an attempt to breach the cockpit, but they stop short of issuing an exact number of participants [1] [2]. The FBI’s published investigation material affirms that passengers “charged the cockpit” and that cockpit voice and flight data recorders document sounds of a struggle until impact, framing the event as collective heroism rather than a tally of individuals [1]. The National Park Service likewise records that “the passengers and crew began their assault on the cockpit” at about 9:57 a.m., again describing intent and action in the plural without giving a final participant count [2].
2. Who is explicitly named in reporting and memorials
Reporting, museum descriptions, and many secondary sources repeatedly cite specific passengers whose calls or actions strongly indicate they were part of the plan or the assault: Tom Burnett (often referenced as Thomas Burnett, Jr.), Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham, and Cee-Cee Ross Lyles appear throughout the record as leaders or key voices in the decision to act [3] [5] [6]. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum lists Burnett, Beamer, Glick, Lyles, Sandra Bradshaw, and Honor Elizabeth Wainio among callers whose messages indicate the passengers were preparing to attempt to retake the plane [3]. These named individuals are repeatedly memorialized as central to the uprising, but the sources do not assert that this is an exhaustive roster of every person who physically surged forward.
3. Why no exact number is given in authoritative sources
Investigators depended on phone calls, air traffic monitoring, and the cockpit voice recorder—evidence that documents plan, intent, and struggle—but physical reconstruction of individual movements in the final minutes was impossible given the destruction at the crash site and fragmentary human remains recovery; official reports therefore describe collective actions rather than attributing specific roles to an enumerated list of people [1] [4]. Secondary accounts and some popular narratives attempt to infer participants—pointing to the vote, known athletic backgrounds of some passengers, and cockpit audio—but the authoritative stance remains that “a group” of passengers and crew forced events that led the hijackers to crash the plane, not a formal roster of assaulters [2] [4].
4. Alternate narratives, assertions, and limits of the record
Narratives that present a definitive number—claims that name an exact tally of six, eight, or some other figure—draw on inference, dramatization, or non-authoritative compilations rather than a single official counting by investigators; some fandom and dramatized accounts go further into specifics not supported by the FBI or National Park Service [6] [7]. Authoritative sources consistently balance the known facts—the vote, the cockpit audio of struggle, names of several participants who called loved ones—with careful caveats about what cannot be determined from the evidence, and those caveats explain why the official language remains collective rather than numeric [3] [1] [2].