Final Minutes of United Flight 93

April 19, 2002 -- — Hearing their relatives' last moments aboard United Flight 93 was "beautiful" yet "horrible." That's how Alice Hoglan describes the mood as family members heard the cockpit voice recording from the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11.

"The cockpit voice recording confirms heroic acts on board," Hoglan said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "The passengers were able to pull it together in the waning moments and acted as a team, and it was beautiful and remarkable and horrible to behold all at once."

Hoglan lost her son, Mark Bingham, when United Flight 93 was hijacked and crashed near Shanksville, Pa.

She was among about 100 relatives who got to hear the cockpit voice recording from the hijacked jetliner. Victims' family members gathered at a New Jersey hotel to hear the tapes in two private sessions Thursday.

Deanna Burnett lost her husband Tom on the flight. She spearheaded the unprecedented effort to make the cockpit voice recording available to the victims' families.

‘Some Level of Comfort’

"Each of the family members who heard the tape walked away feeling some level of comfort, I believe," Burnett said. "I have to say that many questions were answered, in that Alice and I both had confirmed yesterday by listening to the recorder what we had believed all along."

It was difficult to hear exactly what was being said at points on the recording because the voices were muffled and only some were distinguishable, said Burnett.The family members carefully concentrated on the transcript of the cockpit recording on a screen as they listened to the tape through headphones. Although there were a few tears shed during the session, Burnett said they were all very focused on trying to soak up all of the new information they were being provided with on the recordings.

Forty passengers and four crew members were killed when the airliner, bound from Newark to San Francisco, crashed in a field in rural western Pennsylvania.

‘Let’s Roll!

Flight 93 was the only one of the four planes hijacked Sept. 11 that took no lives on the ground. Evidence, including cell phone calls, suggests that passengers fought the hijackers after Todd Beamer cried, "Let's roll!" Hoglan said the tapes also make it clear that the passengers took action.

"The one thing that was confirmed for all of us was that there were active parts played by both men and women on that flight, involved in getting to the cockpit," said Hoglan, whose son called from the air before the plane crashed. "There were 40 heroes. No doubt about it," she said.

Those aboard Flight 93 were praised as heroes by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has called their actions "the most dramatic of the heroic acts" of Sept. 11 and its aftermath.

Much of that praise has been focused on four men: Bingham, who was from San Francicso, Beamer, of Cranbury, N.J., Burnett, of San Ramon, Calif., and Jeremy Glick of West Milford, N.J. During phone conversations from the plane, the men talked of plans to take on the hijackers.

Alice Hoglan and Deanna Burnett said they were asked not to discuss details of the recordings because the information could jeopardize the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is accused of being an accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks.