Daily Mail/ROWLAND MORGAN | August 19 2006

The heart-thumping moment came when when passengers on board one of the hijacked 9/11 jets fought back against the ruthless fanatics hellbent on crashing the plane into the heart of America.

Jumping out of their seats to a rallying cry of “Let’s roll!”, they charged towards the front of the Boeing 757 and began smashing down the cockpit door to reach the hijackers at the controls.

Amid the desperate commotion, the plane rolled violently from right to left and pitched up and down as the rogue pilots tried to throw the passengers beyond the door off balance. As the struggle continued, the cockpit voice recorder captured the hijackers urgently discussing whether to ditch the plane. “Is that it? Shall we finish it off”? asked one of the fanatics.

“No, not yet. When they all come, we finish it off,” was the reply. Minutes later, at10.03am, with the same voices shouting in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest,” the plane headed down, banked hard right and rolled on to its back. It smashed into an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at its top speed of 580mph and exploded into a massive fireball.

The flames set nearby woods on fire as the impact sprayed body parts and other debris into the trees and up into the sky, to float to earth as far as eight miles away.

This, then, is the legend of United Airways Flight 93, one that has been vigorously promoted in a stream of books and films, most recently in the