There’s not much to watch on television on Christmas Eve, especially if you’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life more times than you can stand; and so, on a whim, we decided to watch the pay-per-view movie-channel version of United 93.

Wow!

Even though the plot and the outcome were obvious from the first moment of the film, the suspense was still unbearable; and the shock of watching the multiple hijackings unfolding, on a moment by moment basis, was simply stunning. I had consciously avoided seeing the movie when it appeared in theaters earlier this year, just as I’ve avoided the other 9-11 movies; New Yorkers generally don’t need such vivid reminders of what they lived through five years ago.

Aside from the drama and tension of the movie itself, what struck me most was the contrast between the “top-down” response to the hijackings by the FAA and Defense Department, versus the “bottom-up” response by the passengers on the plane. From what I’ve read, the film was meticulously researched and painfully accurate; so I’m assuming that the events and personalities portrayed in the film were reasonably accurate.

As such, the air-traffic controllers, supervisors, and military personnel come across as responsive, alert, concerned, and doing their level best to cope — in real time — with a scenario that their overall system simply wasn’t prepared for. They never did get any fighters into the skies above New York City or Washington in time, and they didn’t get clearance from the President to “engage” (i.e., shoot down, if necessary) the commercial airliners that had been transformed into flying bombs. Presumably all of that has changed in the ensuing five years; but it’s also reasonable to assume (as we saw with the aborted “liquid” airline attacks in London last summer) that the next terrorist attack will be something other than a straightforward hijacking of airplanes.

Meanwhile, the passengers aboard United 93 divided themselves — in a matter of moments, once the terrorists had pushed them into the rear of the cabin, with threats of a bomb wired to one terrorist’s body — into three groups. One group dissolved into whimpers and sobs, paralyzed by fear and the immediacy of the threat. A second group had the presence of mind, as well as the sense of impending doom, to use the airline phones (the ones embedded in the back of airline seats, which most of us simply don’t use any more) and their cell phones to call authorities on the ground with the news, and to call their families to say goodbye. And a third group, which appears to have consisted of only four or five men and one flight attendant, gathered whatever make-do weapons they could find (knives, fire extinguishers, etc.) and improvised a plan to take down their two terrorist guards, and force their way into the pilot’s compartment. And we all know how it worked out.

There are three aspects of the United 93 hijacking that I found significant, and possibly applicable to other “disruptive” events (whether natural or man-made, whether an overt act of hostility or an impersonal “attack” by Nature, like Hurricane Katrina). The first has to do with the nature of information and communications by which a threatened group (a nation, a city, or a plane full of passengers) becomes aware of its situation. According to the movie, the pilots of United 93 received a text message on one of their computer display panels, informing them of the two flights that crashed into the World Trade Center. This was a classic “top-down” form of communication, from some higher authority to (one assumes) all of the pilots flying some 4,000 commercial flights that were aloft at the time. But the message was terse and succinct, and the United 93 pilots didn’t realize that the attacks had been carried out by hijacked commercial airplanes — so (a) they didn’t act on the information,and (b) they didn’t convey the information to the flight attendants or the passengers.

But through their cell phones and airplane phones, the passengers soon obtained the same information in a “bottom up” fashion — from their families, and from whoever else they managed to reach on the ground. And to their credit, they figured out, on their own, that their hijacked flight was, as one of the terrified passengers put it, a “suicide mission,” and that they weren’t going to be flown safely back to Newark Airport and held for ransom. It’s probably inappropriate to generalize here, and it could be downright dangerous, but at least in this one situation, the bottom-up channel of information was a lot more useful than the top-down channel.

The second aspect of the situation was that the passengers broke the rules in order to obtain their bottom-up information: they used their cell phones to call their loved ones on the phone. Anyone who has flown a commercial flight more than once or twice knows that the flight attendants are relentless about getting everyone to turn off their cell phones, Blackberries, pagers, and other such devices when the cabin door is closed; and most of us have been so browbeaten and brainwashed by the implied disruption that our cell phones might wreak upon the plane’s navigation system that it simply wouldn’t occur to us to turn the phones on in mid-air. Also, many of us get such lousy reception on the ground, even when we’re close to a cellphone tower, that it would never occur to us that our cellphones would actually work at an altitude of 35,000 feet. But apparently they did; and thank goodness that at least a few passengers had the initiative to break the rules and try.

The third aspect of the situation involves the personalities and reactions of the passengers: some are brave; some are quiet, fatalistic victims; and some are hysterical cowards. Some of the characters in the movie were typecast for the “hero” type — such as tall, strapping young man with a baseball cap who was presumably meant to be Todd Beamer, and who actually did utter the line, “Let’s roll!” at the appropriate moment in the movie. But a couple of the other hero-types looked like ordinary, middle-aged businessmen who hadn’t done anything athletic in 20 years. Some of the hysterical victims were elderly people, and I suppose their reaction was predictable. But there were several other passengers who appeared to be in their 20s, 30s, and 40s and whose behavior was more-or-less unpredictable.

And quite frankly, I don’t know how I would have behaved under such circumstances. If my children were still young, and if they were on the plane with me, then I’m quite certain that I would have been overtaken by visceral rage, and would have attacked anyone who threatened their safety. But they’re now grown and gone; and if I were on a plane alone, with only myself to worry about, who knows what I’d do if I suddenly found myself confronted by shrieking terrorists who slit the throat of the passenger beside me, and threatened to detonate a bomb? I’d like to think that I’d be rushing up the aisle, right beside Todd Beamer; but I’m also humble enough to realize that we’re not always as brave as we think we are, or would like to be.

So what are the take-away lessons from all of this? First: the top-down command-and-control system has a purpose, and isn’t going away; but those of us at the bottom of the pyramid should not assume it will help us when dealing with sudden, extreme, malevolent disruptions. Second: to cope successfully with such sudden, extreme, malevolent disruptions, we’ve got to be prepared to break some rules, and deal with the slap-on-the-wrist consequences later. And third: we’d all like to think we’d exhibit the bravery of a Todd Beamer, but most of us have no idea how we would react to a completely unexpected crisis.

Oh, by the way: Merry Christmas…