Clarke Bynum addressed the role of God in his heroic act of saving a British Airways flight from a terrorist attack last December to a crowd of about 100 in the Kenan Field House.
Bynum was on his way to Uganda on a two-week missionary trip. He said his prayer for the trip was to clearly see God in action and to change his life. "I just never knew how true those words would become," he said.
After the initial flight from Charlotte to London, nothing went as planned, Bynum said. He and his friend, Gifford Shaw, missed their flight from London to Uganda due to an ice storm. They were put on a plane to Nairobi several hours later.
"Here we were on a flight we never should have been on," Bynum said. "Everything from this point on was divine intervention."
He and Shaw were seated on the second level of a Boeing 747, two rows behind the cockpit door.
About one hour into the flight, Bynum said he awoke to the "most tremendous jolt you could imagine." Bynum would later find out that the plane dropped 19,000 feet in less than two minutes.
He said he then heard horrendous screams coming from the cockpit. Bynum said he knew at that moment he was going to die.
"It was the strangest thing to know that in three to five seconds I was going to be in heaven," he said. "The first thing I felt was peace. But then I thought of my wife and kids and felt incredible sadness. It was then I felt the overwhelming need to do something."
Bynum took one step to the cockpit door and opened it to find an unarmed Kenyan man standing over the pilot, forcing the plane down.
