• Web Hosting
• Guestbooks
• Hit Counter
• Forums
• Blogs
• Mailing List
• Free Web Hosting

- - -

Top Stories - Reuters - updated 6:16 AM ET Oct 19

Add to My Yahoo!

Reuters  |  AP  |  AP U.S.  |  The New York Times  |  ABCNEWS.com  |  Photos  |  Videos

Thursday September 13 12:01 PM ET Your Ad Here FBI Does Not Rule Out Shootdown of Penn. Airplane Photos Reuters Photo Audio/Video What Happened on Flight 93? (ABCNEWS.com)   SHANKSVILLE, Pa. (Reuters) - Federal investigators said on Thursday they could not rule out the possibility that a United Airlines jetliner that crashed in rural western Pennsylvania during this week's attacks on New York and the Pentagon (news - web sites) was shot down. ``We have not ruled out that,'' FBI (news - web sites) agent Bill Crowley told a news conference when asked about reports that a U.S. fighter jet may have fired on the hijacked Boeing 757. ``We haven't ruled out anything yet.'' ``It's kind of a loaded question. We're basically at the infancy (of the investigation),'' Crowley added. ``We haven't certainly come to that conclusion either.'' The Defense Department on Tuesday vigorously denied reports suggesting the U.S. military could have downed the hijacked flight in an effort to prevent it from reaching a target, perhaps in Washington. United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed with 45 people on board, had been en route to San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey, when it veered off course over northeastern Ohio and headed back southeast toward Pittsburgh. It crashed 80 miles southeast of that city. Pennsylvania state police officials said on Thursday debris from the plane had been found up to 8 miles away in a residential community where local media have quoted residents as speaking of a second plane in the area and burning debris falling from the sky. Crowley said authorities have not yet found the plane's crucial voice and flight data recorders, but that teams were still searching. ``We've not located the black box,'' he said. ''We're confident and we will keep working on it.'' The wooded crash scene was likely to provide investigators of Tuesday's deadly airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with their best chance of recovering working data recorders. The data recorders could provide an invaluable account of what occurred in the plane's cockpit after the flight turned southeast on Tuesday morning. Flight 93, which crashed near a strip mine, was the only one of four hijacked aircraft not to hit a U.S. landmark. Federal officials believe hijackers planned to crash the plane into the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or a target in Washington. But passengers who managed to call out on cellular phones and on-board airphones suggested they were about to thwart any such plan. ``I know we're all going to die -- there's three of us who are going to do something about it,'' passenger Thomas Burnett told his wife Deena just before the crash, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. ``He then said, 'I love you, honey,' and that was the end of conversation,'' the Burnett family's priest, Rev. Frank Colacicco, told the newspaper. The National Transportation Safety Board (news - web sites) was expected to conduct a flyover of the scene to verify the full extent of the debris field, which was sealed off to outsiders and the media by an army of Pennsylvania state troopers. UAL Corp Email this story - View most popular  |  Printer-friendly format Earlier Stories Officials Begin Month-Long Search of Pa. Crash Site (September 12) Passengers on Flight 93 May Have Struggled with Hijackers (September 12)

http://eionews.addr.com/psyops/fourthplane.htm


EYEWITNESSES SAW
UNMARKED PLANE AS
FLIGHT 93 CRASHED
Plane had high back wings
and remained briefly after crash

Video of the WTAE interviews
is usually accessible.
WTAE-TV

13th September, 2001
A PsyOpNews.com Alert

At least four witnesses who were at the crash scene within five minutes of the crash told local WTAE's Paul Van Osdol that they saw another plane in the area.

Somerset County resident Jim Brandt told local TV station WTAE that he saw another plane in the area. He said it stayed there for one or two minutes before leaving.

Another Somerset County resident, Tom Spinello, said that he saw the plane. He said that it had high back wings. Both men said that the plane had no markings on it, either civilian or military

Witnesses reported seeing military aircraft in the air just after the crash, and there were rumors that Flight 93 was shot down. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld said that was not the case, according to Murtha.

As Flight 93 approached Cleveland, radar showed the plane banked left and headed back toward southwest Pennsylvania. Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White said air traffic controllers reported hearing screams on a plane with which they had communicated.

John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport tower chief Dennis Fritz said his tower, located about 20 miles from the crash site, got a warning call from Cleveland Air Traffic Control.

The Cleveland tower said the plane had done some unusual maneuvers, including a 180-degree turn away from Cleveland, and was flying at a low altitude. Johnstown tower controllers also could not see the plane from their tower, leading them to believe the plane was already very low and perhaps obscured by the surrounding topography.

Plane Crash Chronology

American Airlines Flight 11: A Boeing 7-6-7 en route from Boston to Los Angeles. The plane was carrying 81 passengers, nine flight attendants and two pilots. The location of the plane has not been identified.

American Airlines Flight 77: A Boeing 7-5-7 en route from Dulles Airport near Washington to Los Angeles. The plane was carrying 58 passengers, four flight attendants and two pilots. The location of the plane has not been identified.

United Airlines Flight 93: A Boeing 7-5-7, crashed southeast of Pittsburgh while en route from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco. The plane was carrying 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants.

United Airlines Flight 175: A Boeing 7-6-7. The flight was bound from Boston to Los Angeles. It was carrying 56 passengers, two pilots and seven flight attendants. The airline would not say where that plane crashed.

psyopnews.com

In wake of Pa. crash, suggestions that a 'heroic effort' by passengers spared other lives

By MARTHA RAFFAELE Associated Press Writer

The plane left Newark, N.J., for San Francisco at 8:01 a.m. EDT Tuesday. As it approached Cleveland, radar showed the plane banked left and headed back toward Pennsylvania. Cleveland Mayor Michael White said air traffic controllers said they could hear screaming on a plane they were in communication with.

Dennis Fritz, the control tower chief at the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport, about 20 miles from the crash site, said his tower got a call from Cleveland controllers warning that the plane was headed toward Johnstown and flying erratically.

The Cleveland tower said the plane had done some unusual maneuvers, including a 180-degree turn away from Cleveland, and was flying at a low altitude. Johnstown controllers also could not see the plane from their tower, leading them to believe the plane was already very low.

"We had no call signal and we had no tail number. We had no way of making contact with the plane," Fritz said.

From Johnstown, the plane veered south, Fritz said. A witness on the ground called the Westmoreland County 911 center to report a large aircraft flying low and banking from side to side.

A passenger who called 911 from his cell phone told dispatchers he was inside a locked bathroom on the plane. Dispatcher Glenn Cramer said the man repeatedly said, "We're being hijacked!"

"He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him," Cramer said. The man never identified himself.

Minutes later, the plane slammed into the ground, nose first. The Hawk Eye

Dennis Fritz, director of the municipal airport in Johnstown, Pa., said the FAA called him several times as the plane approached his city, and even warned him to evacuate the tower for fear the jet would plow into it.

"They said the plane was very suspicious, and they didn't know what it was doing," Fritz said. Flight 93 crashed into a field 14 miles south of Johnstown.


http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20010913somersetnat3p3.asp

Calls tell of heroics on board Flight 93

Thursday, September 13, 2001

By Charles Lane and John Mintz, The Washington Post

As United Airlines Flight 93 entered its last desperate moments in the sky, passenger Jeremy Glick used a cell phone to tell his wife, Lyzbeth, of his impending death -- and pledged to go down fighting.

Glick, 31, told his wife that the Boeing 757's cockpit had been taken over by three Middle Eastern-looking men wielding knives and a red box they claimed was a bomb. The terrorists, wearing red headbands, had ordered the pilots, flight attendants and passengers to the rear of the plane.


Lyzbeth Glick, in turn, informed her husband that another hijacked jet had already crashed into the World Trade Center, according to Glick's brother-in-law, Douglas Hurwitt, who had spoken in detail with Glick's wife about the 30-minute call. Authorities believe the hijackers of Flight 93 were aiming for a target in Washington.

Glick said he and others aboard the plane had decided to rush the cockpit and try to subdue the terrorists -- a display of resistance that may have staved off a much worse catastrophe.

"They were going to stop whoever it was from doing whatever it was they'd planned," Hurwitt said. "He knew that stopping them was going to end all of their lives. But that was my brother-in-law. He was a take-charge guy."

Glick's cell phone call from Flight 93 and others like it provide the most dramatic accounts so far of events aboard the four hijacked aircraft during the terrifying hours of Tuesday morning, and they offer clues about how the hijackings occurred.

Still, much is unknown about how bands of three to six terrorists on each airliner -- apparently armed with knives, razors and box cutters -- eluded security measures, took control of the four aircraft and committed the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil.


On Flight 93, at least, passengers said they were going to fight back.

Ten minutes into the 30-minute call with her husband, Lyzbeth Glick asked her father to call the FBI on a separate line, Hurwitt said. FBI agents monitored the last 20 minutes of the call and are studying a tape and transcript.

Glick, a sales manager for a technology firm who celebrated his 31st birthday on Sept. 3, told his wife he hoped she would have a good life and would take care of their 3-month-old baby girl -- before the phone call faded out amid what Hurwitt described as "random noises and screams."

It's unclear what Glick and the other passengers did next, but Flight 93 was the only one of four planes hijacked Tuesday that did not smash into a major target on the ground. Some are already calling the passengers who may have attempted to thwart the hijackers' plans heroes.

Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, said Wednesday at the crash site near Shanksville, Pa., he believes a struggle took place in the cockpit and the plane was headed for a significant target in Washington.

"There had to have been a struggle, and someone heroically kept the plane from heading to Washington," Murtha said.

Whoever was ultimately in control of the plane, Flight 93 made a number of odd maneuvers in midair before it finally plunged to Earth. "Halfway through its trip, around Weston, W.Va., it took some sharp turns, all within about two or three minutes," said Jeff Krawczyk, chief executive of Flight Explorer, a software firm that uses Federal Aviation Administration data to track flights.

"It was going west, then took a turn to the north, and then went west again," Krawczyk said. Then the plane headed toward Kentucky and took a sharp turn south toward Washington, and around that time the FAA center in Cleveland lost contact with the flight, apparently because someone aboard had turned off its transponder, he said.

Brad Clemenson, a spokesman for Murtha, said the doomed aircraft apparently made at least two other sharp turns during its last minutes -- swerves that are detectable in Flight Explorer's computerized reconstruction of the jet's path.

Dennis Fritz, director of the municipal airport in Johnstown, Pa., said the FAA called him several times as the plane approached his city, and even warned him to evacuate the tower for fear the jet would plow into it.

"They said the plane was very suspicious, and they didn't know what it was doing," Fritz said. Flight 93 crashed into a field 14 miles south of Johnstown.

The wife of another passenger has also spoken of farewell phone calls from her husband in which he, too, mentioned a plan among the hostages to thwart the terrorists.

Deena Burnett said she received four calls from her husband, California businessman Thomas E. Burnett Jr., 38. During the first call, he described the hijackers and told her they had stabbed and seriously injured one passenger, advising her to contact authorities. She informed him that the World Trade Center had been hit by another hijacked jet.

Thomas Burnett called back shortly thereafter to report that the wounded passenger had died, and said he and some others "were going to do something," to stop the terrorists, Deena Burnett told KCBS Radio San Francisco.

Kathy Hoglan of Los Gatos, California says her nephew, Mark Bingham, 31, did not specifically mention a plan to tackle the hijackers in his cell phone call to her at 9:44 a.m. Eastern time.

Bingham managed only to tell his aunt and mother, Alice Hoglan, that the plane had been hijacked and that he loved them before the phone "went dead," Kathy Hoglan said. But the six-foot-five-inch former University of California rugby player undoubtedly would have joined any such effort, she said.

"He was calm but scared, as if he knew something was going to happen," Hoglan said. "There's no doubt he wouldn't have let them get away with it."

Aboard other doomed flights, passengers and flight personnel were also frantically using cell phones to describe the terror unfolding in the sky.

Betty Ong, an American Airlines flight attendant aboard Flight 11 that slammed into the World Trade Center, called her airline supervisor to report that she had seen at least three hijackers with weapons and that more than one person aboard the plane had been stabbed, law enforcement sources said.

The hijackers also told people on the plane that they planned to crash the aircraft in New York City, the sources said.

It is unclear how that telephone call ended.

 http://newsmine.org/archive/9-11/flight93/flight-93-headed-towards-johnstown-airport.txt

Passengers on Flight 93 May Have Struggled with Hijackers

Alice Hoglan of San Francisco said her 31-year-old son, Mark Bingham, called her by air-phone 15 minutes before the Boeing 757 crashed and said the plane had been taken over by three men claiming to have a bomb.

``We have it from other people, another man on the aircraft who called his wife, who said he and some other passengers were hoping to get at these guys somehow,'' Hoglan, a United Airlines flight attendant who has been questioned by the FBI (news - web sites), told NBC's ''Today'' show.

The impact was so powerful that police investigators who cordoned off the site as a crime scene on Tuesday reported finding no pieces of debris larger than a phone book, and no bodies.