SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — A United Airlines jetliner crashed Tuesday morning in western
Pennsylvania, the airline said. Minutes earlier, a man who said he was a passenger on the
plane told an emergency dispatcher in a cell phone call: "We are being hijacked, we are
being hijacked!"

United said 45 people were aboard Flight 93 from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco. The
fate of the passengers was not immediately announced. The Boeing 757 crashed north of
Somerset County airport, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, following terrorism
attacks in New York City and in Washington, D.C.

The crash was one of four reported Tuesday by United and American Airlines. Two
crashed into the World Trade Center and one hit the Pentagon in Washington.

In Pennsylvania, an emergency dispatcher received a cell
phone call at 9:58 a.m. from a man who said he was a passenger
locked in a bathroom aboard United Flight 93, said dispatch
supervisor, Glenn Cramer in neighboring Westmoreland County.
The man repeatedly told officials the call was not a hoax.

"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!"
Cramer quoted the man from a transcript
of the call.

The man told dispatchers the plane "was going down.
He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke
coming from the plane and we lost contact with him," Cramer said.

USA TODAY
Passengers likely halted attack on D.C.

By John Ritter and Tom Kenworthy

Jeremy Glick

Unknown to each other, Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett, Todd

Beamer and Mark Bingham were just four businessmen

boarding an early morning, cross-country flight.

Thirty-something, successful, take-charge guys, fate

brought them together on San Francisco-bound Flight 93

last Tuesday. Three of them had been scheduled to leave
sooner.

Tom Burnett

Boarding with them on that clear, warm morning in Newark,

N.J., wasanother group of men well known to one another.

They were four men who had trained long and hard for this

day. Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami and

Ziad Jarrahi were bound together in a suicide plot, the FBI says,

bent on turning the United Airlines jetliner into a guided missile

and crashing it into a national landmark.

It now seems likely that those two groups of men — the gung-ho

American businessmen and the militant extremist hijackers —

became locked in a desperate struggle aboard Flight 93. The

Americans apparently tried to save the jet or make sure it didn't

reach its target; the hijackers were intent on completing their holy

mission.

America is hailing the 37 passengers and 7 crewmembers on

Flight 93 as heroes. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter has gone

as far as promoting them for Presidential Medals of Freedom.

Six days after the jet plowed into the soft earth of a former strip

mine in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, killing all aboard, details

are emerging about the terrifying last minutes of Flight 93.

The Boeing 757's two black boxes, recovered deep in the jet's

impact crater, may yield clues. In particular, investigators hope to

piece together the tale of Flight 93 from the cockpit voice recorder,

designed to preserve the last 30 minutes of in-flight talk. FBI and

National Transportation Safety Board experts were analyzing it over

the weekend.

For now, the case for hero status rests on the emotional accounts of

relatives who talked to passengers calling from cellphones and seat-

back phones after the hijackers took over the jet.

In interviews since the crash, relatives have asserted that loved ones

knew other jets already had slammed into the World Trade Center

towers. They hatched a plan to thwart their captors. They knew they

probably would die in the effort. The last words relatives heard included

those of one man who said, "We're going to do something,"

and another who said, "Let's roll."

LET'S ROLL

Todd Beamer

What caused Flight 93's abrupt final dive just after 10 a.m. isn't

known. The Americans could have overpowered the hijackers and

deliberately ditched the jet to save lives on the ground. A cockpit

struggle could have caused whoever was flying the jet to lose control.

It has even been suggested, though vigorously denied by the Pentagon,

that the jet was shot down.

Jets relatively easy to fly

From radar logs, this much is known: After a 40-minute delay, the jet

took off from Newark at 8:44 a.m. from Gate 17, Concourse A and flew

west, climbing to 35,000 feet. The cabin, with about 180 seats, was less

than

one-quarter full. Passengers probably had spread out for more comfort

on the 5-hour cruise to San Francisco.

Five flight attendants served breakfast. The flight was routine for just

over an hour, when the jet suddenly turned south as it reached Cleveland

and headed back the way it came.

By then, the hijackers, wielding knives and threatening to

detonate a bomb, must have been in control. Beamer, one

of the four businessmen thought to have led a

counterattack, picked up a seat-back phone, operated by

GTE. In the call that reached a GTE supervisor, Beamer

said hijackers had herded 26 passengers into first class.

Beamer, nine other passengers and the five flight attendants

were ordered to sit in back. This group likely included the

four businessmen. Beamer said he didn't know what happened

to the two pilots and the remaining passenger.

Investigators believe hijackers on all four doomed jets last Tuesday

had enough training, some of it acquired at flight schools in the USA,

to switch courses and take aim at their targets.

Manufacturers have gone to great lengths to make modern jets like

the Boeing 757 and 767 easy to fly. Cockpit controls behave similarly

to controls on small private planes. Hijacker pilots might not have been

capable of a flawless landing, but flying the jets would not have been a

problem. It's also likely that they knew how to reset flight computers to

change course.

At the least, on that bright, clear day with hundreds of miles of visibility,

the hijackers could have turned the jet around, checked the compass and

dead-reckoned their way to the nation's capital.

Distress calls go out

Not long after the jet's U-turn, calls started going out to loved ones on the

ground. Lauren Grandcolas, 38, of San Rafael, Calif., returning from her

grandmother's funeral in New Jersey, twice left messages for her husband,

Jack. In her second call, she said there was trouble but did not elaborate.

At some point, an unidentified passenger made a 911 call from a cellphone in

a bathroom. "This is not a hoax," the caller insisted.

Mark Bingham

Calls from Glick, Burnett, Beamer and Bingham offer the

most compelling evidence of an onboard rebellion. FBI

investigators say they've found nothing to contradict

such a scenario. And others could have been involved.

There was Andrew Garcia, 62, of Portola Valley, Calif.,

returning from a meeting. His family got a call, they think

from him, but only one word, "Dorothy," his wife's name,

was heard before the line went dead. The Garcias think he

would have joined any insurrection.

There was also Richard Guadagno, 38, a refuge manager

for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from Eureka, Calif.,

who had federal law-enforcement training. His colleagues

believe he would have been involved.

Glick called a little more than an hour into the flight. The

Internet company executive, 31, had been scheduled to
b> leave home in West Milford, N.J., the day before. At 7:30,

before boarding, he called his wife, Lyz, who was staying

with her parents in New York's Catskill Mountains. His

father-in-law said she was still asleep.

His second call was far more urgent: "There's bad men on

the plane, let me talk to Lyz," Glick told his father-in-law,

Richard Makely.

For 20 minutes, as the jet streaked across western Pennsylvania, Lyz and

Jeremy, former high school sweethearts with a 12-week-old daughter, talked

for the last time.

She stayed calm. He wanted to know if what he'd heard from another

passenger who was calling home, that the Trade Center towers had been hit,

was true. She reluctantly told him it was.

"He knew something very bad was going to happen," Lyz told NBC's

Dateline. "What he needed to know was what was going to happen. Were

they going to blow the plane up, or was it going to crash into something,

because that made all the difference."

Glick, a 6-foot-1, 220-pound judo champion, said he and

others were formulating a plan, hashing over whether

passengers should rush the hijackers. He asked Lyz what

he should do. "I finally just decided: 'Honey, you need to go

for it.' "

The hijackers had already stabbed one person to death.

Jeremy told Lyz to stay on the line. The jet was no more

than 30 minutes from Washington.

Recited 23rd Psalm

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Beamer, 32, an Oracle executive

from Hightstown, N.J., learned from the GTE supervisor, Lisa Jefferson,

about the other hijackings. He told her that two hijackers had locked

themselves into the cockpit.

Beamer told Jefferson he and others were going to "jump on" the hijacker

with the bomb, who was guarding the passengers in the rear. He mentioned

Glick by name.

Jefferson heard shouts and commotion, and then Beamer asked her to pray

with him. They recited the 23rd Psalm. He made Jefferson promise to call his

wife, Lisa, due with their third child in January, then dropped the phone.

Jefferson heard Beamer say, "Let's roll." Silence followed.

Burnett was on the phone to his wife, Deena, four times.

The first time he assured her he was OK but asked her to

call authorities. She dialed 911, and a dispatcher put her

through to the FBI.

An executive at a Pleasanton, Calif., medical products

company, Burnett, 38, was by all accounts a man capable

of taking matters into his own hands. "He is absolutely the

kind of person you not only would think might be involved

but you would expect to be involved," says his boss, Keith Grossman. "And

be shocked if he wasn't."

When Burnett called back, his wife told him about the World Trade Center

attacks. On his third call, they discussed whether a bomb was aboard.

Burnett thought the hijackers were bluffing.

In his last call, the 6-foot-2 former high school quarterback, said, "We're

getting ready to do something."

"Who?" Deena asked.

"A group of us," he said. "We're going to do something."

Bingham's role is less clear. He sat in first class with Burnett, but in a call to

his mother, Alice Hoglan in Saratoga, Calif., made no mention of plans to take

on the hijackers.

But Hoglan is sure her son was in the middle of it. Bingham, 31, owner of a

San Francisco public relations company, was a 6-foot-5 rugby player who

had run with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, just this summer, and he had once

wrestled a gun away from a mugger.

"He doesn't seek out trouble, but he won't run away from it either," Hoglan

says. "If he sees something wrong, he sets it right."

The scenario of passengers fighting with the hijackers and disrupting the flight

is consistent with what eyewitnesses on the ground saw as the jet neared the

ground. They saw it wobble hard left, then wobble hard right.

When Glick asked his wife to stay on the line, she handed the receiver to her

father. Makely says there was silence, then screams in the background,

followed by more silence, then more screams. Then nothing. It was 10:10

a.m.

F-16s waited over Washington

For days after the crash, rumors swirled among air traffic controllers that

Flight 93 had been shot down, though sources never offered any specific

information indicating the jet had been attacked. Reports from witnesses said

an F-16 fighter had been in the area. And when investigators recovered crash

debris 8 miles away, it seemed to lend credence to the theory that the jet had

been hit.

But the lightweight debris — papers and insulation — could have been

carried that far by winds, experts say. The Pentagon unequivocally denies that

military aircraft downed the United jet.

However, F-16s flying over Washington were ready to intercept it, according

to Vice President Cheney. "It doesn't do any good to put up a combat air

patrol if you don't give them instructions to act," Cheney said on NBC's Meet

the Press. "The president made the decision on my recommendation as well.

... If the plane would not divert, if they wouldn't pay any attention to

instructions to move away from the city, as a last resort our pilots were

authorized to take them out."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz credits the men on the jet. "I think

it was the heroism of the passengers on board that brought it down," he said.

The families of Flight 93's victims, as well as the nation as a whole, have no

doubt they are heroes. Strangers thrown into a no-win situation, they rose to

the task, made the supreme sacrifice and saved who knows how many other

lives in the process.

"I think it shows that one person can make a difference, that one person in this

country has the opportunity to change this world," says Lyz Glick.

Contributing: Alan Levin