What Happened to Flight 93?

ABCNEWS ^ | Thursday, September 13, 2001 | By Peter Dizikes

[JohnHuang2]

N E W Y O R K, Sept. 12 — Investigators are trying to reconstruct what happened to United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in western Pennsylvania — the only one of the four planes hijacked on Tuesday that was not steered into a famous, densely inhabited building.

Phone calls from passengers, made in the frantic minutes after the plane was hijacked, yield scant but potentially revealing clues about a possible on-board struggle that may have led to the crash — but prevented hijackers from taking the controls.

And since Flight 93, unlike the other three planes that were hijacked, did not cause an inferno-like fire by crashing into a building, it is possible that some information from the on-board flight recorders could be recovered — which seems less likely in the other cases.

Law enforcement officials and aviation authorities do not know yet why the plane, a Boeing 757-200 bound from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, crashed in Pennsylvania's rural Somerset County, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

All seven crew members and 38 passengers on board were killed.

U-Turn and Request for New Flight Plan

Federal Aviation Administration data shows Flight 93, which left Newark at 8:01 a.m. ET, followed its normal flight plan until it neared Cleveland, where the plane took a hard turn south.

That marks the point at which the plane must have been hijacked, investigators say. It then took a turn to the east.

ABCNEWS has learned that shortly before the plane changed directions, someone in the cockpit radioed in and asked the FAA for a new flight plan, with a final destination of Washington.

Passengers Make Desperate Phone Calls

At this stage, passengers realized what had happened, since several of them called from phones on board to report the hijack.

"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" one man on board said during a brief cell phone call from a plane restroom to a 911 dispatcher.

The emergency dispatcher, Glenn Cramer, told The Associated Press the man on board reported 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."

Mark Bingham, 31, of California, called his mother, Alice Hoglan, apparently from the air phone on his seat — telling her he loved her, and that three men had taken over the plane and said they had a bomb on it.

"Mark said, 'Mom, this is Mark Bingham.' He gave me his last name, he was so rattled," Hoglan told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America from her home in Sacramento, Calif.

The phone went dead before the conversation could continue much longer.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, another passenger, Thomas Burnett, called his wife, Deena, and said, "I know we're all going to die — there's three of us who are going to do something about it." Burnett said the hijackers had already stabbed one passenger.

Burnett then told his wife, "I love you, honey," and the call ended. The story was related by the family's priest, the Rev. Frank Colacicco. The FBI has interviewed Deena Burnett about the phone call.

Officials have not yet confirmed this account of the call.

--> The plane crashed at approximately 10:20 a.m. ET, a few miles from the town of Shanksville.

Did the Pilot Resist?

These stories have led some to think the plane crashed into the ground in rural Pennsylvania — as opposed to a building of symbolic national significance or a highly populated area — because passengers engaged the hijackers in a struggle, or because the pilot, Jason Dahl, refused to give up control of the plane.

Mick McGeady, a friend of Dahl, suggests the pilot may have crashed the plane on purpose, or at least prevented the hijackers from controlling it.

"Maybe he didn't actually send it down, maybe he cut off the fuel unbeknownst to the hijackers," McGready told station KCNC in Denver, where Dahl lived. "It looked like it went straight down and didn't hit whatever target they were going for."

Investigators on the site have told reporters that the plane almost totally disintegrated on impact, leaving a crater several feel deep in a field surrounded by woods.

Pentagon Shoots Down Shoot-Down Theory

The descriptions passed along by the passengers aboard Flight 93 during their desperate calls, if accurate, would indicate the plane's hijackers shared a modus operandi with the hijackers on the other planes.

Senior law enforcement sources have told ABCNEWS they believe there was a level of coordination involved in all four hijackings. The sources believe three to six men of Middle Eastern descent on each plane, armed with small knives or box cutters, attacked crew or passengers in order to draw the pilots out of the planes' cockpits. They then seized control and crashed the aircraft.

In addition to United Flight 93, United Flight 175, headed from Boston to Los Angeles, was crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

American Airlines Flight 11, from Boston to Los Angeles, hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, while American Airlines Flight 77, from Washington Dulles International Airport inVirginia to Los Angeles, hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Va.

Pentagon officials have firmly denied to ABCNEWS the widespread rumors that the U.S. military shot down Flight 93 to prevent it from being crashed into Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, or another government facility.

[thinking]

I can never understand why the flight crew don't just simply increase the cabin altitude up to 20000 feet that would knock anyone out in seconds....???