Did Flight 93 Crash in Shanksville?

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Last updated:  07/28/2008

► Crews Begin Investigation Into Somerset County 757 Crash
"We (were) literally surrounded by debris, and there's a very strong odor of scorched earth," Parsons reported. "It doesn't smell like jet fuel, it smells like ... How do you describe it? Burned earth. It smells like burned earth."
A witness told WTAE-TV's Paul Van Osdol that she saw the plane overhead. It made a high-pitched, screeching sound. The plane then made a sharp, 90-degree downward turn and crashed.
Officials said that they believed that the plane took a dip and nose-dived into an abandoned strip mine.
WTAE-TV's Michelle Wright toured the crash scene and said that a crater of about 30 to 40 feet long, 15 to 20 feet wide and 18 feet deep was created by the crash.
Officials told WTAE's Marcie Cipriani that it looked like the plane was headed south when it hit the ground. Most of the plane's debris kept traveling after the plane hit and landed in the woods past the mine. Most of the debris is small." - Pittsburgh Channel (09/11/01)

► American Heroes Changed the Course of United Flight 93

"For Lee Purbaugh, 31, of Listie, the thought of seeing a plane crash right before his eyes still seemed unbelievable to him when interviewed a half-hour later.
"I never in my life thought I would see a plane crash right before my very eyes," said Purbaugh, who was at the wreckage within minutes after the crash.
Purbaugh’s second day on the job at Rollock Inc., a scrap metal company which owns the Diamond T mine, a former PBS Coals dig directly about the crash site, came with a shocking surprise. The crash happened within 200 yards of Purbaugh’s view.
"I happened to hear this noise and looked up," said Purbaugh, who indicated the plane was about 40 to 50 feet above him. "I didn’t know if I should duck or what because this plane was so low but then in a split second it hit."
Purbaugh thought at first it was just a cargo plane carrying some mail because when he ran up to the actual scene, he didn’t notice any carnage, just some mail around. He also noticed a bookbag. He said the pine trees next to the site were on fire from the explosion and the fire was also spreading through the woods.
"I knew about the World Trade Center at the time but I never expected something like this," said Purbaugh. "There was scattered debris everywhere, some in large chunks, but nothing you could identify. I’m just shocked it happened here."
Mark Stahl of Somerset, who went to the scene immediately afterwards, says, "There’s a crater gorged in the earth, the plane is pretty much disintegrated. There’s nothing left but scorched trees."
Michael R. Merringer was out on a mountain bike ride with his wife, Amy, about two miles away from the crash site.
"I heard the engine gun two different times and then I heard a loud bang and the windows of the houses all around rattled," Merringer said. "I looked up and I saw the smoke coming up."
The couple rushed home and drove near the scene.
"Everything was on fire and there was trees knocked down and there was a big hole in the ground," he said.
Purbaugh, Stahl and the Merringers were at the site before state police crews and the Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) arrived to secure the entire site as a crime scene immediately or be arrested. Police helicopters circled overhead every few minutes.
Morrison said everything recovered from the crash site must be thoroughly documented. He says that is why the FBI and state police, in addition to firefighters and other crews, are working together in a "methodical way." - Daily American (09/12/01) [transcribed]

► Cell calls from planes reveal horror

"At 10 a.m., the plane suddenly went down, crashing into rural western Pennsylvania, where it created a crater 30 feet across and 20 feet deep, and scattered debris for half a mile." - MSNBC (09/12/01)

► The crash in Somerset: 'It dropped out of the clouds'

"The United Airlines Boeing 757 came in low, its engines screaming.
A handful of people working near or driving through a rural area of Somerset County watched as the plane flipped over and disappeared with a smoky boom at 10:06 a.m. yesterday, between the tiny communities of Lambertsville and Shanksville.
A few miles north of Lambertsville, yard man Terry Butler, 40, was toiling away at Stoystown Auto Wreckers.
He thought it was odd that a plane was in the area. He'd heard that all air traffic nationwide had been halted after the World Trade Center disaster about an hour earlier.
"It dropped out of the clouds," too low for a commercial flight, Butler said. The plane rose slightly, trying to gain altitude, then "it just went flip to the right and then straight down."
He radioed back to his office, telling coworkers Homer Barron, 49, and Jeff Phillips, 30, what he had seen.
"I told them a plane crashed. At first they didn't believe it, because you know, we do joke around."
Then Barron saw smoke and called 911.
The plane came down on farmland reclaimed from a coal-mining operation. Barron and Phillips drove to the crash scene and found a smoky hole in the ground. A few firefighters had already begun pouring water onto the debris.
"It didn't look like a plane crash because there was nothing that looked like a plane," Barron said.
"There was one part of a seat burning up there," Phillips said. "That was something you could recognize."
"I never seen anything like it," Barron said. "Just like a big pile of charcoal."
The sound of the jet's engines also stuck in the minds of other eyewitnesses.
Lee Purbaugh, 32, working just his second day at Rollock Inc., a scrap yard next to the reclaimed strip-mine land, looked up from operating a burning torch to see the jetliner just 40 feet above him.
"I heard it for 10 or 15 seconds and it sounded like it was going full bore," said Tim Lensbouer, 35, Purbaugh's coworker.
The ground shook and the air thundered as the jetliner slammed into the ground about 300 yards away, Purbaugh said.
A mushroom of flame rose 200 feet and disappeared. Then there was a curtain of black smoke and finally a trail of fire as pieces of the fuselage shot hundreds of yards into the woods.
"My instinct was to run toward it, to try to help" said Nina Lensbouer, Tim's Lensbouer's wife and a former volunteer firefighter. "But I got there and there was nothing, nothing there but charcoal. Instantly, it was charcoal."
Three-quarters of a mile away, at Shanksville-Stonycreek High School, ninth-grader Rose Goodwin, 14, and her classmates had been watching coverage of the World Trade Center catastrophe on a classroom television.
"When the plane hit, it sounded like something just fell on the roof. Everybody sort of panicked," she said. "I went to the window and saw all this smoke coming up and I just pointed and screamed."
Charles Sturtz, 53, who lives just over the hillside from the crash site, said a fireball 200 feet high shot up over the hill. He got to the crash scene even before the firefighters.
"The biggest pieces you could find were probably four feet [long]. Most of the pieces you could put into a shopping bag, and there were clothes hanging from the trees."
Ten miles away, at a warehouse near Berlin, employee Don Miller and co-workers felt their building shake.
Later in the afternoon, state police allowed reporters to enter the crash area. It was incongruously serene. Under a bright sun, the site where all 45 aboard the plane were killed was most remarkable for how unremarkable it appeared.
The apparent point of impact was a dark gash, not more than 30 feet wide, at the base of a gentle slope just before a line of trees.
There were few recognizable remnants of the plane or the passengers and crew. The trees beyond were still faintly smoldering but largely intact.
"If you would go down there, it would look like a trash heap," said state police Capt. Frank Monaco. "There's nothing but tiny pieces of debris. It's just littered with small pieces."

Gov. Tom Ridge arrived later in the afternoon." - post-gazette.com (09/12/01)

► Day of Terror: Outside tiny Shanksville, a fourth deadly stroke

"United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757-200 en route from New Jersey to San Francisco, fell from the sky near Shanksville at 10:06 a.m., about two hours after it took off, leaving a trail of debris five miles long.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) issued a statement denying that United Flight 93 had been shot down by U.S. military aircraft.

Some witnesses reported that the plane was flying upside down for a time before the crash; others said they heard up to three loud booms before the jetliner went down.

Some witnesses reported that the plane was flying upside down for a time before the crash; others said they heard up to three loud booms before the jetliner went down.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, said last night he could only guess that the plane's likely target was "a second shot at the Pentagon or the Capitol or the White House itself."
"The destination sure wasn't an open field," he said. "It's fortunate it didn't come down sooner, on Johnstown."

Flight 93 may have gotten as far west as Ohio before turning around. The Cleveland mayor's office told The Associated Press that an airplane in distress had passed through Cleveland-area airspace before being handed off to Toledo, although it was not clear that the plane was Flight 93.

As the plane neared Pittsburgh, Mayor Tom Murphy stayed in contact with the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration.
"We were in communication with the FBI and the FAA about the jet as to where it was," Murphy said. "They had the jet coming out of Cleveland and losing it when it came into Pittsburgh airspace, and there was no communication with it, and we were concerned."

At the John P. Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport near Johnstown, a call from air traffic controllers in Cleveland set off 10 minutes of high tension before the plane crashed 14 miles southeast of the airport.

Dennis Fritz, the air traffic manager, got a call from controllers in Cleveland warning the Johnstown airport -- which has no radar of its own -- that a large aircraft was 20 miles south and had suddenly turned on a heading for Johnstown.
"It was an aircraft doing some unusual maneuvers at a low level, which is unusual for an aircraft that size," Fritz said last night. "It happened so quickly."

He said workers in his own tower scanned south, toward the horizon, with binoculars, but couldn't see any aircraft, leading Fritz to believe that the plane was flying somewhere in the 2,800 foot high ridges in that part of the Allegheny front.
Then, somewhere within the air zone, about 15 miles south of Johnstown, the plane turned again toward the south.
Shortly before it went down, another call was made to the Westmoreland County 911 center from a Mount Pleasant Township resident who said he could see a large plane flying low and banking from side to side.

The impact "sounded like dynamite," said Lucy Menear, 83, who lives less than a half-mile from the crash site. "It seems as though everything was falling apart."
Eric Peterson, 28, was working in his shop in the Somerset County village of Lambertsville yesterday morning when he heard a plane, looked up and saw one fly over unusually low.
The plane continued on beyond a nearby hill, then dropped out of sight behind a tree line. As it did so, Peterson said it seemed to be turning end-over-end.
Then Peterson said he saw a fireball, heard an explosion and saw a mushroom cloud of smoke rise into the sky.
Peterson rushed to the scene on an all-terrain vehicle and when he arrived he saw bits and pieces of an airliner spread over a large area of an abandoned strip-mine in Stonycreek Township.

"There was a crater in the ground that was really burning," Peterson said. Strewn about were pieces of clothing hanging from trees and parts of the Boeing 757, but nothing bigger than a couple of feet long, he said. Many of the items were burning.
Peterson said he saw no bodies, but there also was no sign of life.

Throughout the day, as a plume of smoke hung in the sky, a steady stream of firefighters, police cars, emergency management crews, national guard members and local volunteers swarmed over the crash site.

Jeff Killeen, an FBI spokesman from Pittsburgh, said the main thrust of the agency's investigation will begin today when authorities divide the crash scene into grids and comb the area for evidence.

Yesterday, the priority of the FBI and state troopers was to protect the scene.

Gov. Tom Ridge arrived about 6:15 p.m., flying over the crash scene in a National Guard helicopter before being briefed on the ground by state police.

Joseph McKelvey, executive director of the Johnstown-area airport, said he didn't know whether it would be an operations headquarters or serve as a morgue.
But as he spoke, one of the few planes in the skies over America, a United Airlines 727 arrived carrying what McKelvey said was equipment for the recovery, and a half dozen rental trucks pulled into the airport to carry the equipment to the crash scene.
"This is the one airport [in the region] that can handle about any aircraft in the world," McKelvey said. Normally, the Johnstown airport handles five commercial passenger flights a day."" - post-gazette.com (09/12/01)

► Alleged Partial Flight 93 Cockpit Transcript Obtained

"A partial transcript has been obtained by CNN of talk heard by air traffic controllers via an open microphone in the cockpit of United Flight 93, which crashed in Somerset County, Pa.

The first phrase was "There is a bomb on board."
Then there's a shout: "Get out of here!" followed by the sounds of scuffling. And then again, someone says, "Get out of here."
Then, a voice in broken English, acting as the pilot, says, "There is a bomb on board. This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There's a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport."

The plane departed from Newark and was headed to San Francisco, but diverted from its flight pattern and crashed nose-first in a large field about 60 miles outside Pittsburgh. All 38 passengers and seven crew members were presumed dead.

Anywhere from 130 to 150 troopers would guard the area at one time, according to Lt. Col. Robert Hickes.
Finding any substantial evidence from the plane will be difficult. Any remaining debris is very small. WTAE-TV's Paul Van Osdol also reports that some debris has been spotted up to two miles away from the crash scene. Some has been washing up on shore at nearby Indian Lake.
Several residents gathered debris, placed it in a plastic bag and carried it to police. Officials do not want residents to touch any possible debris. They should contact police, instead.
At least four witnesses who were at the crash scene within five minutes of the crash told WTAE's Paul Van Osdol that they saw another plane in the area.
Somerset County resident Jim Brandt said 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. The FBI said that it does not think that it was a military plane, but it would not rule out the possibility of it being a civilian plane.
Cellular telephone calls placed from the doomed plane led to suggestions Wednesday that a group effort to crash the craft and stop the attackers from reaching whatever may have been their intended target may have taken place.
The plane first flew near Cleveland but quickly turned around, reportedly flying erratically and losing altitude.
One passenger who called Westmoreland County 911 said he was inside a locked bathroom. Dispatcher Glenn Cramer said the unidentified 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.
FBI officials had a tape of that call in custody. They would not comment on its contents or the speculation of a struggle on board.
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." - thepittsburghchannel.com (9/12/01)

► Homes, neighbors rattled by crash

"Betty Rhoads thought her furnace had exploded. When she “mostly felt” the blast Tuesday morning, she had no idea a Boeing 757 had crashed less than a mile from her rural Somerset County home, killing all 45 people aboard.
The windows of her home were latched shut, but the explosion blasted them open. When the elderly couple looked outside, they saw smoke billowing from the abandoned strip mine behind their house where United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed, carving a crater in the earth.

There were no survivors.
Eric Peterson, 28, an off-duty corrections officer, was an eyewitness to the crash.
“It was burning when it hit the ground,” Peterson said. “When it went down, it was in one piece. It was flying low, real low.
“We couldn’t see past the tree line, but we knew it crashed. I didn’t think it was going to clear these places. It looked like it tumbled.”
Mark Stahl of Somerset, a 32-year-old petroleum salesman, was working on his office computer when he heard the crash. He followed plumes of billowing smoke to the scene. Carrying a digital camera, Stahl arrived at the site 15 minutes after the plane fell from the sky.
He began taking photographs of the still-smoking scene. Later, he showed them to people who crowded around his car in a cornfield filled with reporters, photographers and large television trucks spouting giant satellite dishes.
“I heard the boom, followed the smoke and came up on this,” Stahl said as he displayed an 8-by-10-inch photo of the crash site.
About 30 firemen were at the scene when he arrived, Stahl said. He didn’t realize a passenger jet had crashed until a firefighter told him.
Ron Delano, who lives about two miles from the crash site, also rushed to the scene after hearing about the crash.
Delano said the plane hit a wooded area near a strip mine where he frequently hunts. He was stunned by what he saw.
“If they hadn’t told us a plane had wrecked, you wouldn’t have known. It looked like it hit and disintegrated,” Delano said.
Georgetta Guynn and her husband, Alvin, of Vanderbilt, Fayette County, had been out with relatives when they heard about the attack on the World Trade Center.
“We looked up and there was this big jet going overhead and it was pretty low and we could not hear the engines. It was like they were off. And then about a minute or two later, we got some binoculars and we were looking through them and there was all this smoke in the air and we knew it crashed.
Rosemary Tipton, principal of Shanksville-Stonycreek Elementary School, was in her office when the building shook. From her window, she could see smoke rising from the ridge.
Jim Stop of Somerset was fishing at the Indian Lake marina, about three miles from the crash site, when he looked up and saw the plane overhead.
“I heard the engine whine and scream,” Stop said.
He then heard an explosion and saw a fireball.
Barry Lichty, the mayor of Indian Lake Borough, said the ground shook and the town’s electricity went out. He called the utility company to find out the cause.
Later, Lichty learned that a plane crash had disrupted service to the borough.
At least two witnesses in Shanksville said they saw a large plane circling the crash site following the explosion. About two or three minutes after the explosion, the airplane climbed into the sky almost vertically, the witnesses said.
“It sure wasn’t no puddle jumper,” said Bob Page, general sales manager at Shanksville Dodge.
Page said he could not see if there were any markings on the plane or what kind it was. State and federal officials could not confirm reports of a possible second plane in the area." - pittsburghlive.com (09/12/01)

► Frantic 911 call preceded crash outside Pittsburgh

"Moments before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a grassy southwestern Pennsylvania field, a passenger on the plane apparently called 911 to report a hijacking.
The FBI confirmed yesterday that it had confiscated and was analyzing the emergency phone call, which was recorded by the Westmoreland County 911 center, several miles west of where the plane exploded into the ground, killing all 45 people aboard.
''We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!'' the man said, according to a transcript. The call was received at 9:58 a.m., and the caller said he was locked in a lavatory on Flight 93.
Witness Joe Wilt, 63, said he heard a whistling like a missile, then a loud boom as he stood in the doorway of his Shanksville home across the road from the site. His view was blocked by a group of trees, but he said he saw a fireball rise 800 feet into the air, then give way to black smoke.
''It exploded and you could see flames and debris everywhere, right over that tree over there,'' Wilt said, pointing. He heard from a relative who worked at a small business less than one mile to the west that the plane had passed low overhead, heading southeast before crashing.
The Boeing 757 passenger plane hit the ground in a large open field, creating a crater nearly 20 feet wide and 15 feet deep before slamming into the forest line. It left a charred image burnt into the tall grass, but nothing recognizable as an airplane. Captain Frank Monaco, commanding officer of the Pennsylvania State Police, said nothing larger than a telephone book remained. There were no survivors.
Gay Wilt, 63, said the impact shattered a basement window and sent things flying around her living room. She and her husband had been watching television coverage of the crashes in New York and near Washington.
''I was doing my hair in the bathroom, and I ran up and started screaming,'' she said of her reaction upon catching sight of the plume of black smoke.
Another neighbor, Lu Ray Rhoads, 23, said, ''It was right behind our house.'' She had also been watching the news. ''Obviously, being here I didn't expect it had to do with anything else that was going on,'' in New York or Washington." - Boston Globe (09/12/01)

► Jetliner Was Diverted Toward Washington Before Crash in Pa.

"United Flight 93, originating in Newark, followed a seemingly normal course until it reached Cleveland, where it suddenly made a sharp turn south, followed by another turn toward the southeast, according to Federal Aviation Administration radar tracking reports. The reports were published on the Web by Flight Explorer at www.flightexplorer.com.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) issued a statement denying that United Flight 93 had been shot down by U.S. military aircraft.
Eyewitnesses near the crash scene said the plane, a Boeing 757-200 loaded with more than 11,000 gallons of fuel for the six-hour flight, flew low and then suddenly fell from the sky, producing a huge fireball and a 10-by-20-foot crater in a field near this rural Pennsylvania town, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
"When it decided to drop, it dropped all of a sudden -- like a stone," said Tom Fritz, 63. Fritz was sitting on his porch along Lambertsville Road, about a quarter-mile from the crash site, when he heard a sound that "wasn't quite right" and looked up in the sky.
"It was sort of whistling," he said. "It was going so fast that you couldn't even make out what color it was."
The ensuing firestorm lasted five or 10 minutes and reached several hundred yards into the sky, said Joe Wilt, 63, who also lives a quarter-mile from the crash site.
"The first thing I thought it was, was a missile," Wilt said. The impact shattered a window in his basement and knocked down household objects from a shelf.
Westmoreland County emergency dispatchers said they received a last-ditch 911 cell phone call from a passenger at 9:58 a.m., just minutes before the crash. Dispatch supervisor Glenn Cramer told the Associated Press that the call came from a passenger who had locked himself inside one of the plane's lavatories. "We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked," Cramer quoted the caller from a transcript of the call.
The caller described the plane as "going down," Cramer told AP. "He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane, and we lost contact with him."
FBI agents quickly took possession of the tape of that 911 call, which constitutes the only public evidence so far of what went on during the doomed plane's last moments. The FBI declined to provide any information about the tape's contents or the identity of the caller. At the crash site, FBI Special Agent Jeff Killeen said he was unaware if there had been any communication from the pilot.
Authorities late today recovered the plane's flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders, government sources said. These should permit authorities to reconstruct what went on in the cockpit during the flight.
The woods surrounding the crash site was strewn with body parts, said local resident Fred Waugh, who was among the first on the scene. Waugh "got scared and left," he said. "I couldn't help nobody. I couldn't hear nobody."
United Flight 93 would have arrived at San Francisco International Airport at 11:14 a.m. Pacific time, after six hours and fourteen minutes in the air. Today's flight -- with 38 passengers, five flight attendants and two pilots on board -- was relatively empty; the Boeing 757-200's full capacity is 182 passengers. At the time of the crash, passengers should have been just finishing their breakfast, one of two meals they were to receive on board." - Washington Post (09/12/01)

► Scene of utter destruction

"Two Somerset County men rushed to the scene of Tuesday’s plane crash hoping to help with the rescue effort. They found a scene of devastation.
“You couldn’t see nothing,” said Nick Tweardy, 20, of Stonycreek Township. “We couldn’t tell what we were looking at. There’s just a huge crater in the woods.”
Little remained of United Airlines Flight 93, which had departed from Newark, N.J., at 8:42 a.m. yesterday on its way to San Francisco with 45 people aboard. It crashed in what FBI agents are calling a “terrorist act,” likely linked to yesterday’s attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
FBI Special Agent Jeff Killeen said air traffic controllers had no communication with the pilot of the Boeing 757 before the crash.

And he said the investigation will be slow because the impact of the plane left “scant” evidence that will require “painstaking collection.”
“The tail was a short distance from the rest of the wreckage,” said would-be rescuer Brad Reiman, 19, who lives near Berlin in Somerset County. “It looked like the plane hit once and flopped down into the woods.”
The largest piece of wreckage he could identify looked like a section of the plane’s tail, he said.
The crash site is a former strip mine owned by PBS Coal Co. and is known locally as the Diamond T. Mine. The impact left a blackened crater at least 45 feet in diameter, said Mark Stahl of Somerset, who arrived at the scene carrying a digital camera just minutes after the plane crashed.
Paula Pluta of Stonycreek Township was watching a television rerun of “Little House on the Prairie” when the plane went down about 1,500 yards from her home along Lambertsville Road at Little Prairie Lane.
“I looked out the window and saw the plane nose-dive right into the ground,” she said, barefoot and shaken just 45 minutes after the crash.
The explosion buckled her garage doors and blasted open a latched window on her home, she said.
“It was just a streak of silver. Then a fireball shot up as high as the clouds. There was no way anybody could have survived. I called 911 right away.
“There was no way anything was left,” Pluta added. “There was just charred pieces of metal and a big hole. The plane didn’t slide into the crash. It went straight into the ground. Wings out. Nose down.”
Bits of metal were thrown against a tree line like shrapnel, said state police spokesman Trooper Thomas Spallone of Troop A in Greensburg.
“Once it hit, everything just disintegrated,” he said. “There are just shreds of metal. The longest piece I saw was 2 feet long.”
Hours after the crash, teams of crime scene analysts from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, plus state police, the Pennsylvania National Guard, and state agencies — Department of Emergency Management and the Department of Environmental Protection — cordoned off the area within a 4-mile radius of the crash and began the painstaking task of collecting evidence.
“We’re finding more debris in various locations,” Spallone said.
“Over 100 state troopers secured the area. Our job is not to let anybody in here until the federal accident reconstruction teams from the FBI and (Federal Aviation Administration) can get in here and examine the shreds of evidence left,” said Capt. Frank Monaco, commander of Troop A.
“All that is left is small pieces of the airplane.”
FBI Agent Bill Crowley in Pittsburgh said the bureau has classified the crash as a terrorist act and “not so much as a hijacking.”
Not long before the crash, the plane approached the Johnstown/Cambria County Airport, descending from 6,000 feet, airport director Joe McKelvey said. Airport controllers had no verbal contact with the pilots, McKelvey said.
McKelvey said officials at the Cleveland En Route Air Traffic Control Center in Oberlin, Ohio, ordered Johnstown controllers to abandon the tower and close the airport.
Coroners from Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver and Cambria counties arrived at the scene yesterday afternoon to help Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller. Joanne Bytheway, a forensic pathologist from the University of Pittsburgh, was brought in to help identify the remains.
As the investigation began, police and federal agents began utilizing abandoned buildings at the strip mine. Verizon installed phone lines, and GPU Energy powered lights.
A local motorcycle dealer provided all-terrain vehicles to transport officials.
Somerset County officials scrambled to coordinate a makeshift morgue and establish a command center and counseling sites for relatives who may come to the crash scene." - pittsburghlive.com (09/12/01)

► Fourth crash 75 miles from Morgantown
"The Pennsylvania State Police received the call shortly after 10 a.m., trooper Tom Spallone said, and Capt. Frank Monaco added that “there were people here in minutes.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge described the crash site as a large, gaping hole, and Killeen stated that the crash “appears to be a very high impact into the earth.”
Capt. Monaco stood at the scene as he described the black earth “where the plane initially struck and continued on into the south,” disappearing into the woods. Monaco stated that there was a lot of debris, although little was larger than the size of a phone book.
Given the minuscule size of most debris, Monaco said, as far as survivors or bodies are concerned, “none have been seen at this point.”
Downed power lines, blackened trees and yellow police tape also marked the scene, secured by state police.
The only structures on the site are small hunting cabins, none of which were damaged by the impact, according to Monaco.
“The FBI and state police consider this a criminal investigation site,” Gov. Ridge said after flying over the scene by helicopter.
“Our goal right now is to preserve everything as it is for tonight,” Killeen said, adding that further investigation would continue in the morning.
A second United Airlines plane flew over the crash site in midafternoon to photograph the scene, Spallone said. Hazmat crews called to the site were standard operating procedure, and there was no reason to believe hazardous materials were on board, according to Ridge.
Indian Lake residents Alex and Louise Majesky said their house shook from the impact.
“It just kind of rattled,” Alex Majesky said. “I thought a tree fell on the house. I figured, what else could it be?”
Jim Patrick, a Johnstown resident, believed the crash to be “nothing out of the ordinary and just a coincidence.” - Daily Athenaeum/West Virginia Univ. (09/12/01)

► 'Black box' from Pennsylvania crash found

"Searchers Thursday found one of the so-called black boxes from United Airlines Flight 93, the hijacked airliner that crashed Tuesday in western Pennsylvania.
The flight data recorder was found in the crater the plane created when it slammed into the ground Tuesday morning, according to FBI spokesman Bill Crowley.

They are still searching for the voice data recorder." - CNN (09/13/01)

► No evidence of 'military involvement' in Pittsburg crash

"Bill Crowley, FBI, has told reporters in Pittsburg, that debris from the hi-jacked plane which crashed there has been found six miles away.

He also stated that there was "absolutely no evidence of military involvement."
Revering to earlier speculations that the US military brought the plane down by force to prevent it reaching it's target." - TCM Breaking News (09/13/01)

► America Under Attack: FBI and State Police Cordon Off Debris Area Six to Eight Miles from Crater Where Plane Went Down
"DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, we want to take our viewers live to Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Our Brian Cabell is standing by. This of course is the site where United Airlines flight 93 crashed on its way from Newark to San Francisco, crashed on Tuesday, and I understand, in this investigation, there's some breaking news.  Brian, what can you tell us?
BRIAN CABELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Daryn, in the last hour or so, the FBI and the state police here have confirmed that have they cordoned off a second area about six to eight miles away from the crater here where plane went down. This is apparently another debris site, which raises a number of questions. Why would debris from the plane -- and they identified it specifically as being from this plane -- why would debris be located 6 miles away. Could it have blown that far away. It seems highly unlikely. Almost all the debris found at this site is within 100 yards, 200 yards, so it raises some question. We don't want to overspeculate of course. But there were some cell phone callers, one cell phone caller in particular, who said saw a bomb, or something that looked like a bomb with one of the hijackers. Also, the man who took over the plane apparently announced at one point, he had -- there was a bomb on board the plane.
Again, we don't want to speculate, we don't want to jump to conclusions. But what we do know is that there's a site about half mile behind me, where the plane went down, where most of the debris is, and then about six miles away up by a lake, there is another area that's been cordoned off, and state police and the FBI have said definitely there is debris from the plane located there. We have a crew on the way right now. We should have pictures of that a little bit later on.
KAGAN: Which was first question, so I'll move on to my next one, Brian.
WE don't want to speculate about this large debris field. But it seems to me from covering a number of plane crashes on the scene, that if nothing else, this is not typical for a plane crash to be spread across an area this large.
CABELL: It's certainly doesn't make sense, because most of the debris has been found in a very compact area, within 100 yards, 200 yards, maybe a little bit beyond that. Then all of a sudden they're telling us six miles away, they have another concentration of debris, very small pieces. Most peoples here no bigger than the size of briefcase. The debris six miles away may be smaller. We have talked to a number of individuals here. They say they have talked to people who saw this plane during the final moments. They haven't confirmed whether they saw -- whether they talked to anybody who saw this plane actually land, or crash rather, and as to whether it broke up on the way, we don't know that. The FBI being very tight-lipped about that.
But again, at It leads to that possibility. It certainly leads to a number of questions.
KAGAN: You mentioned they have yet to find the black box. It would seems to me when you compare the four plane crashes of Tuesday, this would be the site where they would be most likely to find a black box.
CABELL: That's what they told us initially, and I think they're somewhat disappointed they haven't found it. It's been 48 hours, but they are still hopeful they will find it. There is a pond nearby this particular site. They may have to send divers into the pond. They haven't done that yet, but conceivably, it could be in the pond, it could be anywhere, it could be at this other debris side. They've also found some other debris scattered around this area. They say in fact some individuals have been collecting it. Again, we're talking about very, very tiny parts. The biggest part they found at this site is an engine, an engine part, and most of the other pieces are probably no bigger than this particular notebook.
So again, very small pieces. They had hoped to find the black box by now. They're still voicing optimism they will find it." - CNN (09/13/01)

► Investigators locate 'black box' from Flight 93; widen search area in Somerset crash

"Investigators this afternoon discovered the "black box" containing flight data recordings from United Flight 93 at the crash site in rural Somerset County.

Pittsburgh FBI spokesman Bill Crowley said the flight data recorder was found about 4:50 p.m. in the main crater at the crash site, located near Shanksville. Crowley said he didn't know whether the recorder was operable, or whether officials would be able to gather information from it.
Finding the flight data recorder had been the focus of investigators as they widened their search area today following the discoveries of more debris, including what appeared to be human remains, miles from the point of impact at a reclaimed coal mine.
Residents and workers at businesses outside Shanksville, Somerset County, reported discovering clothing, books, papers and what appeared to be human remains. Some residents said they collected bags-full of items to be turned over to investigators. Others reported what appeared to be crash debris floating in Indian Lake, nearly six miles from the immediate crash scene.
Workers at Indian Lake Marina said that they saw a cloud of confetti-like debris descend on the lake and nearby farms minutes after hearing the explosion that signaled the crash at 10:06 a.m. Tuesday.
Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller said that, at the same time, the first human remains have been removed from the site in a prelude to the somber challenge of identifying the 45 victims of the crash.
Whether that search will yield usable information was one of the key questions hanging over this stage of the investigation. If it does, it could provide insight into what may have been a terrifying struggle between hijackers and passengers that kept the Boeing 757 from hitting an intended target in a populated area.
Cell phone calls from passengers have fueled the speculation about such a scenario, along with the fact that this was the only one of the four planes that crashed Tuesday that did not hit a populated, high-profile target.
He also said the National Transportation Safety Board has told investigators that the plane, which began its flight in Newark, N.J., was flying east when it crashed but could provide no other information about its path or intended target.
In a morning briefing, state Police Major Lyle Szupinka confirmed that debris from the plane had turned up in relatively far-flung sites, including the residential area of Indian Lake. Investigators appealed to any residents who had come across such debris, in the surrounding countryside or even in their yards, to contact them, emphasizing that even the smallest remnants could prove to be important clues.
In response to a question on recurring rumors that the plane might have been shot down, Crowley said that at this stage of the investigation, no possibility was being ruled out. He stressed, however, that no evidence had surfaced to support that theory.
Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, noted and discounted the same speculation here Tuesday, saying that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield had assured him that the government had not shot down the hijacked plane to prevent it from hitting a potential target." - Pittsburg Post Gazette (09/13/01)

► Passengers Thwarted Hijackers

"Evidence mounted Wednesday that the fate of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into the cornfields of rural Western Pennsylvania Tuesday, was determined by a group of passengers who apparently attacked the plane's hijackers.
U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said Wednesday he has "no doubts" passengers heroically struggled with terrorists to stop the plane from reaching a target in Washington.
"I personally believe there was a struggle on that plane and some people made a heroic effort to make sure that plane didn't hit a populated area," said Murtha, who served as an intelligence officer in the Vietnam War. "I think those heroic people said to themselves, 'We know we are going to die, so let's make sure they can't get to anyone else.'?"
Flight 93 was the only one of four hijacked planes Tuesday that did not hit a major target. Two struck the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and another hit the Pentagon. Flight 93 left Newark, N.J., at 8:01 a.m. headed for San Francisco. It crashed about 10 a.m., roughly an hour or so after the trade center was hit. All 45 on board were killed.
According to the news report, Glick told his wife the plane had been taken over by three Middle Eastern men wearing red headbands. The hijackers, wielding knives and brandishing a red box they claimed contained a bomb, ordered the passengers, pilots and flight attendants toward the rear of the plane, then took over the cockpit.
Bingham, a 31-year-old public relations executive, also said he plane had been taken over by "three guys who say they have a bomb," said Hoglan, who is a United Airlines flight attendant.
The accounts from these relatives, indicating possible turmoil in the cockpit, dovetail with the account of one witness from the ground, who saw the plan rollover shortly before the crash.
"It came in low over the trees and started wobbling," said Tim Thornsberg, a resident of Somerset County, who was working near an old strip mine when he saw the plane.
"Then it just rolled over and was flying upside down for a few seconds ... and then it kind of stalled and did a nose dive over the trees. It was just unreal to see something like that."
Thornsberg has given his account to FBI agents.
These accounts refute speculation that the plane might have been shot down to prevent another suicide attack on Washington -- a theory Rep. Murtha also denied.
Charles Sturtz, who lives about a half-mile from the crash site, said he saw the plane in the air for a few seconds, and saw no smoke, heard no explosions before the crash and saw no other planes in the sky.
The plane was heading southeast he said, and had its engines running.
"It was really roaring, you know. Like it was trying to go someplace, I guess, " the 53-year-old carpenter said.
Murtha said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told him directly the plane not been shot down, and Westmoreland County Public Safety spokesman Dan Stevens reacted strongly to such talk.
"No, that's false. That's false," Stevens said. "There was contact with the plane through the whole thing and there's radio transmissions that people could have been listening to that know what was going on. So that information was not true."
The crash impact left a crater estimated to be 10-feet deep and 20-feet wide. The site was still smoldering Wednesday afternoon and investigators said "hot spots" caused by jet fuel had flared up in the early morning hours. Small patches of smoke could be seen billowing into the trees next to the crater." - Pittsburgh 11 News (09/13/01)

► Human remains recovered in Somerset

"Evidence collection teams late Wednesday recovered the first recognizable human remains from the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Somerset County.
High-ranking law enforcement officials confirmed that an arm and other body parts from victims have been found by investigators who are combing an abandoned strip mine in Stonycreek Township near Lambertsville.
Meanwhile, investigators also are combing a second crime scene in nearby Indian Lake, where residents reported hearing the doomed jetliner flying over at a low altitude before "falling apart on their homes."
"People were calling in and reporting pieces of plane falling," a state trooper said.
Jim Stop reported he had seen the hijacked Boeing 757 fly over him as he was fishing. He said he could see parts falling from the plane.
As yet, there have been no official reports of any human remains recovered from the lake area.
The remains from the main crash site have been taken to a makeshift morgue at the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory near the Somerset County Airport. State police escorted a tractor-trailer truck into the back of the armory late yesterday evening, according to a resident who lives nearby.
The lights were turned off briefly as the truck was directed to the rear of the armory. A short time later, the lights were turned on as the police cars and the truck left, said the man, who declined to be identified.
Investigators made the discovery while walking shoulder-to-shoulder in a search that is expected to take as long as five weeks. The crash site has been divided into grids where evidence collection teams will mark and photograph every piece of debris and any human remains before anything is removed from the location.
By late yesterday evening, the area surrounding the crash scene was relatively quiet as federal investigators and state police, who had been working since daybreak, changed shifts with colleagues assigned to guard the area through the night.
State Police Lt. Col. Robert Hickes said there are 280 state troopers protecting the crash site, which FBI investigators consider a crime scene. Using horses and helicopters, state police have created a double ring of security around the area that spans several miles.
Searchers still have not found the voice data recorder for the doomed flight.
Investigators and the families of the dead wondered if the recorder had captured a heroic tale of passengers turning on their hijackers, refusing to go down without a fight.
Before the plane crashed Tuesday morning, killing all 45 on board, several passengers called loved ones, telling them that their plane had been hijacked and that their captors said they had a bomb. At least two of the callers said they would fight back.
If they did, it makes the hunt for the so-called ``black box'' all the more important, because it might tell why the aircraft -- apparently intended as a jet-powered missile like those that smashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon -- crashed into a previously insignificant field 80 miles southwest of Pittsburgh.
Some surmised that, upon learning the hijackers intended to slam the plane into a significant structure in a much more populated area, some of the passengers or crew gave their lives to ditch the plane.
The plane left Newark, N.J., bound for San Francisco about 8 a.m. But before it reached Cleveland, it abruptly turned back east, losing altitude and flying erratically across Pennsylvania, veering toward Maryland and Washington, D.C.
CNN reported obtaining a partial transcript of chatter from the plane recorded by air traffic controllers as the jetliner approached Cleveland. The network said tower workers heard someone in the cockpit shout, "Get out of here,'' through an open microphone.
A second transmission from the plane is heard amid sounds of scuffling with someone again yelling, "Get out of here.''
Next to be heard is a voice saying:
"There is a bomb on board. This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport.''
CNN said an unidentified source who heard the tape claimed that transmission was of a voice speaking in broken English. The microphone then went dead, CNN reported.
United spokeswoman Liz Meagher had no comment on the transcript.
"Somebody made a heroic effort to keep the plane from hitting a populated area,'' said Rep. John Murtha, a Johnstown Democrat. "I would conclude there was a struggle and a heroic individual decided 'I'm going to die anyway; I might as well bring the plane down here.'''
Murtha said finding the cockpit voice recorder might tell the tale of what happened on Flight 93. But after touring the site yesterday, he said he has his doubts it will be found, given that the plane was pulverized into a 10-foot-deep V-shaped gouge." - Pittsburg Tribune-Review (09/13/01)

► Data box found from plane downed in Pa.
"Federal investigators yesterday found the flight data recorder of the hijacked plane that crashed near Pittsburgh, a discovery that could yield important clues in understanding the plane's final moments.
The other so-called black box, the cockpit voice recorder, still hasn't been found. But the recovery of the data recorder, which contains information on the mechanical workings of the jet, shows that the investigation of the Pennsylvania crash has advanced far beyond the inquiries for the three other planes that were hijacked Tuesday.
Of the four crashes, this was the only one that occurred outside a populous area.
As the authorities piece together the story of United Airlines Flight 93, which reportedly tore into a southwestern Pennsylvania field at a 45-degree angle...
There have been rumors that the plane was shot down by the military, which the Pentagon has vehemently denied. But the FBI is investigating eyewitness reports that an F-16 fighter jet was flying near Flight 93, Newsday reported.
A congressional aide who attended a briefing in Washington yesterday by Federal Aviation Administration head Jane Garvey confirmed that the Defense Department was watching the flight, but did not say whether a fighter jet was involved.
"It dug a deep crater, so it had to be coming in at a steep angle. I think at that point, somebody was struggling with the hijackers, and nobody really had control of that plane,'' said Barnes McCormick, a pilot and an aeronautical engineering professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University." - boston.com (09/14/01)

► Black box recovered at Shanksville site

"Federal investigators hope the flight data recorder recovered from United Airlines Flight 93 will reveal what caused the Boeing 757 jetliner to crash into an abandoned Somerset County strip mine in a deadly sequence of terrorist attacks.
FBI Agent William Crowley announced Thursday afternoon that investigators using heavy equipment found the recorder in a crater at the crash site near Lambertsville in Stonycreek Township.

Searchers yesterday also found one of the hijacked jetliner’s engines. But by evening, the cockpit voice recorder had not been recovered.

Crowley confirmed that there were two other aircraft within 25 miles of the United flight that were heading east when it crashed, scattering debris over 8 miles.

Crowley said the recorders from Flight 93 did not send out any emissions. It was discovered by an “integrated search team” of state police and federal investigators using heavy equipment to unearth the device from the crater cut into the ground on impact.

A passenger, Mark Bingham, 31, of San Francisco, Calif., was able to call Westmoreland County 911 and tell a communications officer that the plane had been hijacked and the terrorists had a bomb.
There was a sound of an explosion before 911 lost contact with Bingham.

Forensic archaeologists and anthropologists were among experts who came to the site yesterday to aid investigators in searching the wide debris field to help retrieve potential evidence and human remains.
Crowley said the FBI and NTSB have not determined whether a bomb exploded inside the aircraft before it crashed. Residents of nearby Indian Lake reported seeing debris falling from the jetliner as it overflew the area shortly before crashing.

State police Maj. Lyle Szupinka said investigators also will be searching a pond behind the crash site looking for the other recorder and other debris. If necessary, divers may be brought in to assist search teams, or the pond may be drained, he said.
Szupinka said searchers found one of the large engines from the aircraft “at a considerable distance from the crash site.”
“It appears to be the whole engine,” he added.
Szupinka said most of the remaining debris, scattered over a perimeter that stretches for several miles, are in pieces no bigger than a “briefcase.”

“If you were to go down there, you wouldn’t know that was a plane crash,” he continued. “You would look around and say, ‘I wonder what happened here?’ The first impression looking around you wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, looks like a plane crash. The debris is very, very small.
“The best I can describe it is if you’ve ever been to a commercial landfill. When it’s covered and you have papers flying around. You have papers blowing around and bits and pieces of shredded metal. That’s probably about the best way to describe that scene itself.” - Pittsburgh Live (09/14/01)

► Flight Data Recorder Is Found at Pa. Site

Federal Investigator Says Military Was Not Involved in United Airlines Crash

"Investigators uncovered the flight data recorder today from the crater left here by United Airlines Flight 93, a discovery that could provide the first solid evidence into what happened on board before it crashed.
Investigators also found small pieces of wreckage today as far as eight miles from the southwestern Pennsylvania crash site -- much farther than previously discovered.
Crowley declined to comment on the possible significance of the widely dispersed wreckage and said investigators have not ruled out the possibility of an explosion. He did, however, comment on questions as to whether the military was involved in the crash.
"There was no military involvement in what happened here," he said. He also said there were two other planes within 25 miles of the United flight when it crashed but said neither was involved.
The first refrigerated truck of human remains recovered from the crash site arrived today at a makeshift morgue at the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory about 15 miles away.
Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic pathologist from Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., said the remains had suffered "extreme fragmentation" and most would have to be identified through DNA analysis. He said experts also would use dental records, X-rays, and fingerprints and footprints.
Only small pieces of the plane were found at the crash site, an old coal strip mine surrounded by farms and some homes. "If you were to go down there and you did not know this was a plane crash you would say, 'I wonder what happened here,' " said Maj. Lyle Szupinka of the Pennsylvania State Police. "The debris is very, very small."
One of the Boeing 757's engines, nearly intact, was recovered, but aside from that, the largest piece of debris was no larger than a briefcase, Szupinka said.
Witnesses have said they saw an intact plane with wobbling wings that dipped to the right before it nose-dived into the ground.
Linda Shepley, 47, of Stoystown, Pa., said she saw the plane fly over her back yard as she hung laundry on her clothesline. "I could see there was no landing gear down," she said.
Witnesses also reported seeing another plane pass above the crash site shortly after Flight 93 went down.
Robert Blair, 41, also of Stoystown, was driving his coal-hauling route when he saw the plane crash a few miles away. He noticed the second plane because he had heard on his truck radio earlier that the FAA had grounded all aircraft, and he said it was flying east -- the same direction as Flight 93. He said the FBI asked him whether it looked like a military plane, but Blair remembered only that it was "a big jet flying low."
Crowley said tiny pieces of debris were found in a residential area near New Baltimore, about eight miles away. He said it would not be unusual for light debris such as paper and thin nylon to blow that far because the wind was blowing in that direction when the plane crashed.
A layer of dirt and dust has settled on the crash site, further hampering the search for plane debris and remains, Szupinka said.
Reporters and photographers have been driven by bus to the crash site but are kept several hundred yards from the crater.
Pennsylvania State Police said they arrested two free-lance photographers from New York this afternoon after a trooper saw them trying to enter the cordoned-off crash site. The FBI's twice-daily briefings have become increasingly controlled. One agent said any details concerning the criminal investigation are "very tightly controlled by the attorney general and even higher." - Washington Post (09/14/01)

► Flight 93 crash shook his house like a tornado

"His windows all are shattered and blown out of their frames, his garage door has disappeared and his ceilings have crumbled and fallen onto floor tiles that have been blasted loose from their moorings.
He's not sure when he'll be able to return to what's left of the once-cozy stone cottage nestled in a thick stand of trees with a view of the sun-dappled cornfields below and the rolling hills beyond. But Barry Hoover said his sorrow at seeing his home nearly destroyed is dwarfed by his grief and sympathy for the 45 people who died Tuesday when United Airlines Flight 93 slammed into the hilltop that he calls home.
No people on the ground were killed in that crash. But the shock waves set off by the impact of that crash heavily damaged Hoover's home, which lies, literally, a stone's throw from the crater gouged into the earth by the doomed plane.
"Obviously, I was upset when I saw my house. Who wouldn't be?" said Hoover, 34, whose home off Lambertsville Road is believed to be the local structure most seriously damaged by the crash. "But you know, it's a house and there's nothing there that can't be replaced. The people who died can't be replaced."
Hoover, who was at work at a lumber yard 10 miles away in Somerset when the Boeing 757 crashed Tuesday morning, said he rushed home after friends telephoned him and told him they believed the plane came down dangerously close to his property.
Already jumpy and heartsick from news reports he'd heard about the morning's other plane crashes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Hoover said he didn't realize at first that the downed plane near his home was also an airliner and that its fall from the sky was linked to those other hijackings.
Wreckage was still burning and emergency workers were still speeding to the scene when Hoover neared his house. While it was still standing, every window and door had been blown off and obliterated, its ceilings and floor tiles had been blasted loose and much of the interior was wrecked.
"It looked like what you see after a tornado or hurricane goes through -- a total ruin," he said.
Hoover spent a few minutes unsuccessfully searching for his cat, Woody, but then walked back outside because he was afraid the house might collapse on him. Police then told him he'd have to leave because the house was considered to be part of the crash crime scene.
He hasn't been permitted to return or retrieve belongings since then, so he's been staying in a Somerset hotel and making do with newly purchased or borrowed clothes and toiletries. But he said he understands why the FBI and state police have barred him from his home and property and doesn't mind staying away until their work is finished there. - post-gazette.com (09/14/01)

► Setback over Pittsburgh black box

"The cockpit voice recorder recovered from the crash site of the hijacked airliner which came down in Pennsylvania has been sent to the manufacturer to try to extract information.
Federal Bureau of Investigation officials had hoped to gain valuable clues into how the hijackers took over United Airlines Flight 93, saying the recorder had been found in "fairly good condition."
However, initial attempts to extract information from the tapes have proved fruitless, and the unit has been sent to the manufacturer, a Justice Department official told reporters in Washington.

Investigators had hoped that the recorder from the Pennsylvania crash might yield the most clues, as it was the only one from the four downed airliners which was not subjected to a prolonged fire.
All 45 passengers and crew members on board Flight 93 that took off from Newark, New Jersey, bound for San Francisco were killed.
Investigators hoped that the voice recorder, and the data recorder, recovered a day earlier, could reveal whether passengers tried to gain control of the airliner before it crashed.

Black boxes - an aircraft's flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) - are two of the most important contributions to air safety since the beginning of the era of commercial flights.
The data collection devices - which are actually orange - are mounted in the tail of an aircraft.
Under internationally agreed regulations, commercial aircraft must carry the equipment to record the performance and the condition of the aircraft in flight.

The recorders are housed in immensely strong materials, such as titanium, and insulated to withstand a crash impact many times the force of gravity and temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius.
The recording material is itself insulated against accidental deletion.
Modern black boxes record up to 300 factors of flight including:
* speed and altitude
* aircraft pitch
* cockpit conversations
* radio communications." - BBC (09/15/01)

► FBI Explains Other Planes At Flight 93 Crash

"Hoping to dispel rumors that United Airlines Flight 93 might have been shot down by military aircraft, the FBI Saturday said that two other planes were in the area but had nothing to do with the hijacked flight crashing in western Pennsylvania.

The FBI said that a civilian business jet flying to Johnstown was within 20 miles of the low-flying airliner, but at an altitude of 37,000 feet.
That plane was asked to descend to 5,000 feet -- an unusual maneuver -- to help locate the crash site for responding emergency crews.
The FBI said that is probably why some witnesses say they saw another plane in the sky shortly after Flight 93 crashed at 10:10 a.m. Tuesday in a grassy field near Shanksville, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

The FBI said there was also a C-130 military cargo aircraft about 17 miles away that saw smoke or dust near the crash site, but that plane wasn't armed and had no role in the crash. That plane was flying at 24,000 feet.
Earlier in the week, witnesses described seeing more planes to WTAE-TV reporters. Click here for video of those accounts.
On Friday, WTAE-TV reported that the mystery pilot in the white plane may have been an area farmer.

James K. Will, a Berlin, Pa., farmer who pilots a white Cessna with red stripes (pictured at right) and who has an airstrip near his farm, told Team 4 reporter Paul Van Osdol that he circled the scene about 45 minutes after the crash.
Will said he had just returned from Altoona and, when he'd heard about the crash, flew to the site to take photos of the wreckage. Pennsylvania State Police said that his plane may have been the one that many saw.
Will's flight was intercepted by a state police helicopter and was escorted to the Johnstown-area airport. His plane was searched and he was released." - ThePittsburghChannel (09/15/01)

► 2 planes had no part in crash of Flight 93; Business jet, military cargo plane were in area of hijacked United Flight 93

"Two other airplanes were flying near the hijacked United Airlines jet when it crashed in Somerset County, but neither had anything to do with the airliner's fate, the FBI said yesterday.
In fact, one of the planes, a Fairchild Falcon 20 business jet, was directed to the crash site to help rescuers. The request for the jet to fly low and obtain the coordinates for the crash explains reports by people in the vicinity who said a white or silver jet flew by moments after the crash.
A C-130 military cargo plane was also within 25 miles of the passenger jet when it crashed, FBI spokesman Bill Crowley said yesterday, but was not diverted.
"There was a hole in the ground -- that was it," said Yates Caldwell, the pilot who was at the controls of the 10-passenger corporate jet for Greensboro, N.C.-based apparel maker VF Corp. "There was no way to know what it was .... I didn't know there had been a crash until I landed, until I was on the ground in Johnstown."
The voice recorder would have picked up the last 30 minutes of conversation in the cockpit, unless the hijackers turned it off or it was too severely damaged in the crash. It was found around 8:25 p.m. Thursday, 25 feet below the ground in the crater gouged out by the doomed jet. It appeared to be in good condition.
Debris from the crash has been found up to 8 miles from the crash site, but searchers are concentrating on the crater where most of the remains are located. Papers and other light objects were carried aloft by the explosion after impact of the plane and they were transported by a nine-knot wind.
Crowley said investigators have found no evidence of a bomb. According to news reports, a crew member keyed a cockpit microphone so that air traffic controllers could hear conversations. One voice, in broken English and Arabic accent said, "There is a bomb on board."
One part of the recovery effort involves about 100 volunteers from the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. The team includes specialists such as anthropologists, pathologists, radiologists, and dentists who have been trained in disaster recovery procedures.
The team, led by Paul Sledzik of the Armed Forces Institute of Technology, set up and began working on Friday.
As agents find items -- bones, jewelry, clothing -- they hand-deliver them to deputy coroners stationed at the perimeter of the crime scene. The deputies deliver the items to a temporary morgue.
Each unique item is numbered, photographed, X-rayed, and described in writing. Items are separated by categories and sent to stations of specialists.
Although the items collected are "extremely fragmentary," Dirkmaat said, he is 100 percent certain that individuals will be identified. So far, none have been identified.
As remains and personal affects are identified, that information will be turned over to Somerset Coroner Wallace Miller. He will work with families to determine what becomes of the remains.
Miller said it might take quite some time before remains are identified. DNA evidence, he said, will be one of the most useful tools. But the labs capable of analyzing that evidence will be overwhelmed by DNA evidence from the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Families will be taken to the viewing area over the next few days. They will not be allowed at the crater itself, because that is still considered a crime scene. State police, the FBI and United Airline officials plan to keep the families away from reporters, "to ensure their privacy once they get there," Capt. Frank Monaco said.
More than 200 people are working at the site, from the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration, Pennsylvania State Police, Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, and local volunteer fire departments.
Cooler weather has made the work a bit easier. Searchers are wearing Hazmat suits that are sealed." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (09/16/01)

► Somerset Crash Site

"FBI and other investigators at the scene have excavated the crash site down to a depth of about 45 feet looking for clues. Digging a trench that deep requires special care to avoid cave-ins and constant monitoring to ensure any fumes from soil contaminated with jet fuel and hydraulic fluid do not present a hazard to emergency workers." - dep.state.pa.us (09/16/01)

► Bound by fate, determination; The final hours of the passengers aboard S.F.-bound Flight 93

"Marcin took her seat on a jetliner that was practically empty. Just 37 passengers had tickets on a plane that could hold about 200.
Los Gatos native Todd Beamer, 32, had just come back last Monday night from a week in Italy with his wife, Lisa, to their home in Cranbury, N.J. But there was no time to rest -- Beamer had to catch Flight 93 to make a meeting of sales representatives at Oracle Corp. headquarters in Redwood Shores.
Deora Bodley, 20, was eager to start her junior year at Santa Clara University after visiting friends in Newark. She was supposed to take United Flight 91, but decided the night before to take one an hour earlier so she could get home sooner to her family and boyfriend, Ryan Lindow.
"They had changed the gate, and she didn't hear it because she had her headphones on, listening to music," Vera Lindow said. In the end, she decided to go to Newark because she didn't want to stand up her old friends.
Like Bodley, Thomas Burnett was leaving New Jersey early to be with his family. The 38-year-old San Ramon resident was supposed to have flown out that afternoon on Delta, but switched to Flight 93 to get home to his wife, Deena, and their three daughters.
Jeremy Glick, a 31-year-old New Jersey resident who worked for a San Francisco Internet company, had been booked on a flight the night before, but it was canceled.
Nicole Miller's flight last Monday had also been canceled. The 21-year-old college student and waitress at a Chili's in San Jose had gone back East at the urging of her boyfriend, who wanted her with him when he visited his family. Because she had agreed to go at the last minute, Miller and her boyfriend had to make return reservations on different flights.
Mark Bingham, 31, was also supposed to have flown to San Francisco last Monday. But he hadn't recovered sufficiently from the 30th birthday celebration of his roommate in Manhattan, so he decided to wait until Tuesday morning.
He overslept a 6 a.m. alarm and just made his flight when his friend Matt Hall of Denville, N.J., rushed through traffic to get him there.
Hall remembered the 6-foot-5 Bingham running to the terminal. The former rugby star at the University of California at Berkeley was lugging his old team canvas bag, emblazoned with his name and number. Flying on a companion pass from his aunt, a flight attendant, Bingham was the last to board.
Driving to work, Hall got a call from Bingham to say he had made the flight and was sitting in seat 4D in first class.
No one had an inkling about the attack on New York's World Trade Center. The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:45 a.m. EDT. Twenty minutes later, the South Tower was struck. At 9:39 a.m., a third plane smashed into the Pentagon -- and Flight 93 suddenly made a U-turn.
Air traffic control picked up a transmission from the San Francisco-bound flight as it neared Cleveland. A stuck microphone revealed something wrong in the cockpit. "Get out of here," controllers heard.
The microphone cut off but then came back on, with the sounds of an apparent scuffle. "Get out of here!" someone yelled.
Eventually, a man speaking in broken English announced: "There is a bomb on board. This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport."
The captain, Jason Dahl, found himself under siege.
Dahl, 43, who lived in Littleton, Colo., with wife Sandy and 15-year-old son Matthew, had tried the day before to find another pilot for Flight 93 so he could spend time with his family.
With no takers, Dahl called his mother in San Jose on Monday night to let her know he would be flying in and would have time to visit her Tuesday.
The four men who are suspected of having hijacked the plane had trained for years, authorities believe, learning to fly, practicing martial arts and procuring some of the information they needed over the Internet.
Passengers saw men with red headbands, holding a red box that they said contained a bomb. They were armed with ceramic knives and box cutters.
Minutes after the plane turned, passengers and a flight attendant called the outside world to tell authorities and family members of the unfolding terror.
When Tom Burnett phoned his wife, Deena, she was getting their twin daughters ready for school.
When Tom phoned Tuesday morning, he spoke quickly but quietly.
"I'm on the airplane. They've already knifed a guy. Call the authorities," Tom told his wife over his cell phone.
Deena called 911 and was patched through to the FBI. A few minutes later, Tom's second call came through.
"They are talking about flying the airplane into the ground," Tom said to his wife, who in turn told him what she knew about the two jets that had slammed into the World Trade Center towers.
Tom asked several questions. Suddenly, he had to go.
Tom called back to tell her the man who had been stabbed, possibly the pilot, was dead.
Deena, a former flight attendant, remembered her own training and urged Tom to keep a low profile. "Please sit down and don't call attention to yourself," she begged.
He refused. In his final call, he told her that he and two other passengers had decided to act rather than face certain death. "We're going to try to do something," he said.
Jeremy Glick called his wife, Lyzbeth, who was staying with her parents in upstate New York.
Glick asked whether there had been such an attack. His wife hesitated, then told him. In the ensuing 20-minute conversation, he calmed his wife as best he could, joking that he and his fellow passengers might assault the hijackers with butter knives from the in-flight breakfast.
Lyzbeth's mother, JoAnne Makely, got on the cell phone with 911, and with state troopers taking down information, Glick described the hijackers and mulled over the situation. The troopers asked whether the plane was over water, was it banking, could he see anything below.
Lyzbeth's father, Richard Makely, said the call ended when the 6-foot-4 Jeremy told his wife about the plan to "jump the hijackers."
About the same time, Todd Beamer was on an Airphone to a GTE supervisor. He, nine other passengers and five flight attendants had been herded to the back of the plane, said Beamer's friend Doug MacMillan, who heard a transcript of the call. The rest of the passengers were in first class. The pilot and co- pilot had been taken from the cockpit and were nowhere to be seen.
"It doesn't seem like they know how to fly the plane," Beamer said of the hijackers.
His group was being guarded by a man who claimed to have explosives strapped to his midsection. Beamer, a basketball and baseball player in college and a take-charge guy, said he thought he and the others could "jump the terrorist with the bomb."
In the background, the supervisor could hear screaming. But Beamer's voice never wavered.
Beamer, a devout Christian, and the GTE supervisor recited the Lord's Prayer. He made the supervisor promise she would call his wife, who is five months' pregnant, and his sons Andrew, 3, and David, 1. He wanted them to know he loved them dearly and that he didn't think he'd make it.
Beamer dropped the phone and was heard saying: "God help me. Jesus help me. Are you ready? Let's roll."
At the Beamer home, the phone rang twice, stopped, then moments later, rang once more.
"When I picked it up, it was dead air," Lisa Beamer said. "I feel fairly confident that it was Todd. It would be on his mind to call me, to protect me."
At her parents' house, Lyzbeth Glick couldn't stand it anymore and handed the phone to her father.
"I'm waiting, hoping Jeremy or somebody will come back and say it worked," Richard Makely recalled. The silence lasted two minutes, then there was screaming. More silence, followed by more screams.
Finally, there was a mechanical sound, followed by nothing. The family held the phone line open for two hours.
Then, at 9:58 a.m., a Westmoreland County emergency dispatcher fielded a call from a passenger barricaded inside a bathroom aboard Flight 93: "We're being hijacked."
Authorities have assumed Flight 93 was heading for a Washington landmark such as the White House or the Capitol. President Bush had given the military the order to shoot down any plane headed into the city.
Shortly after 10 a.m., workers on farms and scrap yards in Somerset County looked up to see an airliner flying low and erratic at an estimated 450 mph.
Bob Blair of Stoystown was driving a coal truck on state Route 30 when he saw the jet plummet "straight down." Barn windowpanes for half a mile around shattered as the jet dived into a reclaimed strip mine and exploded at 10:10 a. m.
"I just watched with my mouth open as this yellow mushroom cloud rose up just like an atomic bomb over the hill where I like to go hunting," said 72- year-old John Walsh.
Barefoot and in his bathrobe, he drove up the dirt road to rescue anyone he could find. There would be nothing he could do.
Debris, including photographs and other papers that survived the fireball, was strewn over a wide area. Residents have spent days collecting it.
Among the remnants may be the treasured family photos and records that Hilda Marcin packed for her trip. She had carefully swathed them with clothes in her luggage.

--------------------------

The toll of terror Estimates of casualties as of yesterday:
PENNSYLVANIA
Dead: 44" - sfgate.com (09/17/01)

► Flight 93 crash site touted as memorial to victims

"Until last week, it was a few remote acres that, like a lot of this part of Somerset County, had been farmed, strip-mined, back-filled and planted over with grass.
Then, nine days ago, in the final nightmarish episode of America's morning of horror, United Flight 93 crashed nose-first into that stretch of ground, killing all 44 people aboard.
The landowners, a pair of coal companies, said yesterday that they are inclined to donate the ground to become a permanent memorial to the passengers and crew of the Boeing 757.
"If we have a say about it, there's no problem with it," John Weir, land manager with PBS Coals Inc., said yesterday.
"I'd be willing to cooperate in whatever way I could," said Michael Svonavec, secretary-treasurer of the local coal company Svonavec Inc. "It's a site of national interest -- certainly, the way I see it, where we as Americans fought back against terrorism."
Precisely which parts of the site PBS Coals and Svonavec own has yet to be determined. It is hidden from nearby roads, and officials from the companies have not been allowed to examine the well-guarded site.
For now the land is a crime scene, marked by a 40-foot crater and tarp-covered piles of earth. The FBI is overseeing the search for human remains and airplane fragments, a painstaking hunt-and-dig process that could continue for more than a month." - Post-Gazette.com (09/20/01)

► Coroner identifies seven more victims of Flight 93 crash

"Seven victims of the Sept. 11 United Airlines Flight 93 crash in Somerset County were positively identified over the weekend, bringing the number of identified bodies to 11.
But Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller said that additional identifications could take months. There were 44 passengers and crew members on the flight.
The coroner's office was able to identify victims with help from FBI fingerprint experts, but Miller said they did not release identifications until investigators were all "comfortable" with the identity of each victim.
Four bodies had been identified as of Friday.
Miller would not name the victims, or say whether they were crew or passengers, saying his "No. 1 priority" was protecting the privacy of families.
"The identifications up to now were not [based on] DNA," said Miller. "The method now will be [to use] DNA [testing]."
Most evidence from the site has been taken away, he said.
"Everything's been collected from the site that's going to be," he said.
The coroner also said he was working as hard as he could to return remains to family members.
It is a difficult task, he said, in part because Somerset, a sixth-class county with only 78,000 people, has little support staff.
"We don't have staff doing it; I'm doing it," said Miller.
That made the help of outside investigators, including pathologists from Honolulu and Washington, D.C., all the more valuable.
"I've accumulated a wealth of information," said Miller." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (09/24/01)

► FBI finished with Pennsylvania crash site probe

"The FBI announced Monday that its investigation of the site where a hijacked jet slammed into a field here is complete and that 95 percent of the plane was recovered.
Evidence-gathering was halted Saturday afternoon and the pieces of United Airlines Flight 93 that had been recovered were turned over Sunday to the airline, with the exception of the flight data recorder and the voice recorder, which are being held and analyzed by the FBI, according to FBI agent Bill Crowley.
Crowley said the biggest piece of the plane that was recovered was a 6-by-7-foot piece of the fuselage skin, including about four windows. The heaviest piece, Crowley said, was part of an engine fan, weighing about 1,000 pounds. " - CNN (09/24/01)

► FBI Completes Flight 93 Investigation

"FBI investigators have concluded that no explosive was involved in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, the only one of four aircraft hijacked Sept. 11 which did not claim a life on the ground.

Passengers on the flight, in cell phone calls made before the crash, said one of their captors had what appeared to be a bomb strapped to him. At least three of the passengers said they planned to confront the hijackers just before the plane crashed in Somerset County, Pa., killing all 44 on board.
At a news conference, FBI agent Bill Crowley said that the field near Shanksville, Somerset County, has been turned over to the county coroner and that 95 percent of the plane found at the site has been turned over to United Airlines.

Crowley said the FBI has determined from the on-site investigation that no explosive was involved in the crash.
He said that no bomb residue was found at the crash site and that there was no evidence that the plane broke up before it hit the ground.
"Nothing was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground intact," Crowley said.

He said that Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller will take over responsibility for the crash site, which will be enclosed with a fence and patrolled. Eventually, the hole where the plane crashed will be filled in and replanted.
After the crash about 10 a.m. Sept. 11, FBI officials said they expected the work at the site to take three to five weeks. On Monday, Crowley said good weather and a large number of workers -- as many as 1,500 in less than two weeks' time -- allowed the work to go more quickly.

Meanwhile, seven more victims of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania were identified using fingerprints and dental records, a coroner said Sunday, bringing the total of those confirmed dead to 11.

The remaining 33 victims will likely require DNA testing, which could take months, Miller said." - WTAE Pittsburgh (09/24/01)

► FBI ends site work, says no bomb used
"The FBI said yesterday that it has finished its work at the crash scene of United Flight 93 after recovering about 95 percent of the downed airliner and concluding that explosives were not responsible for bringing it down.
At the same time, the Somerset County coroner said that he has ended his own search for remains of the 44 people aboard the airliner.

The inventory of jetliner debris gives testimony to the devastation of the Boeing 757 when it hit a Somerset County field at somewhere between 400 and 580 mph, the last of four domestic flights to crash that morning after being seized by terrorists.

FBI spokesman Bill Crowley said that the largest piece of plane recovered was a shred of fuselage skin that covered four windows -- a piece seven feet long from a jetliner that was 155 feet long.

The heaviest piece, he said, was a half-ton section of engine fan.

The jetliner exploded in a fireball, witnesses said -- but not a fireball caused by a bomb, according to Crowley.

He said that the remains of 11 of the 44 people aboard the jetliner have been identified through fingerprints and dental records. Among the tasks left for Miller is to get DNA identification of the remains of the other 33 passengers and crew." - post-gazette.com (09/25/01)

► Witnesses Recall Plane Crash
"Shortly after 10 a.m., workers on farms and scrap yards in Somerset County looked up to see an airliner flying low and erratic at an estimated 450 mph.
Larry Williams, a former state police trooper who is now a private investigator, was golfing on the 17th green at Oakbrook Golf Course about eight miles away when he heard the engines "roar real loud and shut off."
Bob Blair was completing a routine drive to Shade Creek just after 10 a.m. Tuesday, when he saw a huge silver plane fly past him just above the treetops and crash into the woods along Lambertsville Road.
Blair, of Stoystown, a driver with Jim Barron Trucking of Somerset, was traveling in a coal truck along with Doug Miller of Somerset, when they saw the plane spiraling to the ground and then explode on the outskirts of Lambertsville.
"I saw the plane flying upside down overhead and crash into the nearby trees. My buddy, Doug, and I grabbed our fire extinguishers and ran to the scene," said Blair.
"I saw the mushroom cloud and we called 911 right away," added Blair. "I knew with that crash that it wasn't likely there were survivors, but we had to go anyways. The plane was coming in on a slant and really hit the treeline at an angle."
Lambertsville resident George Beckett was going to visit his mother-in-law Lucy Menear, when the accident occured. "I had been planning to go in those woods (where the plane crashed) and start looking for some hunting sites. I was going to start right where the plane came down."
Menear, who lives across from the Lambertsville Road at the intersection where a graveled road leads to the crash site near the strip mine, said, "I felt the ground shake with the impact. I didn't know the plane had crashed. It was just a big jolt."
Laura Temyer of Hooversville RD1 was hanging her clothes outside to dry before she went to work Tuesday morning when she heard what she thought was an airplane.
"Normally I wouldn't look up, but I just heard on the news that all the planes were grounded and thought this was probably the last one I would see for a while, so I looked up," she said. "I didn't see the plane but I heard the plane's engine. Then I heard a loud thump that echoed off the hills and then I heard the plane's engine. I heard two more loud thumps and didn't hear the plane's engine anymore after that."
She thinks it might have been the plane that went down near Indian Lake in Somerset County.
A plane going over Shanksville wasn't anything unusual because it is a military flight corridor, said Kelly Leverknight, who lives in Shanksville, just a couple miles from the crash scene.
"I was sitting in my living room when I heard a plane. I ran out to the front porch and watched it go down," she said. "There was no smoke, it just went straight down. I saw the belly of the plane."
She said she heard the explosion, felt the blast, then saw smoke and fire coming out.
"I thought it hit the school," she said.
She didn't have a car, so she ran to the neighbor's house and the two drove to where the plane had crashed and went into the trees.
"The grass was burned. We saw a bunch of paper and pieces no bigger than a foot around scattered all over the place," she said. "We didn't think there were people on the plane because we didn't see anybody."
Kim Custer, 15, a tenth grader at Shanksville Stonycreek High School, said she was on the second floor of the school, located only a few miles from the crash site, when the plane went down.
"I looked up and saw the ceiling tiles jump up and down, then I felt the whole building shake," she said. "Then we heard a big boom, and a few minutes later the fire alarm system went off, so we all got out of there," she said.
Custer and other classmates had been following the events unfolding in New York City and Washington, DC when the plane went down.
"I was very scared," she said." - Daily American (2001) [Reprinted:  us-pentagon.tripod.com]

► Environmental Restoration Begins At Somerset Site, Residents Concerned About Well Water

"Three groundwater monitoring wells show no evidence of groundwater contamination and nearly 6,000 cubic yards of dirt sifted for human remains and aircraft debris will soon be returned to the crater left Sept. 11 by United Airlines Flight 93.

Environmental Resources Management of Wexford, Pa., will fill in the crater caused by the crash, which was dug 50 feet deep by recovery workers.

Betsy Mallison, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said that investigators still don't know how much jet fuel was spilled at the crash site. But whether it burned away or evaporated, much of it seems to have dissipated, Mallison said." - The Pittsburgh Channel (10/02/01)

► Latest Somerset crash site findings may yield added IDs

"Over the weekend, about 300 volunteers combed a half-mile square around the crash site and found enough debris from the Boeing 757 to fill about one-third of a trash container.

Most of it was little more than thumbnail size -- "no bigger than a pop rivet holding two pieces of aluminum," Miller said yesterday -- that last week's rains washed from trees bordering the stretch of strip mine where the airliner crashed nose-first Sept. 11.
No significant evidence turned up, Miller said, and there probably won't be a repeat of anything the size of last weekend's search.

The FBI has mandated DNA testing to confirm the identities of remains, a process just beginning that Miller said could take four to six months. But using mostly dental records, Miller and staff have identified remains of 12 passengers -- a number that the coroner said might grow with last weekend's recovery of additional remains.
Remains, like the aircraft wreckage itself, were scattered when the jet hit the ground at as much as 575 mph, then exploded in a fireball of fuel.
With those of 12 people identified, Miller and his team have identified the remains of 27 percent of the people on the plane, more than the 20 percent match he said that experts predicted at the outset.

By today, Environmental Resources Management Inc. of Pine, a contractor hired by United, expects to return 5,000 to 6,000 cubic yards of soil to the 50-foot hole dug around the crater left by the crash.

The soil is being tested for jet fuel, and at least three test wells have been sunk to monitor groundwater, since three nearby homes are served by wells, Betsy Mallison, a state Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman, said.
So far, no contamination has been discovered, she said." - postgazette.com (10/03/01)

► Flight 93 probe involved trooper with local ties

"I found a lot of parts," said Marshall, who was awarded a 2000 Law Enforcement Agency Directors award for identifying a man nearly four years after he was found murdered.
"The biggest part I found was one of the plane's engines. It was about 600 yards from the crash site itself. I think they took it out with a winch on a bulldozer."
Marshall, who served four years in the Air Force, said he found many parts that he couldn't specifically identify.
Whenever he found a suspected part, he would notify the FBI or United employees." - sharon-herald.com (10/08/01) [Wayback]

► Newsmaker: Coroner's quiet unflappability helps him take charge of Somerset tragedy

"Even in the middle of it all, where trees were scorched and the Boeing 757's fuselage disintegrated in a crater that collapsed on itself to leave a gouge maybe 14 feet across, the destruction was so complete that it was hard to imagine what happened.
"It was as if the plane had stopped and let the passengers off before it crashed," Miller said.
The FBI took control of the crash scene. Miller had charge of a provisional morgue six miles away." - Pittsburg Post Gazette (10/15/01)

► Flight 93: Forty lives, one destiny

"Late. They were late. United Airlines Flight 93 had been scheduled to take off at 8:01 a.m. Now it was sitting on the tarmac, waiting for clearance to depart for San Francisco.
Tucked into a flatland from which the New York skyline shone in the distance, Newark International Airport was ringed with new construction. Two days earlier, a fire had started at one of the sites, briefly closing the airport. Flights already delayed by construction around an overtaxed airport had backed up even further.
The Flight 93 passengers had walked down the concourse of Terminal A, where they breezed past the security gate, then walked the 100 yards to a long circular hallway from which the boarding ramps jutted out like spokes.
At Gate 17, they strode another 70 feet down the jetway, made a left turn, and were inside the Boeing 757.
The plane pulled away from the gate on time. Then it sat.
Also on board were four men from an entirely different world. Ziad Jarrah, their leader, had been born in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in 1975. Outwardly, it would have been hard to know the turmoil that boiled inside him. Born into an apolitical and secular family of Sunni Muslims, Jarrah attended Christian schools as a youth, studied aviation in Europe and told the man in Florida who had taught him close-quarters hand-fighting that he loved living in America.
"Find ways to blend in with your opponent and control him," the instructor, Bert Rodriguez, had told Jarrah back in May, when he walked into US-1 Fitness, a gymnasium in Dania Beach, Fla., and paid $500 cash for the course.
Now, settling into a seat in first class, Jarrah had blended in.
No one on board would have guessed that back in the Florida apartment he'd left four days earlier, Jarrah had set up a full-size, cardboard replica -- three panels in all -- of the cockpit of the airplane they had just boarded. Nobody could have known he was carrying a global positioning satellite receiver to help him track the plane's course. No one could have known that he and his three companions, seated throughout the plane, had stayed in the same hotel as some of the passengers the night before, eating at the best of its three restaurants, paying cash for seven rooms, meeting with other men who would depart on missions investigators are still trying to figure out.
United Flight 93 groaned down Runway 4-Left, pulled up and banked to the west. From the right side of the plane, passengers would have seen lower Manhattan where, on overcast days, the only thing poking above the clouds were the twin pillars of the World Trade Center. On this day, everything was clear.
No one could have known that, in the skies over Pennsylvania, the worlds of Hilda Marcin, of Thomas Burnett, of Christine Snyder, of Ziad Jarrah, would meet in a cataclysm of cool rage and desperate courage, as passengers tried to take back their airplane, all the time unaware that an Air Force jet, scrambled from a base in Virginia, was closing in with orders to shoot the plane down before it got to Washington, D.C.
By the time United Flight 93 was in smoldering pieces in a field outside the Somerset County village of Shanksville, the F-16 was 14 minutes from the range at which it could have brought down the 757 with heat-seeking missiles.
Flight 93 became an asterisk to a day of horror that claimed almost 5,000 lives, toppled buildings that stood like a twin Colossus on the New York shore, took down one side of the Pentagon, and ushered in a war without rules against an enemy without a state.
What made Flight 93 different was a decision reached somewhere over the skies of Western Pennsylvania, after passengers learned on cell phones that they were likely to be flown into a building as the fourth in a quartet of suicide attacks.
They decided to fight.
They became the first casualties in a strange new combat against an enemy as old as hatred and as unclear as the muffled shouts and groans investigators would later hear on the cockpit voice recorder dug out of a reclaimed strip mine on a Pennsylvania hillside.
Pilot LeRoy Homer Jr. was living life as a newlywed.
In the town of Abha, Saudi Arabia, a skinny, 21-year-old student of Islamic law -- it is called Sharia -- was leaving on a religious trip. Under the rules of Islam, every man must, once in his life, travel to the city of Mecca. Then there were the other trips, the optional, minor pilgrimages known as "Umra." It was on Umra that Ahmed Al Nami left for Mecca.
Before entering the city, Al Nami would stop, perform the rituals of purity, then enter, pray, and walk on holy ground.
But he was supposed to come home.
For almost two years his family would hear nothing from him. His religious journey was about to take him several stops beyond a holy city.
Melodie Homer doesn't know if her husband kissed her goodbye. She had spent most of Monday, Sept. 10, sick in bed. LeRoy Homer stayed up late watching television. By the time he got to bed, she was drifting off to sleep.
The alarm sounded at 4:45 Tuesday morning. She could hear the shower running, the sounds of a man dressing quietly in the bathroom, trying not to awaken his wife, or their 11-month-old daughter, Laurel, who slept in another room. LeRoy Homer put on dark blue trousers, a white shirt, blue tie, and a United Airlines jacket with epaulets. He was now First Officer LeRoy Homer, who would sit in the righthand seat of the cockpit of a Boeing 757. He was starting the day in Marlton, N.J., and was to end his morning in San Francisco.
As LeRoy Homer was traveling north on the New Jersey Turnpike, Christine Snyder and Mary Steiner were in a limousine, going south, from a friend's apartment in Manhattan. The pair had slipped up to New York after attending the American Forestry Conference in Washington. The day before they left Manhattan, they took in a Broadway show, rode the Staten Island Ferry and drank Diet Cokes at the top of the tallest buildings on the East Coast. The view from the World Trade Center had been astonishing.
When they reached the airport they split up. Steiner was flying on Northwest. Snyder wanted to build up frequent flier miles on her United account. That morning, she called to check on her flight, Flight 91, due to leave after 9 a.m. She moved up to Flight 93 for an earlier start.
Ziad Jarrah had come to the hotel a day earlier and paid cash for seven rooms. He and his companions ate the night before at Priscilla's, the hotel's upscale restaurant, where prime steak sells for $34, baby New Zealand lamb goes for $30, and cream of watercress soup starts at $10.
"They paid cash for everything," said one hotel waiter.
With Jarrah was his roommate from Florida, Ahmed Al Haznawi, a 20-year-old student from Baljurshi, Saudi Arabia, along with Al Nami, the man who disappeared on his visit to Mecca, and Saeed Al Ghamdi, a young man about whom almost nothing is known.
Since arriving in the United States in late 1999, Jarrah had studied at two south Florida flight schools. His family in Lebanon told investigators they regularly sent him money -- sometimes as much as $2,000 a month. Before moving to the United States, Jarrah studied aeronautical engineering in Hamburg, Germany, where he became close to another Muslim student named Mohamed Atta, later identified as the man who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center.
Atta was fiery, religious, almost fearfully disdainful of women.
It changed Jarrah, who had received a largely non-religious upbringing.
Jarrah's Turkish girlfriend, Aisle Senguen, told German investigators that Jarrah sometimes criticized her for becoming "too westernized," although he himself had attended Christian schools as a youngster, drank and fancied discotheques.
After moving to Florida, Jarrah and his companions were regularly in touch with Atta, who dispensed thousands of dollars in living expenses through postal orders. Jarrah moved from apartment to apartment, rarely leaving a forwarding address.
On Sept. 5, Jarrah and Al Haznawi, the son of a Muslim prayer leader, visited Mile High Travel in Fort Lauderdale and booked two one-way tickets to Newark. Two days later, Al Ghamdi and Al Nami stopped at another Fort Lauderdale travel agency, Passage Tours, and paid $140 each for budget airline flights to Newark.
The night before boarding Flight 93, in their hotel rooms, Jarrah would have opened a list of instructions, kept in a notebook that apparently was written by his old friend Atta.
It instructed them to bathe, wear cologne, shave excess hair from their bodies and check the knives they carried.
"You must make your knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter," it read.
"Completely forget something called 'this life.' The time for play is over and the serious time is upon us."
It instructed them to turn to two Suras -- chapters -- of the Koran, al Tawba and al Anfa, which translate to "Repentance" and "The Spoils of War." In Al-Anfa, the 32nd verse reads:
Remember how they said:
"O Allah! If this is indeed
The Truth from Thee,
Rain down on us a shower
Of stones from the sky,
Or send us a grievous Penalty."
The crew of United Flight 93 gathered one hour before the scheduled take-off. Such meetings are routine. Pilot and first officer decide who will handle the takeoff and landing, who will work the radio and computers.
Flight attendants go over the passenger manifest and decide who will work what sections of the cabin.
The pilot was Jason Dahl, 43, of Denver. Homer would fly alongside him as first officer.
Dahl was planning to take his wife Sandy to London for their fifth wedding anniversary Sept. 14, and by moving up his flight schedule, they would have more time together overseas. Sandy, a United flight attendant, went onto United's computer system and shifted him to Flight 93.
Wanda Green wasn't originally supposed to be on Flight 93. The 49-year-old divorced mother of two grown children had been scheduled to fly Sept. 13, but Green, who also worked as a real estate agent, realized she had to handle the closing of a home sale Sept. 13. She'd phoned her best friend, fellow flight attendant Donita Judge, who opened United's computerized schedule and shifted Green to the Sept. 11 flight.
The crew boarded its flight 35 minutes ahead of the scheduled departure. The attendants began preparing the in-flight breakfast.
One passenger was late. Mark Bingham had overslept and his friend, Matthew Hall, drove madly from Manhattan to Newark. They screeched to a halt outside Terminal A at 7:40. Bingham leapt from the car, lugging the old, blue-and-gold canvas bag he'd used as a rugby player at the University of California at Berkeley a decade earlier.
United attendants reopened the door to the boarding ramp and let him on the plane.
Between lessons, Jarrah, who carried a German passport and claimed to be Saudi, and Rodriguez, a 53-year-old Cuban-American, talked about the world.
"We talked about business and leadership. We talked about employees," Rodriguez said. "He told me that he loved it here and that he had a girlfriend in Germany and he was planning to return there."
Flight 93 was near cruising altitude when a system-wide message came over its monitor. United control warned pilots in the air of potential "cockpit intrusion" -- meaning some passenger might try to seize a plane.
They acknowledged the message.
At some point -- the best estimation is about 40 minutes into the flight west -- at least three of the hijackers stood up and put red bandanas around their heads. Two of them forced their way into the cockpit. One took the loudspeaker microphone, unaware it could also be heard by air traffic controllers, and announced that someone had a bomb onboard and the flight was returning to the airport. He told them he was the pilot, but spoke with an accent.
Deena Burnett was waking up at her home in San Ramon, Calif. She'd gone down to the kitchen to fix breakfast for her three daughters. The phone rang. She recalls it was around 6:20 a.m. -- 9:20 Eastern time.
It was Tom.
"No. I'm on United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco. The plane has been hijacked. We are in the air. They've already knifed a guy. There is a bomb on board. Call the FBI."
Jeremy Glick picked up a GTE Airfone just before 9:30 a.m. and called his in-laws in the Catskills. His wife, Lyz, and daughter, Emerson, were visiting. The family had been transfixed in front of a television, watching news coverage of airliners smashing into the World Trade Center in New York.
Glick's mother-in-law, JoAnne Makely, answered.
"Jeremy," she said, "Thank God. We're so worried."
"It's bad news," Glick replied. He asked for Lyz.
Lyz recalls no background noise. No commotion. He described the men as Arabic-looking, wearing red headbands, carrying knives. One told passengers he had a bomb. Most passengers had been forced to the rear of the cabin. Glick's mother-in-law went to another phone and dialed 911. As Jeremy and Lyz spoke, New York state police patched in on the call.
Glick asked his wife: Was it true that planes had been crashed into the World Trade Center?
Yes, she said. Glick thought so. Another passenger had been on the phone home and heard the same thing.
Around 9:30, Deena Burnett's phone rang again. It was Tom.
"He didn't sound frightened, but he was speaking faster than he normally would," she said. He told her the hijackers were in the cockpit.
"I told him a lot of planes had been hijacked, that they don't know how many," she said.
"You've got to be kidding," he replied.
"No," she said.
Were they commercial planes, airliners, he asked her. She didn't know.
"OK," he said, "I've got to go." He hung up.
Deena looked at the television. The Pentagon suddenly appeared, a hole torn into its side by an oncoming airplane. She wondered if it was her husband's flight. Deena Burnett started crying.
Alice Hoglan was visiting her sister-in-law, Kathy Hoglan, in Saratoga, Calif., when the phone rang. It was 9:42 Eastern time. Kathy's nephew, Mark Bingham was on the line.
"Alice, talk to Mark," Kathy said, handing her the phone. "He's been hijacked."
"Mom? This is Mark Bingham," the voice said. It sounded strange for her son to introduce himself by his full name. She knew he was flustered.
"I want to let you know that I love you. I'm on a flight from Newark to San Francisco and there are three guys who have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb," he said.
"Who are these guys?" Alice Hoglan asked.
There was a pause. Hoglan heard murmurs of conversation in English. Mark's voice came back.
"You believe me, don't you?" he asked.
"Yes, Mark. I believe you. But who are these guys?"
There was a pause. Alice heard background noise. The line went dead.
Todd Beamer was near the rear of the plane, trying to use his company's Airfone account. For some reason, he couldn't get authorization for the call. Finally, he was routed to a Verizon customer service center in Oakbrook, Ill.
He told the operator his airliner had been hijacked. He was patched through immediately to Lisa Jefferson, a Verizon supervisor.
It was 9:45 a.m.
Somewhere outside Cleveland, United Flight 93 had made a sharp turn and began flying east, toward Washington, D.C.
Beamer told Jefferson he was sitting next to a flight attendant. He could see three hijackers, armed with knives. One insisted he had a bomb. Twenty-seven of the passengers had been herded to the rear of the plane, where the hijacker with the bomb was guarding them, he said. Two hijackers were in the cockpit. A fourth was in first class.
He asked Jefferson to promise to call his wife, and their two sons, David, 4, and Drew, 2.
"Oh! We're going down!" Beamer shouted. There was a pause. Then, calmly: "No, we're OK. I think we're turning around."
While Beamer was on the phone with Lisa Jefferson, Deena Burnett's phone rang again.
Tom was still alive.
"They're taking airplanes and hitting landmarks all up and down the East Coast," she told him.
"OK," he replied. "We're going to do something. I'll call you back."
Click.
In Fort Myers, Fla., Lorne Lyles didn't hear the phone ringing. He'd worked the night shift and had lain down to sleep at 7:30. At 9:47 a.m., the answering machine picked up a call from his wife, CeeCee, stranded in the back of the airplane.
When the tape was played back hours later, CeeCee Lyles could be heard praying for her family, for herself, for the souls of the men who had hijacked her plane.
"I hope I'll see your face again," she said.
Lyz Glick was still on the phone with Jeremy. She stood in her parents' living room while the television screen filled with the sight of two burning towers.
"You need to be strong," she said.
State police, on the other line with Glick's mother-in-law, relayed a question: Did Glick know where his plane was? Glick didn't know, but he sensed they had changed direction.
Lyz and Jeremy spoke of their love for each other.
"I need you to be happy," he told her, "and I will respect any decisions that you make."
Then he told her the passengers were taking a vote: Should they try to take back the plane?
"Honey, you need to do it," Lyz told him.
Glick wondered what to use for a weapon. "I have my butter knife from breakfast," he joked.
Phil Bradshaw was home in Greensboro, N.C., on the telephone, talking with a friend about the horrors on television. The line clicked. He asked his friend to hold.
It was Sandy Bradshaw, his wife, the flight attendant.
"Have you heard what's going on? My flight has been hijacked. My flight has been hijacked by three guys with knives," she said.
Who was flying the plane? Phil asked his wife.
"I don't know who's flying the plane or where we are," she said.
Sandy Bradshaw, who was trained never to spill hot coffee on a paying customer, slipped into the airplane's galley and began filling pitchers with boiling water.
Some calls from Flight 93 arrived at hours people can no longer recall.
Marion Britton, 53, assistant director of the Census Bureau's New York office, phoned a longtime friend, Fred Fiumano. All he can remember is that it was "sometime after 9:30."
Britton was crying. She had been hijacked, she told Fiumano, and two people on the plane already had been killed.
"I was trying to console her," Fiumano said. "I said 'Don't worry, they're only going to take you for a ride. You'll be all right.' "
Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas, 38, phoned her husband Jack in San Rafael, Calif.
She'd been scheduled to take a later flight that day, but rebooked to get home sooner. Jack hadn't heard the message. He'd seen the madness on television, and when Jack's sister-in-law phoned to ask if he'd heard from Lauren, he checked the phone machine.
"Sweetie," the voice came over the tape, "pick up the phone if you can hear me." There was a brief pause. "OK, I love you. There's a little problem with the plane. I'm fine and comfortable for now." She told Jack she loved him. She asked him to tell her parents and family how much she loved them, too. Then she passed the Airfone to the woman seated next to her.
"Now you call your people," Grandcolas told her.
Honor Elizabeth Wainio, 27, took the phone from Grandcolas and dialed her stepmother, Esther Heymann, in Baltimore.
"Mom, we're being hijacked. I just called to say good bye," she said.
"Elizabeth, we don't know how this is going to turn out. I've got my arms around you," Heymann said.
Wainio told her stepmother she could feel them.
"Let's look out at that beautiful blue sky. Let's be here in the moment," Heymann told her. "Let's do some deep breathing together."
They passed a few quiet moments.
"It hurts me that it's going to be so much harder for you all than it is for me," Wainio said.
"I see a river." Sandy Bradshaw couldn't name it. It suggested, though, that Flight 93 was somewhere over Western Pennsylvania.
"I just told her to be safe and come home soon," Phil Bradshaw said. "She said she hoped she would."
Sometime shortly before 10 a.m., Tom Burnett called home one last time.
"A group of us is going to do something," he told Deena.
"I told him, 'No, Tom, just sit down and don't draw attention to yourself,' " she said.
"Deena," he told her, "If they're going to crash the plane into the ground, we have to do something. We can't wait for the authorities. We have to do something now."
The authorities, at that moment, had scrambled three F-16 fighter jets from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va. The planes, armed with heat-seeking, Sidewinder missiles, were authorized to knock down any civilian aircraft that appeared headed toward a target on the ground.
The fighter jets were 14 minutes out of range and closing in.
"Pray, just pray, Deena. We're going to do something," Tom Burnett told his wife.
Still on his own phone call, Todd Beamer was pouring out his heart to his family through Lisa Jefferson, the Verizon supervisor he'd reached on his Airfone.
They prayed the 23rd Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures
He leadeth me beside the still waters ...
Sometime shortly before 10 a.m., the direct line from Cleveland Air Traffic Control rang inside the control tower at Johnstown-Cambria County Airport, 70 miles east of Pittsburgh.
Did Johnstown tower have any radio contact with a large aircraft about 20 miles to its south? Supervisor Dennis Fritz and controller Thomas Hull picked up binoculars -- the tower has no radar -- and scanned the horizon to the south. The day was clear and, from the highest point in the area, they could spot radio towers in neighboring Somerset County. A large plane would have stood out.
"We didn't see a thing," Fritz said.
Hull went on the radio and broadcast an open message: "Aircraft 20 South of the field, contact Johnstown tower ... ."
Ninety seconds later, Cleveland called back. The plane was now 15 miles south and heading directly for the Johnstown tower.
"We suggest you evacuate," they told him.
Fritz ordered trainees and custodial staff out of the 85-foot tower. He and Hull stayed at their posts and scanned the south with binoculars. It occurred to Fritz that the plane must be flying below the level of the mountain ridges around them.
From the back of Flight 93, CeeCee Lyles finally reached her husband, Lorne.
"Babe, my plane's been hijacked," she said.
"Huh? Stop joking," he said.
"No babe, I wouldn't joke like that. I love you. Tell the boys I love them."
The pair prayed. In the background, Lorne Lyles could hear what he now believes was the sound of men planning a counterattack.
"They're getting ready to force their way into the cockpit," she told him.
When he had finished talking with Lisa Jefferson, finished relaying his love for his family, finished praying the Psalm that asked for green pastures and still waters, Todd Beamer put down the phone, still connected with the outside world.
"Are you guys ready? Let's roll," he said.
Honor Wainio was still on the line with her stepmother.
"I need to go," she said. "They're getting ready to break into the cockpit. I love you. Goodbye."
"Everyone's running to first class," Sandy Bradshaw told her husband. "I've got to go. Bye."
CeeCee Lyles let out a scream.
"They're doing it! They're doing it! They're doing it!" she said. Lorne Lyles heard a scream. Then his wife said something he couldn't understand. Then the line went dead.
Forty-five seconds after telling Fritz to evacuate the Johnstown tower, Cleveland Air Traffic Control phoned again.
"They said to disregard. The aircraft had turned to the south and they lost radar contact with him."
It was 10:06 a.m.
Fritz and Hull studied the horizon to the south. They couldn't see a thing.
United Airlines has confirmed one of its flights has crashed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 aircraft, is the flight number involved. The flight originated in Newark and was bound for San Francisco. United is deeply concerned about a further flight, United Flight 175, a Boeing 767, which was bound from Boston to Los Angeles. On behalf of the airline, CEO James E. Goodwin said, "The thoughts of everyone at United are with the passengers and crew of these flights. Our prayers are also with everyone on the ground who may have been involved in today's tragic events. United is working with all the relevant authorities, including the FBI, to obtain further information on these flights. In the meantime, in line with FAA directives, a worldwide groundstop on all our flights continues. For further information, friends and relatives who may be concerned about a passenger on United Flight 93 should call 1-800-932-8555."
After the crash, Lorne Lyles discovered CeeCee's first message on the answering machine.
He couldn't force himself to listen to it. He will. Someday.
Christine Fraser, who dropped off her sister, Colleen, at the airport that morning, reproached herself for not getting out to hug her sibling.
It was only after she worked up the courage to finally enter Colleen's room that Christine found her sister's turquoise, flower ring. Colleen had worn it for most of her life. It was her signature item. For some reason, she hadn't done so that day.
"It was in her room, like she'd left it for me. I'm wearing it now," said Christine Fraser. "It's a comfort." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (10/28/01)

► We know it crashed, but not why; FBI is silent, fueling "shot down" rumors

"Ernie Stuhl is the mayor of this tiny farming borough that was so brutally placed on America's psychic map on the morning of Sept. 11, when United Airlines Flight 93 slammed nose-down into the edge of a barren strip-mine moonscape a couple of miles outside of town.
A 77-year-old World War II veteran and retired Dodge dealer, he's certainly no conspiracy theorist.
But press the mayor for details, and he will add something surprising.
"I know of two people - I will not mention names - that heard a missile," Stuhl said. "They both live very close, within a couple of hundred yards. . .This one fellow's served in Vietnam and he says he's heard them, and he heard one that day." The mayor adds that based on what he knows about that morning, military F-16 fighter jets were "very, very close."
No one has fully explained why the plane went down, or what exactly happened during an eight-minute gap from the time all cell phone calls from the plane stopped and the time it crashed.
And the FBI, which assumed control of the probe from the National Transportation Safety Board, refuses to release data from either of the critical "black boxes," the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder.
Citing the ongoing war on terrorism, the FBI says it can't say when it will release the data - or indeed, if it ever will.
Last week, the nation was rocked by another jetliner crash - American Airlines Flight 587 in New York - and the difference in the way the probes have been handled is remarkable. In the latest crash, federal officials released detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder in less than 36 hours.
In the case of Flight 93, both the FBI and the nation's air-defense agency - NORAD - have said the aircraft was not shot down.
Already, there is a Web site (www.flight93crash.com) that summarizes everything known about the crash. And while much of the mainstream media has lost interest in the story, articles suggesting that the government shot down Flight 93 and has lied about it have flourished on left-wing Internet sites and publications.
What is surprising is this: Go to Shanksville and the surrounding farm fields where people actually saw or heard the jetliner go down at roughly 10:06 that morning and there are a number of people - including witnesses - who also think that Flight 93 was shot down, or at least aren't ruling it out.
Laura Temyer, who lives several miles north of the crash site in Hooversville, was hanging some clothes outside that morning when she heard an airplane pass overhead. That struck her as unusual since she'd just heard on TV that all flights were grounded.
"I heard like a boom and the engine sounded funny," she told the Daily News. "I heard two more booms - and then I did not hear anything."
What does Temyer think she heard? "I think the plane was shot down," insists Temyer, who said she has twice told her story to the FBI. What's more, she insists that people she knows in state law enforcement have told her the same thing, that the plane was shot down and that decompression sucked objects from the aircraft, explaining why there was a wide debris field.
But an eyewitness, Linda Shepley, said she had an unobstructed view of Flight 93's final two minutes and has reached the opposite conclusion. She recalls seeing the plane wobbling right and left, at a low altitude of roughly 2,500 feet, when suddenly the right wing abruptly dipped straight down, and the Boeing 757 plunged into the earth.
"It's not true," said Shepley of the persistent rumors. "If it had been shot down, there would have been pieces flying, but it was intact - there was nothing wrong with it."
So what are the clues that have prompted the crash of Flight 93 to remain a lingering mystery?
* THE 911 CALL. At 9:58 a.m., roughly eight minutes before impact, a 911 emergency dispatcher in neighboring Westmoreland County took a call from a frantic passenger who said he was locked in the bathroom of Flight 93 and that the plane had been hijacked. The caller said there had been an explosion aboard the plane and there was white smoke. Authorities have never explained the report, and the 911 tape itself was immediately confiscated by the FBI.
* THE DEBRIS FIELD. The reclaimed mine where the plane crashed is composed of very soft soil, and searchers say much of the wreckage was found buried 20-25 feet below the large crater. But despite that, there was also widely scattered debris in the immediate vicinity and further afield. Considerable debris washed up more than two miles away at Indian Lake, and a canceled check and brokerage statement from the plane was found in a deep valley some eight miles away that week.
* THE MYSTERY PLANE. Many people in the Shanksville area, including some interviewed by the Daily News, saw a fast-moving, unmarked small jet fly overhead a very short time after Flight 93 crashed. Several days later, authorities said they believe the plane was a Falcon 20 private jet that was headed to nearby Johnstown but was asked to descend and survey the crash site. Yet officials have never identified the pilot nor explained why he was still airborne roughly 30 minutes after the government ordered all aircraft to land at the closest airport.
* THE ENGINE. While the FBI and other authorities have said the plane was mostly obliterated by the roughly 500 mph impact, they also said an engine - or at least a 1,000-pound piece of one - was found "a considerable distance" from the crater. Stuhl, the Shanksville mayor, said it was found in the woods just west of the crash. That information is intriguing to shoot-down theory proponents, since the heat-seeking, air-to-air Sidewinder missiles aboard an F-16 would likely target one of the Boeing 757's two large engines.
* LOCATION OF F-16S. From Day 1, the government has given conflicting accounts about the exact whereabouts of three North Dakota Air National Guard F-16s, assigned to national air defense, based at Langley Air Force base in Virginia and scrambled at the height of the attacks.
Just a few days after the crash, a federal flight controller told a Nashua, N.H., newspaper that an F-16 was "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet, following so closely that it made 360-degree turns to stay in range. "He must have seen the whole thing," an unnamed aviation official said.
Based on the plane's general course, the conventional wisdom is that Flight 93 was headed toward Washington and a strike on the White House or the Capitol. But last month, the widely respected Times of London, quoting U.S. intelligence sources and noting the plane's low altitude and erratic course, suggested the real target might have been one of the state's nuclear power plants. At 500 mph, the Three Mile Island plant, near Harrisburg, was about than 10 or 15 minutes away.
Whether it was hero passengers or an F-16 fighter pilot who wanted the hijacked jetliner to come down away from a populated area, they did an amazing job in picking Shanksville.
The nearest sizable town, Somerset, is 10 miles away on winding back-country roads - where a visitor encountered as many dead raccoons as vehicles. Nestled along a creekbed in the rolling Allegheny foothills, Shanksville is a small cluster of red-brick homes and flag-draped front porches.
The only commercial enterprise, a convenience store called Ida's, also rents videos and has the only ATM for miles around.
But the cell phone calls from the passengers all stopped about 9:58 a.m. - roughly the same time that the caller to 911 in Westmoreland County stated there had been an explosion.
The plane didn't come down until 10:06 - leaving an 8-minute gap of unaccounted for air time, and thus a great mystery.
When Flight 93 came down, the eyewitnesses seem to agree on a few basic facts - that the Boeing 757 was headed south or southeast very fast, that it was flying erratically or banking from side to side, that its right wing dipped steeply down and that the jetliner came down at close to a 90-degree angle. A number of people quoted right after the crash said there were strange noises, that the engine seemed to race but then went eerily silent as the plane plummeted.
The plane seemed to be fully, or largely, intact. "I didn't see no smoke, nothing," said Nevin Lambert, an elderly farmer who witnessed the crash from his side yard less than a half-mile away.
Lambert also said he also later found a couple of pieces of debris, one a piece of metal, less than 12 inches across, with some insulation attached. To those who are debating the causes of the crash, the debris is particularly significant because heavier farflung debris would suggest that something happened to cause the plane to break up before it hit the ground.
Authorities also sought to explain why a number of residents saw a small, unmarked jet circling over the crash site shortly after. Workers at a marina saw it, and so did Kathy Blades, who was in her small summer cottage about a quarter-mile from the impact site.
Blades and her son ran outside after the crash and saw the jet, with sleek back wings and an angled cockpit, race overhead. "My son said, 'I think we're under attack!' " She said she was so shocked by the crash she can't say exactly how long after the impact it was.
A few days later, the FBI offered a possible explanation for what the witnesses saw. Authorities said that a private Falcon 20 jet bound for nearby Johnstown was in the vicinity and was asked by authorities to descend and help survey the crash site. But the authorities didn't identify the owner of the jet, nor explain why it was airborne some 40 minutes after the Federal Aviation Administration ordered all planes to land at the nearest airport.
So where was the U.S. air defense at 10 a.m. - 72 minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and about a half-hour after air controllers and United started to suspect that Flight 93 had been hijacked?
At 9:24 that morning, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) ordered three F-16s from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to scramble. They were airborne at 9:30. It's not clear how close any of the planes were to Flight 93, although Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said a few days later on TV that "we were already tracking that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania."
Vice President Dick Cheney said later that President Bush authorized the military to shoot down any civilian plane that did not respond to air-traffic control and appeared to be a threat. The order is said to have come before Bush left Florida, which was at 9:58 a.m.
The commander of the North Dakota Air National Guard, which was handling air defense out of Langley that morning, later told the New York Times that the unidentified pilots received a harrowing order.
"A person came on the radio," Major Gen. Mike Haugen said, "and identified themselves as being with the Secret Service and he said, 'I want you to protect the White House at all costs.' "
"I think it was shot down," said Dennis Mock, who was not an eyewitness but lives closest to the crash site on the west side. "That's what people around here think." - Philadelphia Daily News (11/18/01)

► Flight 93 remains yield no evidence

"United Airlines Flight 93's crash into rural Somerset County decimated all human remains so badly that investigators can't say if any of the 44 people aboard were killed before the aircraft went down, the FBI has told the county coroner.
That leaves it up to the jet's cockpit voice recorder to offer support for widely held assumptions that the four hijackers began killing passengers before or during a fight for control of the jetliner. For now, federal investigators holding that recorder, one of two pieces commonly dubbed the black box, are staying mum.
Investigators who recovered remains from the Shanksville-area crash site brought possible stab wounds and lacerations to the attention of FBI pathologists, Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller said yesterday. But the FBI has responded that "the catastrophic nature of the crash and fragmentation" left them unable to draw conclusions, Miller said.
The coroner's assessment came yesterday as he confirmed that the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory has used DNA samples to match recovered remains with the last of 40 crew members and passengers aboard the hijacked jetliner 14 weeks ago when it slammed into a recovered strip mine at around 500 mph.
Miller has kept control of the crash site, under watch by security guards hired by United Airlines, expecting a possible final search for remains in the spring.
Remains of passengers and crew identified so far should be released in February to families or for burial, entombment or cremation in the Somerset County area, depending on families' preferences, Miller said. Unidentified remains, yielding no DNA information, will be "treated properly," probably interred or entombed in the county, according to the coroner.
This is where hijackers and victims get different treatment.
Death certificates for the 40 victims list their deaths as homicides. The hijackers' death certificates, not released yet, call their deaths suicides.
The four hijackers' remains will stay in FBI custody in case they prove important to the evolving investigation.
Investigators segregated remains which yielded DNA samples that did not match DNA profiles of the 40 passengers and crew. Those, by process of elimination, are the hijackers, and their remains are being grouped by common DNA.
The air pirates have been identified as Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed Al Haznawi, Saeed Al Ghamdi and Ahmed Al Nami -- but not so positively identified that officials will list the names in official records.
"The death certificates will list each as 'John Doe,' " Miller said." - Pittsburg Post-Gazette (12/20/01)

► A NATION CHALLENGED: THE PENNSYLVANIA CRASH; Cockpit Tape Offers Few Answers but Points to Heroic Efforts

"Families of passengers and crew members aboard United Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed outside Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, will hear nothing to resolve crucial questions about their loved ones' last minutes when they listen to the cockpit voice recorder next month, say officials who have heard the tape or read transcripts of it.
Officials said the tape, a loop that records the last 30 minutes of a flight, did not record the moments when the hijackers got into the cockpit and does not resolve how they took over or whether the pilot and co-pilot were then killed. It also does not make clear whether the passengers were able to force their way into the cockpit in an effort to regain control of the plane or whether the hijackers crashed the Boeing 757 deliberately or just lost control of it.
But the tape seems to confirm that the passengers acted heroically in trying to overtake the four hijackers and keep the plane from being crashed into the White House or other national landmark. A government transcript of the recording shows that moments before the plane crashed, one of the hijackers shouted, ''They're coming,'' perhaps a warning as he looked at the charging passengers through the peephole in the cockpit door, officials said.
The families are scheduled to listen to the recording on April 18 in Princeton, N.J. A number of family members had petitioned the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hear the tape, no matter how disturbing its contents. After initially declining the request, F.B.I. officials say they have changed their minds.
Little but intermittent conversation and stretches of silence is on the first 20 to 25 minutes of the tape, after the hijackers gained control but before the passengers tried to wrest it back. Much of what can be heard of the final five to seven minutes of a desperate, fierce struggle remains open to interpretation, officials cautioned.
A woman can be heard pleading for her life, asking not to die. At another point, someone appears to be gurgling. Rustling and scuffling, a groan and shouts in English and Arabic can be heard.
All this coincides with the time that four passengers, Todd Beamer, Honor Elizabeth Wainio, Jeremy Glick and Thomas E. Burnett Jr., along with two flight attendants, CeeCee Lyles and Sandra Bradshaw, reported in phone calls that passengers were advancing down the 757's single aisle to take control of the plane after learning that other hijacked planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
At one point, someone in an accented voice said, ''No, no,'' leading officials to speculate that the hijackers might have been arguing with each other over the controls. The hijackers could be heard saying ''God is great'' numerous times.
Sounds of what seemed to be breaking glass and crashing dishes were also picked up by the recorder, microphones located in the pilots' headsets and in the ceiling of the cockpit. This was first reported by Newsweek in December. Officials have theorized that plates and bottles and glasses may have been hurled by passengers. Or they may have fallen from trays and carts as the hijackers waggled the wings of the plane up and down in an effort to keep the passengers from moving forward. Eyewitnesses reported seeing the wings moving up and down in the final minutes.
''We don't have all the answers, but there is no question in my mind that the passengers were heroes in the truest sense of the word,'' said Wells Morrison, the deputy on-scene commander for the F.B.I., who declined to discuss specifics of the voice recorder or evidence found at the crash site. ''Everyone should be proud of their actions.''
The tape also recorded unnerving background sounds. A two-tone alarm sounded because the plane was flying up to 150 miles per hour faster than the instructed limit of 425 m.p.h. for its low altitude, officials said. The air resistance as the plane rushed so close to the ground created a constant rush of wind.
''It could have even broken the sound barrier for a while,'' said Hank Krakowski, who was director of flight operations control at United's system control center near O'Hare Airport in Chicago on Sept. 11.
Recent reporting has revealed other intriguing information about what was said and done on the flight. While authorities have said that the hijackers on the four flights had knives and box cutters, one passenger aboard Flight 93, Mr. Burnett, told his wife in a cellphone call that the terrorists also had a gun.
On a tape of a 911 call made by Mr. Burnett's wife, Deena, to the sheriff's department in Contra Costa County, Calif., Ms. Burnett said: ''My husband just called me from United Flight 93. The plane has been hijacked. They just knifed a passenger and there are guns on the airplane.'' Investigators said they found no evidence of a gun at the crash site.
Earlier reports have said that a previously unidentified passenger, Edward Felt of Matawan, N.J., said in a 911 call from a restroom that he saw a puff of smoke and heard an explosion, leading some to cite this as evidence that the plane was shot down by the military to prevent it from crashing into sensitive targets. But the 911 dispatcher, John Shaw, and others who have heard the tape, including Mr. Felt's wife, Sandra Felt, say he made no mention of smoke or an explosion when he said, ''We're going down.''
Officials said the victims' remains were too badly damaged in the crash to tell whether anyone had been stabbed or injured in the struggle.
But Patrick Welsh, the husband of Deborah Welsh, the flight's purser, said he was told by United that one flight attendant had been stabbed early in the takeover. It was ''strongly implied,'' he said, that his wife had been a victim, given her position in first class and the likelihood that she would have stood between the hijackers and the cockpit. ''Knowing Debby, she would have resisted,'' Mr. Welsh said. ''She didn't meekly submit to anything. She could handle herself.''
Alice Hoglan, a United flight attendant who was phoned by her son, Mark Bingham, a passenger on the plane, while the hijacking was in progress, called him back at 9:54 a.m. and left two messages on his cellphone, urging him and the other passengers to rush the cockpit because the flight appeared to be a suicide mission. Her son, who she believes helped try to retake the plane, apparently never got the messages, but Ms. Hoglan later retrieved them from the phone company.
''Mark, apparently it's terrorists and they're hellbent on crashing the aircraft,'' Ms. Hoglan said in the second message, urgency in her voice. ''So, if you can, try to take over the aircraft. There doesn't seem to be much plan to land the aircraft normally, so I guess your best bet would be to try to take it over if you can, or tell the other passengers. There is one flight that they say is headed toward San Francisco. It might be yours. So, if you can, group some people and perhaps do the best you can to get control of it. I love you, sweetie. Good luck. Goodbye.''
More than six months later, Ms. Hoglan said, she did not expect to gain any consolation from hearing the voice recorder. Still, she wants to listen." - New York Times (03/27/02)

► Hallowed Ground

"Before Miller can even unfold his lanky 6-foot-4 body from the vehicle, a deputy sheriff thrusts at him a plastic baggie containing a handful of jagged metallic nuggets, mangled and melted into irregular shapes, little bigger than children's marbles. They are the latest of the shreds to be recovered -- nearly six months later -- of what remains of United Airlines Flight 93. Miller holds up the bag and says that virtually the entire airplane, including its 44 human occupants, disintegrated in similar fashion.

The Boeing 757 still heavily laden with jet fuel slammed at about 575 mph almost straight down into a rolling patch of grassy land that had long ago been strip-mined for coal. The impact spewed a fireball of horrific force across hundreds of acres of towering hemlocks and other trees, setting many ablaze. The fuselage burrowed straight into the earth so forcefully that one of the "black boxes" was recovered at a depth of 25 feet under the ground.

As coroner, responsible for returning human remains, Miller has been forced to share with the families information that is unimaginable. As he clinically recounts to them, holding back very few details, the 33 passengers, seven crew and four hijackers together weighed roughly 7,000 pounds. They were essentially cremated together upon impact. Hundreds of searchers who climbed the hemlocks and combed the woods for weeks were able to find about 1,500 mostly scorched samples of human tissue totaling less than 600 pounds, or about 8 percent of the total.

Miller was among the very first to arrive after 10:06 on the magnificently sunny morning of September 11. He was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked, he says, "like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it." Once he was able to absorb the scene, Miller says, "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there. It became like a giant funeral service."

Thousands of people -- the locals estimate up to 1,000 a week -- have arrived at an old coal-mining access trail called Skyline Road, where finally they can see what remains of Flight 93: nothing. "There's not really much to it, is there?" Wally Miller often says to families and other visitors who are bewildered by what they don't see.

Immediately after the crash, the seeming absence of human remains led the mind of coroner Wally Miller to a surreal fantasy: that Flight 93 had somehow stopped in mid-flight and discharged all of its passengers before crashing. "There was just nothing visible," he says. "It was the strangest feeling." It would be nearly an hour before Miller came upon his first trace of a body part.

Miller says he is often asked how he copes emotionally with the work he must do. He says he is not sure. Then he tells the church audience that, remarkably, two heavily damaged Bibles were found in the wreckage of the flight; a white one at the crash site that belonged to a passenger who was a practicing Buddhist; and a second one, black, of uncertain ownership. Miller says he ran across the second one on the floor of the warehouse where victims' belongings were being kept. The second Bible was scrunched up and was lying open, he says, to the 121st Psalm, which is customarily read at funerals. He says he has no idea who left the Bible in that position." - Washington Post (05/12/02)

► Coroner remembers Sept. 11

"Miller recalled his arrival at the crash site about 20 minutes after the plane plummeted to the earth and described how the aircraft came down at a 45-degree angle. He explained how the cockpit broke off at impact, bouncing into a wooded area of about 60 acres. The resulting fireball scorched about eight acres of trees, he said.

The remainder of the plane burrowed deep into the ground, creating a long, narrow crater.
"When we got out there, we knew there weren't going to be any survivors. Debris was strewn about everywhere, with nothing bigger than a large coffee can," Miller said.

As the more than 250 FBI agents and other federal officials descended upon the site, Miller said, it was apparent their main objective was to search for evidence and find the plane's "black box," the only one that was recovered from the four planes hijacked in the Sept. 11 attacks." - pittsburghlive.com (05/30/02)

► Sept. 11 video, photos might be shown at Moussaoui trial

"The pictures would be augmented by dramatic cockpit voice recordings from United Flight 93, as passengers apparently tried to wrest control of the aircraft from hijackers, prosecutors said Thursday. The plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing 44, including the attackers.
Additional recordings would be played from the cockpit of an executive jet that tracked Flight 93 on Sept. 11, according to written proposals subject to approval by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema.

The government said it would play the cockpit voice recordings from Flight 93 and the executive jet in open court, but asked Brinkema to keep both recordings and their transcripts from dissemination outside the courtroom.
An official for NetJets, a company that sells shares in private business aircraft, confirmed that the plane tracking Flight 93 belonged to the company.
The official, who asked not to be identified by name, said the company was asked not to comment on the Sept. 11 flight but would not say who made the request." - Holland Sentinel (08/09/02) [archive]

► Flight 93 Remains Returned
"The remains and belongings of 40 people who died when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a western Pennsylvania field Sept. 11 will be returned to their survivors, the county coroner said.
The remains of all but the plane's four hijackers will be placed into caskets. The first sets of remains were shipped Monday and the rest will be delivered when the victims' survivors are contacted, Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller said.
Officials identified remains through fingerprints, dental records and DNA. They had been stored at a temporary morgue in Somerset.
The hijackers' remains will stay in the county, Miller said, and may eventually be turned over to FBI investigators." - CBS (08/17/02)

► On hallowed ground

"This is the place where, on Sept. 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93, scene of a desperate airborne battle pitting passengers and crew against terrorist hijackers, came hurtling out of the sky, turning upside down and slamming into the earth at more than 500 mph.

No bodies were recovered here, at least not as we normally think of bodies. In the cataclysmic violence of the crash, the people on Flight 93 literally disintegrated. Searchers found fragments of bones, small pieces of flesh, a hand. But no bodies.

In the grisly accounting of a jetliner crash, it comes down to pounds: The people on Flight 93 weighed a total of about 7,500 pounds. Miller supervised an intensive effort to gather their remains, some flung hundreds of yards. In the end, just 600 pounds of remains were collected; of these, 250 pounds could be identified by DNA testing and returned to the families of the passengers and crew.

Wally Miller, coroner, has walked this ground hundreds of times. He spent endless hours among those collecting human remains and picking up plane parts. Even now, he walks with his eyes down, looking, looking. Every now and then he reaches down and picks up a tiny piece of plane - a thimble-sized piece of twisted gray metal, a bit of charred plastic, a shard of circuit board, a wire. This is what Flight 93 became: millions of tiny pieces, a vast puzzle that can never be reassembled. Despite the cleanup effort, there are still thousands of plane parts scattered for acres around the crash site, just under the new plant growth, reminders of what happened here.

The site is peaceful; no sound but birds. Miller walks from the bright field into the hemlock woods just beyond the barren spot where Flight 93 slammed into the earth. It's mid-afternoon, but the woods are in permanent dusk, the tall trees allowing only a dim, gloomy light to filter down to the lush green ferns that blanket the ground. The woods look undisturbed, except for bright "X"s painted on the trunks of dozens of hemlocks. The "X"s mark the trees that were scaled by climbers retrieving human remains, flung high and deep into woods by the force of the crash." - Miami Herald (09/07/02)

► Vignettes: They were there

"WALLY MILLER
The plane, too, was decimated. The largest pieces were the size of suitcases, the smallest the size of dimes.
"It just looked like somebody just dropped a bunch of metal out of the sky," Miller said.
Officially, Miller was charged with identifying the victims, returning what remains were recovered and caring for the site of the crash. He personally identified 12 bodies through fingerprints and teeth. The remaining 32 bodies had to be identified with DNA testing." - Houston Chronicle (09/08/02)

► On Hallowed Ground

"He can remember his first time there, 10.45am, Tuesday, September 11 ­ the stench of jet fuel, still puddled on the ground, the smell of the burnt and smouldering trees and grass, the silence of nature and the men who had arrived to find they could do nothing, the overwhelming evidence that a Boeing 757, 55 metres long and weighing 110 tonnes, had somehow been obliterated, and with it, the 44 people on board.
He stands next to a mound of wood chips, the remnants of the trees that caught the full force of the fireball that was flight 93. The first screams had been the sound of the tree trunks, riddled with metal from the exploded plane.
The 8am United Airlines flight 93 was 42 minutes late in taking off from Newark, New Jersey, for the trip to San Francisco. Its 43,000-litre fuel tanks were brimming for the six-hour flight.
Calls from on-board and mobile phones alerted emergency and phone company operators and families to the hijacking and the plan by the passengers to try to retake control of the aircraft. The cockpit voice recorder revealed seven minutes of pandemonium in English and Arabic as the passengers, apparently led by Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham and Jeremy Glick, stormed the front of the plane.
After its abrupt U-turn, flight 93 was tracked on radar by the control tower at Cleveland. The jet hurtled low and erratic, south-east over Pennsylvania.
Minutes later, he rang back. A jet had just passed overhead at treetop level, looking as though it was about to crash, before abruptly climbing. The plane followed a highway, State Route 30, then veered south.
Terry Butler was working in the yard of Stoystown Auto Wreckers, pulling a radiator from a junked car. Butler could see the last remnants of fog burning off in the adjoining fields. It was 10.02am.
Butler saw the plane. "It was just above the treetops, flying straight. Maybe a little bit wobbly, but it was flying straight. Then it went up." As it passed overhead, Butler estimated the plane's height at no more than 100 metres, before it suddenly climbed to twice that.
At that moment, at Ida's store in Shanksville, three kilometres away, store owner Rick King heard "a whining, screaming noise of the engines" as the plane briefly ascended.
Terry Butler saw the plane bank right at the top of its climb, then lost sight of it behind some trees. Within three or four seconds, there was the impact, marked, he remembered, by four explosions.
King, the assistant fire chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department, felt the ground shake beneath his feet.
In Kashurba's account, the ceiling tiles bounced, then settled again in the fourth grade classroom of Shanksville-Stonycreek School.
In another class, students were ordered to hide under their desks as the room shook from the shockwave.
Flight 93's estimated speed at the point of impact was 975kmh. In its final moments, it spun 180 degrees, hitting the ground upside down and at a 45-degree angle.
Somerset County is dotted with mines; some still working but most abandoned. The 20-hectare plot that Wallace Miller walked had been mined for coal on its surface and underground for 30 years.
In 1990, the reclamation process began: 190,000 cubic metres of soil and dynamited rock were spread over the site, then sewn with grass.
To the casual eye, it looked like solid, consolidated ground but in reality the reclaimed expanse was loose and uncompacted. When flight 93 hit the ground, the cockpit and first-class cabin broke off, scattered into millions of fragments that spread and flew like shrapnel into and through the trees 20 metres away.
A section of the engine, weighing almost a tonne, was found on the bed of a catchment pond, 200 metres downhill.
Some of the plane's cargo was found intact ­ 200 kilograms of mail in the hold, a Bible, its cover scorched but its pages undamaged and later, as the excavation began, the passport of one of the four hijackers.
The rest of the 757 continued its downward passage, the sandy loam closing behind it like the door of a tomb. Eventually these pieces and its human cargo ­ the heroes and the cowards, as a message left at the nearby temporary memorial put it ­ came to rest against solid rock, 23 metres below the surface.
The scene was captured in a picture taken soon after by a local photographer, Mark Stahl. Published in a magazine commemorative book, the scene is remarkable for its total absence of urgency.
The point of impact, about 10-12 metres across, is black and smoking. According to Miller it was about three metres deep. In Stahl's photograph it looks more like an excavation.
Other photos taken at the scene by Miller show a small furrow, like a hand-dug drainage ditch, running back from the crater. This was the mark left by a wing.
"It was the most eerie thing," Miller recalled. "Usually, when you see a plane crash on TV, you see the fuselage, the tail or a piece of something. The biggest piece I saw was as big as this (spreading his hands less than a metre apart). It was as though someone took a tri-axle dump truck and spread it over an acre."
Walking in his gumboots, the only recognisable body part he saw was a piece of spinal cord, with five vertebrae attached.
"I've seen a lot of highway fatalities where there's fragmentation," Miller said. "The interesting thing about this particular case is that I haven't, to this day, 11 months later, seen any single drop of blood. Not a drop. The only thing I can deduce is that the crash was over in half a second. There was a fireball 15-20 metres high, so all of that material just got vaporised."
There have been other, grimmer, visitors. First the FBI evidence recovery team members came in. They had sieves built to filter the evidence, but especially the human remains, from the soil.
The bureau members stayed at the crash site for 16 days and recovered 230 kilograms of remains.
Searches of the area were conducted on hands and knees. Wallace Miller remembers seeing an agent, from Mississippi, in tears as he crawled forward. When the FBI left, it handed legal responsibility for the location to the coroner, who was left with hell's own clean-up.
Miller and workers from the company contracted by United Airlines to clear the site found some dental work among the piles of dirt excavated from the crater. They used fine sieves to work through the piles again and extracted a further 45 kilograms. When that was done, the soil went back into the crater.
He estimated the average weight of each of the 44 people aboard flight 93 was 79.5 kilograms, for a total body mass of 3500 kilograms. "We recovered 270 kilograms. Of that, we identified about 110. The main thing I've been saying ever since that is the area down there is a cemetery because 92 per cent of these people's loved ones repose there."
For now, the site is off-limits to the public.
The shovel twists and is caught among the root-ridden soil at the base of a stand of hemlock trees. The soil is dark and rich on top, lighter underneath. Brightly covered pieces of electrical wire are still strewn and wrapped around the base of some of the trees." - The Age (09/09/02)

► Crash site cleanup cost $850,000

"The state Department of Environmental Protection has approved the final cleanup report for the United Airlines Flight 93 crash site near Shanksville in Somerset County.
"United Airlines did a thorough job in its investigation of the environmental effects from the September 2001 plane crash," said Charles A. Duritsa, the DEP southwest regional director.
"Site samples indicate that the site meets Pennsylvania's Act 2 statewide health standards for soil and groundwater for the fuel known as jet "A" fuel. We consider cleanup work at the site completed."
Betsy Mallison, a DEP spokeswoman, said it cost United Airlines $850,000 for the environmental investigation and remediation at the site of the crash in an old strip mine.

United Airlines' site investigation included tests on samples of soil, sediment and groundwater in the immediate crash impact area, and also in the areas lying in the south and southeast corners of the site. The areas tested included a sediment pond drained during the FBI site investigation.
Soil sampling areas included the excavated pit, the area surrounding the pit and the backfill material.
"The backfill material was made up mostly of soil and dirt excavated from the pit during the criminal investigation," Duritsa said.
The material was in an area most likely to be contaminated by jet fuel, he said.
"Tests showed the area is considered safe," Duritsa added.
Soil sampling was conducted in a grid pattern and samples were collected down to 6 inches, according to the DEP. A geoprobe was used throughout the crash site to evaluate deeper impacts. Groundwater samples were collected from four monitoring wells installed in the zone." - Pittsburg Tribune-Review (09/11/02)

► Town embraces role it never sought
"When Flight 93 came down, eyewitnesses agreed on a few facts: the Boeing 757 was headed southeast very fast. It was flying erratically and wobbling right and left, at a low altitude of roughly 2,500 feet. Its right wing dipped down suddenly and the jetliner plunged into the earth at nearly a 90-degree angle.
"I had just finished shoveling coal into the cellar (in preparation) for the winter, and was sittin' right on this front porch when I saw the plane coming down at a 45-degree angle," Nevin Lambert says. "I said to myself, 'Boy, that plane's in big trouble.' It was flippin' from one side to the other. I did not hear no engines on the plane. I didn't see no smoke. When it went nose down straight into the ground, I looked at my watch, and it was 10:07 a.m. Boy, I was scared."

After it stopped raining dirt and smoke and fiery debris, he later found a couple of pieces of metal from the aircraft in his yard.
While the FBI and other authorities have said the plane was mostly obliterated by the 500 mph impact, they also said a 1,000-pound piece of one of the engines was found "a considerable distance" from the crater in the wide open spaces of the Svonavec Coal Co.
The strip mine is composed of very soft black soil, and searchers said much of the wreckage was found buried 20 to 25 feet below the large crater. Debris washed up more than two miles away at Indian Lake, and a canceled check and brokerage statement from the plane were found in a valley 8 miles away.
Immediately following the crash, rumors surfaced that Flight 93 had been shot down. The Pentagon categorically denies that military aircraft downed the jet.
Most Americans are quite secure in their belief that a struggle between the passengers and the hijackers caused the crash.
Folks differ as to where the crash site actually is. Some call it Shanksville because that's where the media were kept, a mile away from the actual explosion. Some say it's actually in Stoystown. Others maintain it should be called Stony Creek Township." - Standard-Times (09/11/02)

► The day that changed America

"Dave Fox did go out to Skyline Drive, to the old strip mine, abandoned in 1996.
He saw the smoke. He drove out in the funeral van, expecting a skid crash, with fire and fuselage chunks, and the tail off to one side. And a survivor or two, God willing.
They couldn't find the plane.
At about 500 feet, with the wind so loud they could barely hear, the passengers had fought back. Several had forced their way into the cockpit, where the hijackers had the controls. They struggled, shouting, swearing. They grabbed at the instrument panel. Behind them, a woman cried.
The plane pitched, then rolled, belly up. It hit nose-first, like a lawn dart. It disintegrated, digging more than 30 feet into the earth, which was spongy from the old mine work.
The hemlocks caught fire. The jet fuel pooled. The wind played with paper scraps: a Bible page, some bank-machine receipts, the corner of a business card.
Fox stepped over a seat back. He saw a wiring harness, and a piston. None of the other pieces was bigger than a TV remote.
He saw three chunks of torn human tissue.
He'd assumed it was an accident. A Cessna, maybe. A spark in the fuel tank. A stuck rudder. He didn't connect it to the other planes, still crashing on cable TV.

------------

She stood there as the men hunched in contamination suits, sifting through what was left of the plane and the 44 people on board.

------------

The FBI arrived. The governor came. The Smithsonian sent forensics experts, pulled off an Indian dig.

The plane hit at about 575 mph. The cockpit and first-class cabin collapsed; the rest crumpled into it, the rivets giving, the fireball scorching everything.

Investigators crawled through the debris field, bagging bolts and bone fragments. They found chunks of seat cushion foam, and honeycombed sound insulators. Then a shoelace, some shirt buttons, and a wedding ring. Then part of a passport, and a necktie, still knotted.

Wallace Miller, the lanky, Civil War-studying county coroner, did see it. He sat at the family funeral home, his father, Wilbur, with him. They watched the second plane sweep in low, from nowhere. They winced when it hit.
He couldn't believe the scene. He saw the burnt trees, and some debris smoking in the dirt. He saw half a window frame. He saw shreds of that white cloth they put over the headrests.
He saw things in the trees.
He takes off his glasses, cleans them with his T-shirt. "This is the most eerie thing," he says. "I have not, to this day, seen a single drop of blood. Not a drop."
------------

"An extraordinary thing happened on that airplane," says Miller, who spent five months and $500,000 and found less than a tenth of the victims' remains." - Pittsburgh Live (09/11/02)

► Families of Flight 93 victims gather at Shanksville crash site

"Hamilton Peterson had steeled himself for his first visit to the site where his father and stepmother died a year ago in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93.

Yesterday, he was shown where the Newark-to-San-Francisco-bound Boeing 757 corkscrewed into the ground at more than 507 mph. He heard how debris from the impact, including human teeth and bone, were imbedded in nearby trees, and how bodies were reduced to no more than swatches of skin." - post-gazette.com (09/11/02)

► WHAT DID HAPPEN TO FLIGHT 93?

"India Lake also contributes to the view there was an explosion on board before the Newark-San Francisco flight came down. Debris rained down on the lake - a curious feat if, as the US government insists, there was no mid-air explosion and the plane was intact until it hit the ground.
"It was mainly mail, bits of in-flight magazine and scraps of seat cloth," Tom said. "The authorities say it was blown here by the wind." But there was only a 10mph breeze and you were a mile and a half away? Tom raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, that's what they reckon."
Light debris was also found eight miles away in New Baltimore. A section of engine weighing a ton was located 2,000 yards - over a mile -from the crash site. Theorists point out a Sidewinder heat-seeking missile attacks the hottest part of aircraft - the engine.
The authorities say the impact bounced it there. But the few pieces of surviving fuselage, local coroner Wallace Miller told us, were "no bigger than a carrier bag". - Daily Mirror (09/13/02)

► Coroner completes probe of Flight 93 site; Plans to acquire land for memorial underway

"A coroner has completed his investigation of the United Flight 93 crash site, saying less than 10 percent of the human remains were recovered from the site and he considers the land a cemetery.

Since the plane crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller has presided over the site near Shanksville, about 60 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. He has lead searches to recover remains of the 40 passengers and crew and the four hijackers, their personal effects, parts of the airplane and other evidence.
Miller, who said a final search in July turned up "two or three handfuls of aircraft debris" but no remains, announced Tuesday that he was officially ending his investigation.

Mike Svonavec, owner of Svonavec Inc., a coal company that owns 270 acres -- including the impact site -- said he intends to donate the land as soon as it is appraised." - 9news.com (08/27/03)

► Small town shoulders a nation's grief

"The point of impact is near the end of a pockmarked little lane, in a shallow basin next to a pond at the edge of a stand of pine trees charred by the initial blast.

The site had been mined for coal, then refilled with dirt. It was still soft when Flight 93 crashed, and firefighters said the Boeing 757 tunneled right in. They had to dig 15 feet to find it.

The impact was such that few human remains were found, and the site is considered hallowed ground, a heroes' graveyard. It is surrounded by a chain-link fence, with a single American flag hanging from it. The Sheriff's Department added 15 deputies to provide 24-hour security." - St. Petersburg Times (09/10/03)

► More land donated for Flight 93 memorial

"A coal company will donate 29 acres, including part of the site where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, and will become the third group to give away land that could be used for a national memorial.
PBS Coals Inc., based in Friedens, Somerset County, announced Tuesday that it was giving the land to The Conservation Fund, an Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit group working with Somerset County landowners and officials to preserve land for a memorial for the 40 passengers and crew who died on the flight.
With the coal company's donation, officials have garnered 175 of the 1,500 acres that a federal panel has said it would like for a permanent memorial around the crash site.
Last week, Pittsburgh-based Consol Energy announced that it had donated 140 acres of company-owned land. Last year, Tim Lambert, a Harrisburg-area resident, donated six acres to the nonprofit Families of Flight 93 Inc.
The National Park Service will lead a federal commission in designing a memorial to be placed at the crash site. President Bush has ordered that the design be completed and delivered to the Interior Department and Congress by 2005." - Post-Gazette.com (12/11/03)

► Flight 93 hijacker: 'Shall we finish it off?'

"Who actually put United Flight 93 into a death dive, causing it to slam into the Pennsylvania countryside on September 11, 2001, is revealed in the 9/11 commission report released Thursday.

The passenger revolt began at 9:57 a.m., nearly 30 minutes after the four terrorists aboard launched their takeover of the Boeing 757 loaded with more than 11,000 gallons of jet fuel.

"The airplane headed down; the control wheel was turned hard to the right. The airplane rolled onto its back..."

"...the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington, D.C."

The report says at least 10 passengers and two crew members contacted family, friends or others on the ground. They reported the hijackers were wearing red bandanas, forced passengers to the back of the plane and claimed a bomb was aboard, according to the report.
Flight 93 was the only hijacked plane that day with four hijackers aboard. All other flights had five hijackers." - CNN (07/23/04)

► Last seconds of United Flight 93

"Again and again, the heroic passengers and crew of United Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers, continuing their assault even when the plane was turned upside down." - New York Daily (07/23/04)

► Report sheds light on Flight 93 heroics

"The aircraft struck the earth at 580 mph outside Shanksville, 20 minutes' flying time from Washington. A passing National Guard cargo plane, which had earlier seen American Airlines Flight 77 strike the Pentagon, was passing over the Johnstown area at that point. It reported seeing black smoke rising from the ground near Johnstown." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (07/23/04)

► 9-11 Mysteries Remain; Three Years After Terror Attacks, Public Still Doubts ‘Official’ Story

"American Free Press visited Somerset County to look into some of the questions surrounding United Airlines Flight 93, which allegedly turned over and crashed in a refilled strip mine between Lambertsville and Shanksville, Pa., taking 44 lives with it.
Many local residents believe the plane was shot down, which they say would explain why parts of the plane and its contents were found strewn over a large area.
One question, “is what happened to the physical wreckage of the plane?”
“There was no plane,” Ernie Stull, mayor of Shanksville, told German television in March 2003:
“My sister and a good friend of mine were the first ones there,” Stull said. “They were standing on a street corner in Shanksville talking. Their car was nearby, so they were the first here—and the fire department came. Everyone was puzzled, because the call had been that a plane had crashed. But there was no plane.”
“They had been sent here because of a crash, but there was no plane?” the reporter asked.
“No. Nothing. Only this hole.”
When AFP asked Stull about his comments, he disagreed about when he had gone to the crash site. “A day or two later,” Stull said, was about when he went to the site. But he reiterated the fact that they saw little evidence of a plane crash.
Nena Lensbouer, who had prepared lunch for the workers at the scrap yard overlooking the crash site, was the first person to go up to the smoking crater.
Lensbouer told AFP that the hole was five to six feet deep and smaller than the 24-foot trailer in her front yard. She described hearing “an explosion, like an atomic bomb”—not a crash.
Lensbouer called 911 and stayed on the line as she ran across the reclaimed land of the former strip mine to within 15 feet of the smoking crater.
Lensbouer told AFP that she did not see any evidence of a plane then or at any time during the excavation at the site, an effort that reportedly recovered 95 percent of the plane and 10 percent of the human remains.
While specific details vary, the explanation for the disappearance of the plane is that the reclaimed land acted like liquid and absorbed the aircraft, which is said to have impacted at between 450 and 600 miles per hour.
This explanation is also used to explain why there was only a brief explosion with one short-lived smoke cloud, not unlike a bomb blast.
“I never saw that smoke,” Paula Long, an eyewitness, told AFP. Long ran “immediately” after hearing the crash but did not see the cloud of smoke caught in the now-famous photograph by Valencia McClatchey, she said.
“It [the ground] liquefied,” Bob Leverknight, an active member of the Air National Guard and correspondent with Somerset’s Daily American, told AFP regarding how the wreck and much of the fuel disappeared. One of the massive engines, Leverknight said, however, bounced off the ground and was found in the woods.
Jim Svonavec, whose company worked at the site and provided excavation equipment, told AFP that the recovery of the engine “at least 1,800 feet into the woods,” was done solely by FBI agents using his equipment." - American Free Press (09/17/04)

► 9/11: Debunking The Myths - Roving Engine

"Experts on the scene tell PM that a fan from one of the engines was recovered in a catchment basin, downhill from the crash site. Jeff Reinbold, the National Park Service representative responsible for the Flight 93 National Memorial, confirms the direction and distance from the crash site to the basin: just over 300 yards south, which means the fan landed in the direction the jet was traveling. "It's not unusual for an engine to move or tumble across the ground," says Michael K. Hynes, an airline accident expert who investigated the crash of TWA Flight 800 out of New York City in 1996. "When you have very high velocities, 500 mph or more," Hynes says, "you are talking about 700 to 800 ft. per second. For something to hit the ground with that kind of energy, it would only take a few seconds to bounce up and travel 300 yards." Numerous crash analysts contacted by PM concur." - Popular Mechanics (03/05)

► After Flight 93 spotlight, coroner stays true to small-town roots

"County Coroner Wallace Miller remembers hearing melting plastic drip from the trees, and days and weeks later, comforting the families of doomed Flight 93.
More often than not, the 6-foot-4 Miller, who is in his second term, has some connection to those people - Somerset County's population numbers fewer than 80,000.
After the crash he found himself in charge of a major crime scene, releasing the site to its owners only this past summer.
The secretary for the coroner in neighboring Cambria County was the first to alert Miller to trouble in his own back yard. The call came shortly after 10 a.m.
"'Hey Wally, do you need any help with your plane crash? Call me up and we'll get everybody up here,'" Miller recalled the secretary saying.
Many coroners were at a meeting in the eastern part of the state. Miller had planned to attend the next day.
"I was, 'What are you talking about?'
"She said, 'A jet crashed down in Lambertsville.' I said, 'No, it didn't. 911 didn't call.'
"This is a flight path, but you never see a jet around here lower than 20,000 feet," he says.
When he got to the scene, about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, there was little evidence that what crashed had been a plane.
The Boeing 757 hurtled into the ground at 580 mph, leaving a 20-by-10-foot deep gouge in the earth.
"I can just remember seeing very small bits of debris everywhere. There really wasn't any large sections of debris or aircraft," he says. "The thing that really struck my mind the most was hearing the melted plastic dripping out of the trees."
Miller knew no one could have survived. In his nearly four years as coroner at that point, he had just two homicide cases. Now, he had 40 - every passenger and crew member aboard the plane.
Miller assembled a team that included Cambia County Coroner Dennis Kwiatkowski and Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic anthropologist at Mercyhurst College. They began recovering human remains, a job that lasted weeks, with periodic sweeps since.
Only about 650 pounds of human remains, just 8 percent of the total the people on board would have weighed, were collected - leaving little traditional pathology work to do, Miller says. Much of the identification was done through DNA testing." - phillyBurbs (09/10/05)

► Triton's Clayton White on other side of recruiting

"You might say Clayton White's life has come full circle since February 1996.

White’s career didn’t end there, however. He eventually made the NFL’s New York Giants as a free agent and spent three seasons in the league, the last one in 2002 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

But the most lasting memory of White’s time in New York had nothing to do with football.
"We had played a Monday night game in Denver, and flew back home the next morning," White said. "We landed in Newark, N.J., about 6:45 in the morning. We usually get off the plane on the tarmac and board a bus to get to our cars.
"I noticed another plane sitting next to ours because the people were walking to the plane across the tarmac instead of through the jetway.
"Two weeks later, as we’re taking another plane to a game, one of the stewardesses informed us the plane that had been boarding next to us was Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. That was a very eerie feeling." - Fayetteville Observer (01/31/06)

► Families of 9/11 Victims Praise 'United 93'
"KING: We are discussing the film, "United 93," which opened today. Joining us now, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on site where the crash occurred, is Kevin Huzsek. Kevin is a paramedic, Somerset area ambulance area. He was dispatched to the scene within minutes of the flight and remained on site for nine hours.
And with him is Sergeant Anthony Deluca Pennsylvania State Police stationed commander troop T Somerset, fourth state trooper to arrive at the flight 93 crash site. Neither gentlemen has seen the film, both intend to see the film.
Kevin, what happened with you that day? What do you remember about the call and going to the site?
KEVIN HUZSEK, PARAMEDIC WHO ARRIVED AT CRASH SITE WITHIN MINUTES OF CRASH: Well, actually, we had been working on our ambulance outside, and within minutes of the crash actually being dispatched, we immediately left our station en route to the scene. Of course, when we arrived on scene, it was a little chaotic at first. There had been a lot of people within the crash site, residents, bystanders, seeing the plane go down.
However, we immediately got those people out of the site for safety reasons. I remember just actually pulling up on scene and seeing smoke, a large aircraft tire burning off around the crater. And at that time it had to have been a large aircraft that was actually down.
First instinct that we had thought about, we thought no survivors, but we actually did go down to the crash site and do a search, just to be on the safe side but obviously, nothing was found.
KING: Kevin, was it in a crater?
HUZSEK: Actually, right there, it was a crater, where the plane actually went down, but the plane parts were pretty much scattered throughout a large area, down through the trees and also where the jet fuel burned. There was burned out trees and still smoldering. I guess when the fuel was actually burned off, there was only small spot fires throughout the area.
KING: Sergeant Deluca, where were you? What happened to you that day?
SGT. ANTHONY DELUCA, PA STATE POLICE, 4TH TROOPER TO ARRIVE AT CRASH SCENE: Larry, I was at my station on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And I was in there, and I got a phone call reference to the first plane going into the World Trade Center. I went to my next office next door and my boss in there, Lieutenant Schmidt (ph) and I said let's watch TV real quick, there's a plane that went into the trade center.
When we saw the second plane go into the trade center, began to notify our troops that something was the matter. We had planes going into the World Trade Center. Probably around 10 minutes later, another plane went into the Pentagon at which time I had most of them back on station.
A short while later, we received information that a plane just went down in Shanksville, but they didn't say if it was a commercial airline or just a plane. Myself and my boss at that time Lieutenant Schmidt responded to the scene. We were met here. There was Trooper James Broderick, (ph) Trooper Grove (ph) and Trooper Pat Stewart (ph) were already on scene.
We assisted to get into the command. We came in off the lower end. There are some homes in the wooded area, just near the crater, there were some burning tires there. was some debris. And the first thing we realized it was a commercial airline when there was three seats from a commercial airline.
KING: Did you -- go ahead. I'm sorry.
DELUCA: And beyond the seats, I pulled out one of the cards that showed what type of plane it was, and we found out it was Boeing 757. And the other seat had a "United Magazine," so we knew we had a commercial airline.
When I did some surveillance in the wooded area to look for any survivors at one time I found a flight diary of Lorraine Bay. It was blowing in the wind. I picked the papers up that was around there and placed it back in there. At that time, I realize there was human tragedy in this accident.
KING: Did you associate, Sergeant Deluca -- that crash, did you immediately associate it with the World Trade Center and Pentagon?
DELUCA: After we found out that it was a commercial airliner, we began to think, yes, we did have a possible terrorist airplane." - CNN LARRY KING LIVE (04/28/06)

► About WITF FM 89.5 News:

Tim Lambert
Morning Edition host/reporter

"Since September 11, 2001, Tim has spent much of his time in Shanksville, Somerset County, where he owns some of the United Flight 93 crash site, working to assure the property will be home to a fitting memorial." - WITF

► Email from Tim Lambert:

Subject: RE: Follow-up question about engine found in pond
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006
From: "Tim Lambert" <tim_lambert@witf.org>
To: "Killtown" <killtown@yahoo.com>
i just checked an article i had written after my first trip to the site....it was a piece of fuselage that was recovered from the pond.
tim

► Sacred Ground in Pennsylvania

"In front of the shelter, names of the 40 heroes of Flight 93 are prominently displayed on benches that face the field where the plane crashed upside down at 10:03 a.m. at an estimated speed of over 500 miles per hour. As tragic as it was, the damage could have been much more extensive. The Boeing 757 could have carried 182 passengers. If the plane had remained airborne for another few seconds, a nearby school in the path of the flight would have been hit, explains Emily.
"The F.B.I. and state police were here within 30 minutes" of the crash, Emily notes. "The F.B.I. led the investigation."

Working With the F.B.I.
At the temporary memorial, Sally Svonavec, 64, greets her husband, Jim, and their son, Jamie, when the men drive up in their pickup truck. Members of St. Peter’s Parish in nearby Somerset, they explain how the family business, J & J Svonavec Excavating, became the only excavating company to work with the F.B.I. at the site.
Jim, 65, and Jamie, 34, have refused all previous requests for interviews: They wanted to tell their story to a Catholic publication. Men of few words, they admit it’s difficult returning to this site, where they dug through soil that contained pieces of the aircraft, personal items that belonged to those on board and human remains: No whole bodies were recovered.
Sally explains that she and Jim were in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on September 11, 2001, just beginning an overdue vacation. Jim had assured Jamie that he could handle business matters while they were gone.
Jim and Sally followed the shocking events of that morning on the news: They learned that two hijacked planes had hit the two towers of the World Trade Center, then a third plane crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth hijacked plane was being tracked over western Pennsylvania.
Later Jamie phoned them that the fourth plane had just crashed near Shanksville (about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh) on reclaimed strip-mined land where they had worked.
It didn’t take long for throngs of law-enforcement officers, who had been tracking the plane’s path, and other people, including Jamie, to reach the location where they could tell the aircraft had gone down. But it took a while to identify the exact location of impact because there was no plane visible. Sally remembers Jamie phoning them from the site and saying, "There is no plane there, believe me."
The location was eventually determined because of some disturbed ground in front of a grove of charred evergreens, explains Jamie. The ground had swallowed up much of the wreckage.
Because of their familiarity with the property, the Svonavecs were asked to work with the F.B.I. on recovery efforts. "We hired some extra people and worked one long shift, seven days a week," says Jim, a former federal mining inspector.
Using a Kobelco excavator, the process was slow and meticulous because “every bucket of material that was excavated went through screens,” explains Sally. Screening helped locate many body fragments and debris from the plane.
The plane "went in the ground so fast it didn’t have a chance to burn," says Jim. Authorities were especially anxious to find Flight 93’s “black boxes” (cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder) in hopes of discovering what happened during the doomed flight.
The flight data recorder was located on September 13, some 15 feet underground. The following day, the cockpit voice recorder was unearthed at a depth of 25 feet. The cockpit recording was played in public for the first time this past April during the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 9/11 attacks.
In honor of Jim’s role in finding the black boxes, a United Airlines official presented him with a hat he treasures. It says, “I found the box.” The excavators also found “a jacket that belonged to one of the terrorists,” explains Jim. The jacket contained the hijacker’s schedule for September 11. “We found the knives [the terrorists] used, too.”
Although only fragments of bodies were recovered, everyone was identified, including the hijackers, explains Emily Jerich. Pointing to a fenced-in field about 500 yards below the shelter, she explains that the public isn’t allowed there “because that is their burial area.”

Inside the Secure Area
Jim and Jamie receive clearance to drive me into the secured area, which is guarded by Somerset County deputies around the clock. We walk up to the fence and gaze at the now peaceful-looking field where Flight 93 crashed.
Jim points to a grove of hemlocks behind the field and explains that the impact “burned about an acre of those trees.” From this proximity, it’s obvious that the lower parts of the trees in front are charred.
They describe some of the memorable items they saw during the excavation, such as a coiled snake that appeared “petrified” as a result of the blast from the crash. Bibles that had been on the plane were found aboveground, unburned and opened to passages that seemed prophetic.
Compassionate Coroner
Unlike the Svonavecs, the coroner of Somerset County has been interviewed by reporters from around the world. “I found out what it is to be a public figure,” says Wallace Miller, who succeeded his father in running Miller Funeral Home and getting elected as coroner. The likable guy everyone calls “Wally” was reelected last November with over 82 percent of the votes.
Wally discusses his career, his marriage and his faith at the Somerset location of the family business, where he works with his wife, Arlene, and his father, Wilbur. The Millers manage a second funeral home in nearby Rockwood.

Nothing Negative
Although he downplays his own role in the case of Flight 93, Wally’s involvement was well documented by the media.
“As coroner, responsible for returning human remains, Miller has been forced to share with the families information that is unimaginable,” reported The Washington Post. “[T]he 33 passengers, seven crew and four hijackers together weighed roughly 7,000 pounds. They were essentially cremated together upon impact. Hundreds of searchers who climbed the hemlocks and combed the woods for weeks were able to find about 1,500 mostly scorched samples of human tissue totaling less than 600 pounds, or about eight percent of the total.”
Identification was made by using dental and medical records, fingerprints and DNA.
A few weeks after the crash, Wally said, “I consider this site almost like a cemetery,” reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “When you walk through a cemetery and you see debris, you pick it up.”
He has led many searches for evidence. In July 2005, The Associated Press reported that Wally and over two dozen volunteers “made a final sweep of the property, looking for debris.” They found airplane fragments and a small amount of human remains. “I now feel it’s appropriate to close my involvement in the case,” said Wally at the time.
Special Assignment
John and Doreen Loiodici are among the Red Cross volunteers who worked at the crash site during recovery efforts. As members of St. Peter’s Parish, they know the Millers and Svonavecs.
The Loiodicis’ accent betrays the fact that they’re transplants to Rockwood from Long Island, where many of their relatives still live. Due to telephone problems during the period immediately following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, “We couldn’t get hold of them and they couldn’t get hold of us,” explains John, 45.
Working at the crash site, which became known as “The Pit,” Doreen, 44, says she and John encountered people “from every branch of government you could imagine,” such as “F.B.I., state police and ATF.”
Due to security at the crash site, workers were discouraged from leaving during their shift each day, so volunteers attended to their needs. “We served meals to everyone who worked in The Pit,” says Doreen.
Impact Continues
The local people have become very protective of this site that some call a cemetery and others refer to as sacred or hallowed ground. They want to see a respectful memorial but are concerned about the escalating size and cost, and the tourism industry that is bound to follow.
One thing that’s certain: The crash of Flight 93 in Somerset County will continue to have a lasting impact on residents and visitors." - St. Anthony Messenger Online (09/06)

► personal stories: instructions for the last night

"U.S. authorities found this letter handwritten in Arabic in the suitcase of Mohamed Atta. It includes Islamic prayers, instructions for a last night of life, and a practical checklist of reminders for the final operation. The FBI released an untranslated copy of the letter; the British newspaper The Observer published this translation. Additional copies of this letter were found at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania and at a Dulles International Airport parking lot in a car registered to one of the hijackers on American Flight 77.

"When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, 'Allahu Akbar,' because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers." - PBS/Frontline

► "WE HAVE SOME PLANES"

"The airplane headed down; the control wheel was turned hard to the right. The airplane rolled onto its back, and one of the hijackers began shouting "Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest." With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington, D.C." - 9/11 Commission [local]

► September 11, 2001 - The FAA Responds

"Horak, along with many others, used picks and shovels to scour the crash site for aircraft parts, including the voice and data recorders and any other material that would help in the investigation.
At one point, searchers stopped using hand tools and brought in a backhoe to assist with the search. Thursday night, as the backhoe was moving mounds of dirt in a crater that was about 30 feet deep, the flight data recorder fell to the ground. The cockpit voice recorder was found later." - FAA

► NTSB Identification: DCA01MA065.
Scheduled 14 CFR Part 121: Air Carrier operation of United Airlines
Accident occurred Tuesday, September 11, 2001 in Shanksville, PA
Probable Cause Approval Date: 3/7/2006
Aircraft: Boeing 757, registration: N591UA
Injuries: 44 Fatal.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Safety Board provided requested technical assistance to the FBI, and any material generated by the NTSB is under the control of the FBI. The Safety Board does not plan to issue a report or open a public docket.
The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:
The Safety Board did not determine the probable cause and does not plan to issue a report or open a public docket. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Safety Board provided requested technical assistance to the FBI, and any material generated by the NTSB is under the control of the FBI." - NTSB

► Study of Autopilot, Navigation Equipment, and Fuel Consumption Activity Based on United Airlines Flight 93 and American Airlines Flight 77 Digital Flight Data Recorder Information

A. SUBJECT AIRCRAFT
Location: Shanksville, PA
Date: September 11, 2001
Time: 10:03 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Flight: United Airlines Flight 93
Aircraft: Boeing 757-200, registration: N591UA
NTSB#: DCA01MA065

C. SUMMARY
This document describes information obtained from the Digital Flight Data Recorders (DFDRs) of the subject aircraft concerning the use of the airplane autoflight and navigation systems both before and after the hijacking events, and presents fuel on board calculations based on the DFDR fuel flow data.

D. AUTOFLIGHT SYSTEMS DESCRIPTION AND ACTIVITY

UAL 93 Autoflight Activity
Figure 2 shows a time history of the various autopilot and autothrottle modes engaged on Flight 93, from takeoff from Newark to the end of the DFDR data at impact. Also shown in the Figure are the values of speeds, altitudes, headings, and climb/descent rates set in the MCP, along with the values of those parameters that the airplane actually flew.
For most of the flight, until shortly after the hijackers took control of the cockpit (at approximately 09:30), both the Captain’s and First Officer’s Flight Directors were on. During the takeoff, the autopilot was off, and the Flight Director was issuing roll commands based on inputs made in the MCP, and pitch commands based on inputs coming alternatively from the FMC (when in VNAV mode) or from the MCP (when in Altitude Hold or Flight Change modes). Once the flight was cleared to its 35,000 ft. cruising altitude, the autopilot was engaged in LNAV and VNAV modes, which use inputs from the FMC to guide the airplane along the desired horizontal and vertical flight path.
The autothrottle was engaged throughout the flight. During the climb the autothrottle mode varied between climb thrust mode, airspeed hold mode, and flight level change mode. Upon reaching the 35,000 cruise altitude, the autothrottle switched to a Mach number hold cruise mode, applying thrust to achieve a Mach number of 0.82.
At about 09:33, the autoflight modes started to change. Both the Captain and First Officer’s flight directors were turned off, and at about 09:34 the autopilot was turned off briefly. After the autopilot was reengaged (less than a minute later), up until the last three minutes of the flight it operated in modes that receive inputs from the MCP (i.e., target values of altitude, speed, heading, and descent rate set directly by the operators of the aircraft) rather than from the FMC. The autopilot was off for the last three minutes of the flight.
The autothrottle switched from a Mach hold mode to an airspeed hold mode at about 9:33:30, and remained in this mode for the remainder of the flight, except for brief periods where the airspeed was either below or above pre-set limits and the autothrottle adjusted thrust in an attempt to correct the situation (these are the MIN SPD and SPD LIMIT modes).
From 09:33 to the time the autopilot was turned off (about 10:00), the airplane was maneuvered horizontally via the heading select and heading hold modes, with the desired heading set on the MCP. The bottom graph in Figure 2 shows the magnetic heading selected in the MCP was 120 degrees, and also shows the airplane turning towards that heading. From the airplane’s position at this point, a magnetic heading of 120 degrees would put the airplane on course for Washington, D.C.. At 09:57, the heading selected in the MCP is changed to 90 degrees. About half a minute later, the autopilot switches from heading hold to heading select modes, and the airplane turns to the 90 degree heading selected in the MCP.
From 09:33 to the time the autopilot was turned off, the airplane was maneuvered vertically using the vertical speed and altitude hold modes. In the vertical speed mode, the desired rate of climb or descent is set in the MCP. In altitude hold mode, the airplane maintains the altitude at which the altitude hold mode button on the MCP is pressed. As shown in Figure 2, initially the vertical speed selected was about +1,500 ft/min, and the airplane climbed accordingly. Interestingly, at the same time, the altitude selected in the MCP was 9,600 feet (lower than the current airplane altitude). At about 09:38 the autopilot entered altitude hold mode at 40,700 feet. A couple of minutes later, the autopilot re-entered vertical speed mode, with a descent rate of -4,200 feet/minute selected in the MCP, and the airplane started to descend. At about 09:47, this descent rate in the MCP was adjusted to about -1,300 feet/minute. At around the same time, the altitude set in the MCP was adjusted to about 5,000 feet. This suggests that the intent of the operators may have been to descend to 5,000 feet.
At about 10:00, the autopilot was turned off, and remained off for the remaining three minutes of the flight.

D. NAVIGATION SYSTEMS DESCRIPTION AND ACTIVITY

UAL 93 Navigation System Activity
Figure 4 shows the VOR stations tuned to by the two VOR receivers on United Flight 93. At the bottom of the Figure, the EFIS mode is shown. For most of the fight, the EFIS is in “MAP” mode.
As in Figure 3, the points during the flight at which the EFIS mode switched to MAP mode and then to VOR mode are shown on the map in Figure 4 as yellow diamonds. The VOR stations tuned by the left and right VOR receivers are indicated by lines from the airplane flight path to the stations. The point on the flight path from which the lines originate are the points at which the station was first tuned.
As with Flight 77, while the EFIS was in MAP mode, the left and right VOR receivers were tuned to stations whose bearings from the airplane differed by about 90 degrees, at the time at which the VOR station pairs were changed. Again, this illustrates the method the system
uses for obtaining VOR position fixes to update the INS.
Shortly after the EFIS was switched to VOR mode, the frequency of the left VOR receiver was set to 111.0 MHz, corresponding to the VOR station located at Washington Reagan National Airport (DCA). At the time the DCA frequency was selected, the station was too far away for its signals to be received by the receiver. If DCA VOR had been in range, the display on the EHSI could have been used to show the airplane’s position relative to an inbound radial to DCA, and thus help navigate the airplane towards DCA. The selection of the DCA VOR frequency in the airplane’s left VOR receiver suggests that the operators of the airplane had an interest in DCA, and may have wanted to use that VOR station to help navigate the airplane towards Washington.
The magnetic heading of 120 degrees selected in the autopilot MCP was the correct heading for flying to Washington. However, even though the EFIS was in the MAP mode at the time, it was in the 80 nautical mile range setting, and so would not have shown DCA on the display; consequently, it is unlikely that the hijackers used the map display on the EHSI to deduce the correct heading for Washington. It follows that the hijackers had some other means of obtaining this heading.
A surprising element in the navigation of flight 93 is the rapid descent from cruise altitudes while still approximately 260 nautical miles from the (presumed) target. If the hijacker’s destination was Washington, they started their descent very prematurely. Figure 5 compares the descent profiles of all four airplanes hijacked on September 11. Note that by the time AAL 11, UAL 175, and AAL 77 descended below 5,000 feet, they were all within 10 NM of their targets. UAL 93, on the other hand, descended to 5,000 feet while still 135 NM from Washington.

E. FUEL CONSUMPTION AND FUEL REMAINING CALCULATIONS

UAL 93 Fuel Consumption
Figure 7 shows fuel flow and fuel remaining for UAL Flight 93, calculated in the same way as just described for AAL Flight 77.

Based on ACARS transmissions to the airplane, the fuel load on takeoff was 48,700 lb. This results in about 37,500 lb. of fuel remaining upon impact (the end of the DFDR data). If instead of descending to about 5,000 feet over Pennsylvania, Flight 93 had continued cruising at 35,000 feet to Washington, it would have arrived over Washington with about 35,500 lb. of fuel on board. - NTSB (02/13/02)

*One pound of jet fuel = 6.84 pounds per gallon.  37,500 = approx. 5,500 gal.

► September 11, 2001 Flight 93; Stonycreek Township, Somerset County, PA

Somerset County
Emergency Services
• 29 Fire Departments
• 12 EMS Services
• 21 Police Agencies
• 1 Haz Mat Team
• EMA Staff – 5 Paid
• 911 Staff – 12 Full Time, 5 Part Time
• 4 Position 911 Center
• Covering 1085 Square Miles
• Population of 78,000

September 11
• Clear Skies
• Light Wind
• Warm with temperatures in the 70s
• Quiet Day in Somerset County
• 3 Telecommunicators on duty
• Routine EMA Staff

Newark, NJ to San Francisco, Ca
• Light Passenger Load
• Full of Fuel
• Minimal Crew?
• Started on it’s Flight plan
• Data Block Lost on Radar During Flight
• Turned Southeast near Cleveland

Flight 93
• United Airlines Boeing 757
• 44 People on Board
• 33 passengers
• 7 Crewmembers
• 4 Terrorists - EPA

► Flight 93 stats

Airline:                United Airlines

Aircraft:               Boeing 757-222

Location:               Somerset, Pennsylvania, USA

Registration:           N591UA

Previous Registrations: ---

Flight Number:          93

Fatalities:             45:45

MSN:                    28142

Line Number:            718

Engine Manufacturer:    Pratt & Whitney

Engine Model:           PW2037

Year of Delivery:       1996

- Airdisaster.com

► Boeing 757 Specifications

Dimensions           Feet
Wing Span            124.10
Tail Height          44.6
Interior Cabin Width 11.7
Length               155.3
Crew & Passengers    2 Pilots 192 Passengers
Cruise Speed         530 mph
Max Fuel Capacity    11,489 gal
Max Takeoff Weight   255,000 lb (115,680 kg) [115 tons]

Max Range            3,900 - 4,520 miles

- Sources:  Boeing, FOX

► NTSB UA 93 reports

- United Airlines Flight 93 FDR Report (PDF)
- ATC Report United Airlines Flight 93 (PDF)
- Flight Path Study United Airlines Flight 93 (PDF)
- Autopilot American Airlines Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight 93 Study (PDF)
- Recorded Radar Data Study all Four Aircraft (PDF)

- NTSB

To preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic.

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