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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.

The device that electronically records the aircraft's instruments in the final moments before a plane crashes was packaged for transport to Washington, D.C., for analysis by officials from the National Transportation Safety Board, Crowley said.

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

Meanwhile, speculation continued to swirl around reports that a military fighter jet was seen in the vicinity immediately after the crash.

According to the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph, FAA employees at an air-traffic control center near Boston learned from controllers at other facilities that an F-16 "stayed in hot pursuit" of the 757.

By 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Air Force had taken control of all U.S. airspace, the unidentified controller told the Telegraph. A few minutes later, the Boeing crashed in Stonycreek Township.

The F-16 made 360-degree turns to stay close to the 757, the Telegraph reported. "He must've seen the whole thing," the FAA employee said of the F-16's pilot.

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.

He did not know the types of planes, nor could he discuss the altitudes at which they were flying.

Military planes sometimes "shadow" airliners that are in trouble or have lost radio communications, as part of efforts to re-establish contact.

An Air Force spokeswoman at North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado, Capt. Adriane Craig, said the military could neither confirm nor deny whether an airplane was following the United 757.

Neither NORAD nor the Air Force releases information about where its jets are flying at any given time, or what their patrol routes are over metropolitan areas, Craig said.

Crowley discounted rumors that the military shot down the jetliner in a sparsely populated area to keep it away from the White House and other possible targets in Washington, D.C.

"There was no military involvement," Crowley said.

NORAD issued its own denial yesterday afternoon, "confirm(ing) that the United Airlines jetliner that crashed outside Somerset ... was not downed by a U.S. military aircraft."

"NORAD-allocated forces have not engaged with weapons any aircraft, including Flight 93," the statement said.

A Canadian aviation expert told the Tribune-Review that the concept of a U.S. Air Force jet shooting down the 757 "seems a bit bizarre."

"It's not a very palatable piece of news for the American public," said Victor Ujimoro, a professor of aviation management at the University of Western Ontario.

Although Ujimoro said he doubted the rumor was true, he could understand why "it may not be too far-fetched of a hypothesis to entertain."

"There (were) already other aircraft hitting the Trade Center," Ujimoro said. "The third plane flew from Dulles to the Pentagon, and the fourth plane (Flight 93) is possibly going to Camp David."

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, President Bush's nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said fighters and other aircraft were mobilized Tuesday in response to the hijackings.

Air Force Gen. Richard Myers emphatically denied that Flight 93 was shot down.

"The armed forces did not shoot down any aircraft," he said. "When it became clear what the threat was, we did scramble fighter aircraft, AWACS radar aircraft and tanker aircraft to begin to establish orbits in case other aircraft showed up in the FAA system that were hijacked, but we never actually had to use force."

Investigators have not ruled out the possibility that the terrorists had a bomb on board the plane, the FBI's Crowley said.

"We have no information to lead us either way. We need them (the flight recorders) to determine if that happened," he said.

Crowley said evidence recovery teams will continue to look for the cockpit voice recorder. Known as "black boxes," the recorders are encased in orange containers designed to withstand the impact of a crash.

The flight data recorder can tell investigators such things as the speed of the aircraft, its altitude, the amount of fuel and the position of its rudders and flaps. Impact is supposed to trigger a transponder that emits an electronic signal that enables searchers to track its location on the ground.

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.

The discovery of the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorders are critical to determining the cause of the crash, according to U.S. Rep. John Murtha, a Johnstown Democrat, who visited the scene Wednesday morning.

Murtha said he was told that conversations overheard by air traffic controllers at the Cleveland FAA center revealed that there was a struggle going on inside the cockpit, perhaps between members of the flight crew and the hijackers armed with plastic knives and boxcutters.

"We have not seen anything to contradict this," Crowley added.

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.

An evidence collection team comprising technicians from several different federal law enforcement agencies has been working since Tuesday, collecting parts of the airplane and human remains, as well as searching for the recorders.

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."

Tribune-Review staff writer Jason Togyer and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Lisa Beamer said her husband called Jefferson on a GTE Airfone at 9:45 a.m., after the passengers aboard his flight had learned that Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center. By that time, the hijackers aboard Flight 93 had stabbed one passenger to death. The United pilots, Jason Dahl and Leroy Homer, had also been injured, Beamer told Jefferson, though he did not say how seriously.
The remaining passengers and crew were broken up into two groups; some were herded together in the first-class compartment, but most were told to sit on the floor in a galley at the rear of the 757-200’s 110-foot cabin, Beamer told Jefferson.

Beamer's call connected at 9:45 a.m. He told Jefferson there were three hijackers, armed with knives. He did not know their nationalities or their intentions.

Charles Lane and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 13, 2001; Page A01

As United Airlines Flight 93 entered its last desperate moments in the sky, 31-year-old passenger Jeremy Glick used a cell phone to tell his wife, Lyzbeth, of his impending death -- and pledged to go down fighting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bingham managed to tell his aunt and mother, Alice Hoglan, only that the plane had been hijacked and that he loved them before the phone "went dead," Kathy Hoglan said. But the 6-foot-5 former University of California rugby player would undoubtedly have joined any such effort, she said.

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

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

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

The hijackers had also told people on the plane flying from Boston to Los Angeles that they planned to crash the aircraft in New York City, the sources said.

Passengers on S.F. flight died heroes
Families tell how loved ones threw hijackers off course

Passengers aboard a doomed United Airlines flight to San Francisco, knowing that other jetliners had crashed into the World Trade Center, fought it out with hijackers to keep the plane from being steered into a Washington, D.C., landmark, authorities and victims' relatives said yesterday.

Among the possible targets was the White House, officials said. Instead, United Flight 93 went down in southwestern Pennsylvania Tuesday morning, killing all 45 aboard.

Several passengers' relatives passed along news and listened as their loved ones wondered aloud in phone calls from the airliner what they should do about the terrorists who had commandeered the plane.

"If we are going to crash into something . . . let's not let that happen," Jeremy Glick, a sales executive for a San Francisco company, told his wife. "Our best chance is to fight these people, rather than accept it."

The plane had left Newark, N.J., just after 8 a.m. EDT. Nothing appears to have been amiss until it approached Cleveland, when it banked sharply and headed back over Pennsylvania, losing altitude and flying erratically.

Glick got on a seat phone to his wife, Lyzbeth. Thomas Burnett called his wife in San Ramon.

From those conversations and others, authorities have pieced together a picture of what happened.

Three hijackers, who looked Middle Eastern and wore red headbands, were armed with ceramic knives they had smuggled aboard, defeating metal detectors, as well as box cutters and razors.

They also carried a red box they said contained a bomb. Officials now doubt there was one, but passengers had no way of knowing.

The three -- who authorities say they now have identified -- herded the passengers to the rear of the plane. They stabbed one of the pilots to death.

The plane headed toward Washington. That's when passengers -- told by their captors to call home to say goodbye -- confided to their loved ones about a plan to foil the hijackers.

The plan came after passenger Burnett made a series of calls over a 45- minute span to his wife, Deena, telling her first to call 911, which she did.

Burnett mentioned the possibility of forcing the plane into the ground and then listened intently when she told him details of the World Trade Center attack.

In his last call, he said a group of passengers had resolved to ''do something." She told him to sit down, and not to draw attention to himself, but he said no.

"I know that's he's a fighter, so I'm not surprised he planned to save everyone's life," she said yesterday. "He kept focusing on what they were going to do. I didn't even get a chance to say anything personal to him before he hung up."

As Burnett was talking to his wife, Glick was on the phone to his in-laws' home in upstate New York, where his wife was staying with the couple's 11-week- old daughter, Emerson.

The World Trade Center towers in New York had already been hit, and Glick's family was worried about his flight. He was supposed to have been on a plane Monday to San Francisco for a meeting at his Internet company, Vividence, but the flight was canceled.

At first, the family was relieved to hear Glick's voice. Then he recounted the unfolding terror.

"Calm down, you have to be brave, you have to be strong," Jeremy told her, according to Lyzbeth's father, Richard Makely.

Lyzbeth's mother got on her cell phone and called 911. State troopers asked questions that were relayed through Lyzbeth to Jeremy on the flight, Makely said.

Over the next 20 minutes, the Makelys and Lyzbeth listened on the phone as Jeremy struggled with what to do.

"How did these people ever get on this flight with knives and bombs? How could this happen?" Jeremy asked. ''How could this be, that we could be taken by surprise by these armed people?"

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September 13, 2001

UNITED FLIGHT 93

On Doomed Flight, Passengers Vowed to Perish Fighting

By JODI WILGOREN and EDWARD WONG

They told the people they loved that they would die fighting.

Mark Bingham, 31, a public relations executive was killed Tuesday, when hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco crashed in rural southwest Pennsylvania.

In a series of cellular telephone calls to their wives, two passengers aboard the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field instead of possibly toppling a national landmark learned about the horror of the World Trade Center. From 35,000 feet, they relayed harrowing details about the hijacking in progress to the police. And they vowed to try to thwart the enemy, to prevent others from dying even if they could not save themselves.

Lyzbeth Glick, 31, of Hewitt, N.J., said her husband, Jeremy, told her that three or four 6-foot-plus passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark bound for San Francisco planned to take a vote about how to proceed, and joked about taking on the hijackers with the butter knives from the in-flight breakfast. In a telephone interview last night, Ms. Glick said her husband told her "three Arab-looking men with red headbands," carrying a knife and talking about a bomb, took control of the aircraft.

"He was a man who would not let things happen," she said of her high school sweetheart and husband of five years, the father of a 12-week-old daughter, Emerson. "He was a hero for what he did, but he was a hero for me because he told me not to be sad and to take care of our daughter and he said whatever happened he would be O.K. with any choices I make.

"He said, `I love you, stay on the line,' but I couldn't," added Ms. Glick, 31, a teacher at Berkeley College. "I gave the phone to my dad. I don't want to know what happened."

Another passenger, Thomas E. Burnett Jr., an executive at a San Francisco-area medical device company, told his wife, Deena, that one passenger had already been stabbed to death but that a group was "getting ready to do something."

"I pleaded with him to please sit down and not draw attention to himself," Ms. Burnett, the mother of three young daughters, told a San Francisco television station. "And he said: `No, no. If they're going to run this into the ground we're going to have to do something.' And he hung up and he never called back."

The accounts revealed a spirit of defiance amid the desperation. Relatives and friends and a congressman who represents the area around the crash site in Pennsylvania hailed the fallen passengers as patriots.

"Apparently they made enough of a difference that the plane did not complete its mission," said Lyzbeth Glick's uncle, Tom Crowley, of Atlanta. In an e-mail message forwarded far and wide, Mr. Crowley urged: "May we remember Jeremy and the other brave souls as heroes, soldiers and Americans on United Flight 93 who so gallantly gave their lives to save many others."

Jason Dahl was the captain of United Airlines Flight 93.

Like others on the doomed plane, Mr. Glick, 31, and Mr. Burnett, 38, had not originally planned to be aboard the 8 a.m. flight. Mr. Glick, who worked for an Internet company called Vividence, was heading to the West Coast on business, and Mr. Burnett, chief operating officer for Thoratec Corporation, was returning home from a visit to the company's Edison, N.J., office.

Lauren Grandcolas of San Rafael, Calif., left an early-morning message on her husband's answering machine saying she would be home earlier than expected from her grandmother's funeral. Mark Bingham, 31, who ran a public relations firm, had felt too sick to fly on Monday, but was racing to make an afternoon meeting with a client in San Francisco.

The plane was airborne by 8:44 a.m., according to radar logs, and headed west, flying apparently without incident until it reached Cleveland about 50 minutes later. At 9:37, it turned south and headed back the way it came. Mr. Bingham, a 6-foot-5 former rugby player who this summer ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, called his mother, Alice Hoglan. "He said, `Three guys have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb,' " said Ms. Hoglan, a United flight attendant.

CNN reported last night that it had obtained a partial transcript of cockpit chatter, and that a source who had listened to the air-traffic control tape said a man with an Arabic accent had said in broken English: "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."

Another passenger on the sparsely populated plane barricaded himself in the bathroom and dialed 911. Ms. Grandcolas tried to wake her husband, Jack, but got the answering machine. "We're having problems," she said, according to her neighbor, Dave Shapiro, who listened the message. "But I'm comfortable," she said, and then, after a pause, added, "for now."

Mr. Glick, a muscular 6-foot-4 water sportsman, and Mr. Burnett, a 6-1 former high school football player, called their wives over and over, from about 9:30 a.m. until the crash at about 10:10 a.m., chronicling what was happening, urging them to call the authorities, vowing to fight, saying goodbye.

"He sounded sad and scared, but calm at the same time," Ms. Glick said. "He said people weren't too panicked. They had moved everybody to the back of the plane. The three men were in the cockpit, but he didn't see the pilots and they made no contact with the passengers, so my feeling is they must have killed them."

In a radio interview with KCBS in San Francisco, Ms. Burnett said her husband of nine years called four times - first just reporting the hijacking, later asking her for information about the World Trade Center disaster, eventually suggesting the passengers were formulating a plan to respond.

"I could tell that he was alarmed and trying to piece together the puzzle, trying to figure out what was going on and what he could do about the situation," Ms. Burnett said. "He was not giving up. His adrenaline was going. And you could just tell that he had every intention of solving the problem and coming on home."

Ms. Glick said that at one point, she managed to create a conference call between her husband and 911 dispatchers. "Jeremy tracked the second-by-second details and relayed them to the police by phone," Mr. Crowley wrote in his e-mail account of the calls. "After several minutes describing the scene, Jeremy and several other passengers decided there was nothing to lose by rushing the hijackers."

At the crash site near Shanksville, Pa., a local politician and law enforcement officials said the wives' accounts made sense.

"I would conclude there was a struggle, and a heroic individual decided they were going to die anyway and, `Let's bring the plane down here,' " said Representative John P. Murtha, a Democrat who represents the area and serves on the Defense Appropriations Committee.

An F.B.I. official said of Mr. Murtha's theory, "It's reasonable what he said, but how could you know?"

While the women cherished their final words and their husbands' seeming heroism, other people's relatives and friends struggled to reconstruct their last conversations with their lost loved ones.

Between sobs, Doris Gronlund recalled how her daughter, Linda, an environmental lawyer from Long Island who was headed for a vacation in wine country with her boyfriend, Joseph DeLuca, called on Monday to relay her flight numbers, just in case anything happened.

David Markmann last saw his upstairs neighbor, Honor Elizabeth Wainio, on Sunday night, standing on her balcony in Plainfield, N.J. Ms. Wainio, 28, who was a regional manager of the Discovery Channel's retail stores.

When the Newark flight crashed, "things started clicking in my mind," Mr. Markmann said. He dialed Ms. Wainio's home number - no answer. The cell phone rang four times and went to voice mail. He called again, and again and again and again, 15 times or more, until 2 p.m. yesterday, when he saw the list of Flight 93's passengers on the United Airlines Web site.

"I wasn't getting a phone call back," he said, "so I kind of had a feeling."

Vivian S. Toy contributed to this article.

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Other passengers were FORCED TO CALL their families to tell them that they were going to die. Why would the hijackers put out this warning? The article definitely says "forced to call". See: Flight 77: 'Our Plane Is Being Hijacked' (washingtonpost.com) See:

ABCNEWS' JOHN NANCE at 8:26 p.m. ET
When notification of a hijacking or possible hijacking rumbles through the air traffic control system, it becomes a general alert and is tracked not only at the local facility, such as an air route traffic control center, but is also tracked and coordinated at the Herndon, Virginia facility that is the master control center for the entire air traffic control system (like mission control at NASA).





	NORAD notification time

Flight	CNN	NORAD

11	8:38	8:40
175	8:43	8:43
93	9:16 >>	Information not available <<
77	9:25	9:24

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We know it crashed, but not why

FBI is silent, fueling "shot down" rumors