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| Day of Terror: Outside tiny Shanksville, a fourth deadly stroke Wednesday, September 12, 2001 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 Washington Post reported that leaders of Congress -- including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo. -- were told at a briefing by the Capitol Police that the hijacked plane might have been bound for the Capitol or Camp David, the presidential retreat in Thurmont, Md., 85 miles southeast of the crash site, according to participants in the meeting. The participants discussed a possible shoot down of the aircraft, said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. |
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| 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. |
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| Authorities weren't ready yesterday to pronounce the crash a result of terrorism. But a telling detail came minutes before the plane went down when dispatchers at the Westmoreland County Emergency Operations Center intercepted a frantic cell phone call made to 911 by a passenger aboard the doomed flight. "We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" the man told dispatchers in a quivering voice during a conversation that lasted about one minute. "We got the call about 9:58 this morning from a male passenger stating that he was locked in the bathroom of United Flight 93 traveling from Newark to San Francisco, and they were being hijacked," said Glenn Cramer, a 911 supervisor. "We confirmed that with him several times and we asked him to repeat what he said. He was very distraught. He said he believeD the plane was going down. He did hear some sort of an explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane, but he didn't know where. "And then we lost contact with him." |
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| Agents seized the 911 dispatch tape from Westmoreland County as part of their investigation. |
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| Murtha also said the Pentagon denied reports that the 757 was being shadowed by U.S. military aircraft. But he suggested that terrorists would have picked the 757 because it would have worked as a fuel-packed bomb. A 757-200 can carry up to 11,276 gallons of fuel. |
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| 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. |
| QUOTE (thehighwaymanq @ Dec 2 2007, 03:40 PM) |
| TC, you ever see this? |