SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — A United Airlines jetliner crashed Tuesday morning in western Pennsylvania, the airline said. Minutes earlier, a man who said he was a passenger on the plane told an emergency dispatcher in a cell phone call: "We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!"
United said 45 people were aboard Flight 93 from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco. The fate of the passengers was not immediately announced. The Boeing 757 crashed north of Somerset County airport, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, following terrorism attacks in New York City and in Washington, D.C.
The crash was one of four reported Tuesday by United and American Airlines. Two crashed into the World Trade Center and one hit the Pentagon in Washington.
In Pennsylvania, an emergency dispatcher received a cell phone call at 9:58 a.m. from a man who said he was a passenger locked in a bathroom aboard United Flight 93, said dispatch supervisor Glenn Cramer in neighboring Westmoreland County. The man repeatedly told officials the call was not a hoax.
"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" Cramer quoted the man from a transcript of the call.
The man told dispatchers the plane "was going down. He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him," Cramer said.
Flight 93 crashed about 10 a.m. about 8 miles east of Jennerstown, according to officials at the scene.
"There's a crater gorged in the earth, the plane is pretty much disintegrated. There's nothing left but scorched trees," said Mark Stahl of Somerset who went to the scene.
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