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.

[url]www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34186,00.html[/url]

That's why they keep telling us not to use our cell phones on planes! (Black humor, sorry, but I can't posibly fathom the terror right now)

Actually the plane was shot down by one of our scrambled fighters.

Whre is this reported? I have seen this insinuated & wondered myself. Really curious.

Initial reports denied US fighters shot down the jets.

It's all in the wording, are there any SAM sites around there?

They showed footage of the "crash site" from PA, and it did not appear that a plane had crashed there. There was no debris, just a hole in the ground. I wonder when we will find out what really happened to make the flight crash.

Right before the plane was announced as being downed, the reporters in DC were talking about a confirmed report that an airplane was heading towards DC and would be their in an estimated time of 10 minutes.  

Next thing I hear about is a crash.

There were fighter planes scrambled to shoot down any jet liner that strayed.

Also, it stands to reason that there were ground defenses on alert at the same time.  

Just a few guesses and facts to add to the pot.  Obviously pennsylvania is more that 10 minutes from DC, but this is an interesting coincidence.

the guy on the phone reports an explosion and smoke while they were still airborne, sounds lke a missile hit to me