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United said Flight 93 left Newark at 8:01 a.m. with 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants.
Minutes before the 10 a.m. crash, an emergency dispatcher in Pennsylvania received a cell phone call from a
man who said he was a passenger locked in a bathroom aboard United Flight 93. The man repeatedly said
the call was not a hoax, said dispatch supervisor Glenn Cramer in neighboring Westmoreland County. "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. FBI agent Wells Morrison wouldn't confirm that the
plane was hijacked, but said the FBI was reviewing the tape of the 911 call. "At this point, we're not
prepared to say it was an act of terrorism, though it appears to be that," Morrison said. Reporters were taken
to the top of a hill overlooking the scene. The crash left a V-shaped gouge in a grassy field surrounded by
thick woods, just below a hilltop strip mine. The gouge is 8- to 10-feet deep and 15- to 20-feet long, said
Capt. Frank Monaco of the Pennsylvania State Police. |