SAN JOSE, Calif. -- It might have been the final resistance of a doomed pilot. Or a heroic struggle by a Bay Area passenger. Or
a miscalculation by terrorists.
But if there was one glimmer of good news amid the numbing enormity of Tuesday's terrorist attacks, it shined in the wreckage
of a United Airlines 757, a flight once bound for San Francisco and instead now strewn across a remote field in the coal country
of southwestern Pennsylvania.
Unlike three other commercial jets that were purposely slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, United Flight
93, for some reason yet unknown, did not hit a terrorist's target Tuesday morning and did not kill thousands of people.
The flight crashed instead at 10:06 a.m. EDT in a wooded area 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania,
two hours after it left Newark, N.J.
All 45 people on board were killed, said Bill Crowley, a special agent with the FBI in Pittsburgh. Among them were 38
passengers, five flight attendents and two pilots.
Minutes before the fiery impact, at least two passengers telephoned from the plane.
One man phoned 911, yelling to dispatchers "We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!" before the signal was lost. The
other, Tom Burnett, 38, the vice president of a Pleasanton, Calif., medical devices company and father of three children, called
his wife, Deena, and may have indicated he and other passengers were about to attempt to overpower the hijackers.
Burnett told his wife that somebody on the plane had been stabbed, said Father Frank Colacicco, of St. Isidore's Church in
Danville.
"We're all gonna die, but three of us are going to do something," Burnett told his wife, according to Colacicco. He added: "I love
you honey" before the call ended.
FBI agents were interviewing members of the family Tuesday night.
The FBI said that 40 agents and more than 150 other investigators were combing the crash site as darkness fell, including
agents from the Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the FAA and the Pennsylvania State Police.
Like the three other doomed jets that took off, and then suddenly veered off course, United Flight 93 sharply turned south after
nearing Cleveland. One Congressman told Knight Ridder that some investigators believe the plane's hijackers were attempting to
crash into either Camp David, the presidential retreat located 80 miles south of the crash site, at Thurmond, Maryland, or the
Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
"There was concern that it was heading in the direction of Washington, D.C.," said Rep. Jim Moran, D-Virginia.
Moran said that Capitol police named the two potential targets in a briefing he received from them.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, described Tuesday as a national tragedy and the scope is only just beginning to sink in.
"At Pearl Harbor, there were 2,000 people killed," Feinstein said.
"This could be tens of thousands."
United Airlines did not release the passenger list from Flight 93 on Tuesday. At least one other Bay Area resident was confirmed
dead, a female student at Santa Clara University. The name of the woman, a junior, was not being released, pending notification
of her family, said Barry Holtzclaw, a spokesman for the university.
"I'm shattered by this," said Holtzclaw. ""The scale of it, the enormity of it, the buildings and the loss off life. The mood of the
campus tomorrow will be very very somber."
It may be weeks before it is known what happened in the doomed flight, experts said.
"It fits the same pattern of the other ones," said a high-ranking FAA official. "The moves of the plane are similar to what you
would see if a struggle or some violent problem occurred in the cockpit."
Gary Joseph, who co-pilots United 747-400 flights from San Francisco to Shanghai, said he believes the pilots aboard Flight 93
tried to prevent the terrorists from taking control of the aircraft.
"They train you to do whatever they say, but that only goes so far," Joseph said. "If he had any idea what they were planning,
I'm sure he tried to fight them off."
Joseph said a pilot may try to make sharp turns and dive . . . much the way initial radar records show the plane did in its final
minutes in the air . . . to throw a would-be hijacker off balance.
"There's been cases where they do that and get control back of the plane. But a jet can only take so much of a dive before it
starts to fall apart, I don't know."
Joseph said it wasn't clear whether the crew was a San Francisco-based one or a New York-based group, because the airline has
crews stationed in each city.
No family members showed up at San Francisco International Airport to greet the passengers at its normal 11:15 a.m. arrival
time, said Ron Wilson, spokesman for San Francisco International Airport. That is possibly because United employees in Chicago
reached many of them before they left home.
Dozens of clergy members gathered at United's VIP lounge to await survivors. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown cancelled his
trip to meet the victims' families when it appeared nobody would show up.
The Boeing 757 seats about to 200 passengers, which means Flight 93 was less than a quarter full.
The crash scene is located near one of America's worst civilian disaster, the site of the 1889 Johnstown flood, in which 2,200
people perished when the South Fork Dam collapsed.
Jim Marker, a Somerset, Pennsylvania County Commissioner, visited the crash site and said the FBI was investigating the
possibility that the plane suffered an explosion before it crashed. The passenger who phoned Westmoreland County dispatchers
also said there was an explosion, the Associated Press reported.
"They are checking about a mile from the site for some debris that might show there was an explosion," said Marker. "They do
believe there was that possibility."
Others in the small town said the crash rocked the area, like an earthquake.
"It was 2 miles away, but it shook everything," said Bruce Grine, owner of Grine's Service Center in Shanksville. "It shook the
windows. We saw smoke. Then the smell. Then somebody came running up the street and said a plane crashed. God, it was
terrible."
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