Plane passenger told wife he was going to ‘do something’

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, September 11, 2001

By Todd Spangler

Associated Press

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. – Just before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, a passenger reportedly telephoned his wife and told her that the plane had been hijacked and that he and some of the others were going to “do something about it.”

Authorities have not said whether an attempt by passengers to thwart the hijacking may have caused the airliner to go down in the Pennsylvania countryside instead of hitting a high-profile target elsewhere. All 45 people aboard were killed.

In his phone call, Thomas Burnett told his wife, Deena, “I know we’re all going to die – there’s three of us who are going to do something about it,” the family’s priest, the Rev. Frank Colacicco, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Then, Burnett told his wife, “I love you, honey” and the call ended, Colacicco said.

Other people were also able to make calls from the plane before the Boeing 757 slammed into a grassy field Tuesday about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Rescue crews who reached the scene shortly after 10 a.m. found a deep V-shaped gouge filled with smoldering rubble.

In California, Alice Hoglan picked up her phone about 9:45 EDT to the hear the voice of her son, Mark Bingham, 31.

“He said, ‘I want you to know I love you very much. I’m calling you from the plane. We’ve been taken over. There are three men that say they have a bomb,” Hoglan said. The phone went dead a short time later.

The hijacking was the last of four closely timed terrorist attacks, following the two crashes into New York’s World Trade Center towers and a third into the Pentagon.

U.S. officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that the Secret Service had alerted the White House that the hijackers may have been headed for Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. Fearing the White House might be a target, the Secret Service diverted President Bush, who had been in Florida, to Louisiana and then Nebraska.

Flight 93 left Newark, N.J., at 8:01 a.m., headed for San Francisco. As the plane approached Cleveland, radar showed that it banked left and headed back toward southwestern Pennsylvania. Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White said that air traffic controllers reported that they could hear screaming on a plane they communicated with.

“We’re being hijacked!” one caller repeatedly told 911 dispatchers. He said he was inside a locked bathroom on the plane and insisted the call was not a hoax, dispatcher Glenn Cramer said.

“He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him,” Cramer said. The man never identified himself.

On board, flight attendant CeeCee Lyles grabbed her cell phone and call her husband and four sons in Fort Myers, Fla.

“She called him and let him know how much she loved him and the boys,” said her aunt, Mareya Schneider. During the call, he heard people screaming in the background, Schneider said.

On Tuesday night, FBI agents and forensic experts began picking through tiny pieces of rubble. Neither the cockpit voice recorder nor the flight data recorder had been recovered, and it was expected to be days before the victims could be identified.

The plane went down after air traffic control coordinators reported a large aircraft heading toward the John Murtha Johnstown Cambria County Municipal Airport, authorities said. The controllers said the aircraft would not identify itself.

Minutes later, the plane went down in rural Somerset County, about 20 miles away.

“When I got there, the plane was obliterated. You couldn’t see the cockpit or the wings or nothing,” said John Walsh, 72, who heard the crash and drove to the site in his bathrobe.

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