10Meters News Roundup

Sept. 12, 2001 – Cell phone calls provided glimpses of the terrifying ordeal aboard two of the doomed commerical jetliners used to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday.

"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" a passenger – locked in a bathroom – on United Flight 93 told a 911 dispatcher.

Minutes later, the United jetliner crashed in western Pennsylvania with 45 people aboard. It was the last of four terrorist attacks on the United States yesterday morning that have stunned the world.

Tuesday's attacks began at 8:45 a.m. (EST) when hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 92 people from Boston to Los Angeles, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Minutes later, hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 65 people from Boston to Los Angeles, dove into the Center's south tower. Then, about thirty mintues later, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 64 people from Washington to Los Angeles, hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

The fourth plane, United Flight 93, was bound for San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey. According to some reports, passengers aboard Flight 93 were ordered to call their families to say good-bye.

The attacks, which some have compared in intensity to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, forced the evacuation of key buildings and the closure of financial markets and schools.

Barbara Olson, a victim on the hijacked plane that struck the Pentagon, called her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, twice on her mobile phone before the aircraft crashed, according to CNN.

Olson told her husband that all the passengers and the flight personnel, including the pilot, were herded to the back of the plane, reported CNN. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.

Olson said his wife made no reference to the nationality or motive of the hijackers.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, three families of passengers aboard the doomed United Flight 93 reported that loved ones had contacted them by cell phones.

Thomas Burnett called his wife and reportedly told her that he and others knew that the hijackers were planning to use the plane as part of the terrorist blitz, and indicated that they were hoping to prevent further carnage. "I know we're going to die – there's three of us who are going to do something about it," he told her.

Alice Hoglan received a call from 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 told KTVU-TV in San Francisco. The phone went dead a short time later.

Another passenger on the same flight, Lauren Grandcolas, was returning from her grandmother's funeral and called her husband. "We have been hijacked," she told him, according to press reports. "They are being kind. I love you."