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America Under Attack: Plane Goes Down in Pennsylvania Near Shanksville

Aired September 11, 2001 - 13:50   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: And I just want to quickly say here, before we go to the site of the Pennsylvania crash, that the D.C. National Guard was having difficulty getting through to people that it needs to mobilize, and this specifically, this is information specific to the Washington, D.C. area.

The D.C. Guard wants to alert the 372 police battalion and its subordinate companies to report, as soon as possible to the D.C. Armory. And we got this information just about a half hour ago, and there have been so many other stories and pieces of information coming in. We haven't been able to get this out, but we do want to get it out now. Perhaps it will do some good.

Joining us now, I mentioned to you a moment ago that we had -- we have a correspondent on the scene of the airplane crash into the -- the ground, we believe. I am going to go to David Mattingly, CNN correspondent there in Pennsylvania. This is near Shanksville, Somerset County in western Pennsylvania, about 80 miles outside of Pittsburgh. David Mattingly, are you with us now?

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Judy, I am here. And we are outside of the town of Shanksville. And to give you an idea of what kind of a countryside this is -- to my left is a huge field, a field of corn, to my right is a rolling green pastoral hill here at the edge of the Allegheny Mountains, one of the last places that you probably would expect to be touched by the violence of an act of terrible terrorism like we have seen today.

But people here in the area have reported that they saw the commercial airliner going overhead at about 2,000 to 3,000 feet with no landing gear down. They heard then a loud roar of an engine, at which point the jet climbed and then banked sharply to the left before going down straight, on a 45-degree angle. Now, it hit the ground at that 45-degree angle.

People here at the scene say there are no large pieces of debris even left from the plane; no hope of, at this point, apparently seems to be no hope of survivors. There is just about every piece of emergency personnel here from miles around. The mood is considerably calmer, as you might imagine, than what you might see in Washington or New York, but there is a great deal of concern.

Schools are being closed, businesses are being closed up in Pittsburgh and other parts of Pennsylvania. Prayer vigils are being reported, scheduled all across this part of Pennsylvania, as far as away as Altuna, it has been reported. Also, at this point, there has been an emergency staging area set up. We are a good ways away from the crash scene, and we will see what transpires here -- Judy.

WOODRUFF: David Mattingly on the scene, as you are seeing there, near Shanksville, a small town in Somerset County, about 80 miles south of Pittsburgh. This the site of one of the two United Airlines aircraft. This a Boeing 757, left Newark, New Jersey this morning on its way to San Francisco. This is the plane that we know crashed, and you just, with David Mattingly's report, looking at the site, where this plane came down.

We don't know where -- we presume terrorists behind this -- what their destination was, what their target was. We can only presume, we can only guess that they were short of the target, that they were headed someplace farther -- some place else from where they landed.

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