Ed Felt's Call, The Flight 93 Timeline and Strange New Details

Ed Felt's call was taken by a 911 dispatcher in Westmoreland county, which is just west and north of the Shanksville crash site.

Since this area is in the official flight path of flight 93, we can assume that the call was made from the plane, since there is no airport in that area. The plane was probably at a fairly low altitude, which would help the chances of the call going through.

Although, where the call came from, and hence where the plane was, depends on whether one goes by the 10:03am "official" crash time or the 10:06am seismic crash time.

If the plane was going almost 600 miles an hour, and Felt made his call at 9:58am, then the plane would be about 50 miles away from Shanksville if the crash was a 10:03am (10 miles a minute and 5 minutes) but 80 miles away if the crash was at 10:06am (10 miles a minute and 8 minutes).

The 10:03am crash and 50 mile out call is consistent with Westmoreland County.

However, the 10:06am crash and 80 mile out call would have been significantly west of Westmoreland county, in Washington County.

So even this relatively straight-forward analysis runs into problems!

While it is possible that flight 93 did crash at 10:03am, what the heck produced a huge seismic signal at 10:06am? And why didn't the 10:03am crash produce a seismic signal?

Note-- here is a great timeline/flight path map for flight 93 from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Note that this timeline uses the 10:06am crash time.

IMPORTANT: Looking at this timeline/map, Tom Burnett reports a hijack at 9:20am but the hijackers didn't enter the cockpit and confront the pilots until 9:28am. What the hell happened in those 8 minutes???? Why weren't the pilots alerted to a cockpit take-over???? Then after the struggle at 8:28am, the plane didn't turn around until 9:35am. The hijackers were already running very late (even the hijacking started very late into the flight, even though the plane was already late taking off). Why did the hijackers wait so long to hijack the plane then take so long to enter the cockpit and then turn the plane around?

Then there is this info, that suggests that flight 93 tried to contact Air Traffic Control and set a course for Washington DC right before it crashed:

Though the story seems to have dropped suspiciously out of the focus of the media there were accounts right after 911 that UA 93 indeed requested a change of flight path:

John Nance (ABC): By the same token, we have this as the only one of the four airplanes that made a sudden turn and requested a change in direction. The other three, according to Lisa, we don't have any information they made any request of air traffic control. The fourth one did, and that would indicate possibly, and it could have been one of the hijackers, but it indicates possibly that one of the pilots was allowed to stay functional long enough to agree to take the plane back to Washington. He would not have had any idea what they were going to do, or wherever it was headed, and that at some point in time that still remaining pilot or pilots got into a fight, and that could have led, very much as in Egypt Air, to a tussle in the cockpit, which lost control.
(ABC, 9/12/01)


But once it was over Cleveland, the plane suddenly veered south, according to Flight Tracker. It climbed above 40,000 feet, turned sharply toward the southeast and flew over Pittsburgh. It zig-zagged slightly north and east and then south again.
At 9:56 a.m., the destination code for the plane in FAA computers was changed from "SFO," the code for San Francisco, to "DCA," the code for Reagan National Airport in Washington. That indicates an air traffic controller probably changed the destination. Typically, that is done only when it is requested by the pilots.
For reasons still unknown, the plane crashed near Somerset, Pa., seven minutes later.
(St Petersburg Times, 9/12/01)

This is interesting in light of the fact that at 9:45am, according to Longman's book, the hijackers in the cockpit said "let the guys in now" (this was on the cockpit voice recording). Perhaps the pilots were still alive and were brought back in to the cockpit to change the destination. But this also suggests to me the hijacking was faked and the pilots came back to the cockpit and were trying to cancel the hijacking exercise. Is this why the plane had to be shot down????

Finally, I should also point out this site:
http://www.flight93crash.com/
has a lot of great information on flight 93 that I need to digest.