"Shortly after 10 a.m., workers on farms and scrap yards in Somerset County looked up to see an airliner flying low and erratic at an estimated 450 mph.

Larry Williams, a former state police trooper who is now a private investigator, was golfing on the 17th green at Oakbrook Golf Course about eight miles away when he heard the engines "roar real loud and shut off."
Bob Blair was completing a routine drive to Shade Creek just after 10 a.m. Tuesday, when he saw a huge silver plane fly past him just above the treetops and crash into the woods along Lambertsville Road.

Blair, of Stoystown, a driver with Jim Barron Trucking of Somerset, was traveling in a coal truck along with Doug Miller of Somerset, when they saw the plane spiraling to the ground and then explode on the outskirts of Lambertsville.

"I saw the plane flying upside down overhead and crash into the nearby trees. My buddy, Doug, and I grabbed our fire extinguishers and ran to the scene," said Blair.

"I saw the mushroom cloud and we called 911 right away," added Blair. "I knew with that crash that it wasn't likely there were survivors, but we had to go anyways. The plane was coming in on a slant and really hit the treeline at an angle."

Lambertsville resident George Beckett was going to visit his mother-in-law Lucy Menear, when the accident occured. "I had been planning to go in those woods (where the plane crashed) and start looking for some hunting sites. I was going to start right where the plane came down."

Menear, who lives across from the Lambertsville Road at the intersection where a graveled road leads to the crash site near the strip mine, said, "I felt the ground shake with the impact. I didn't know the plane had crashed. It was just a big jolt."

Laura Temyer of Hooversville RD1 was hanging her clothes outside to dry before she went to work Tuesday morning when she heard what she thought was an airplane.

"Normally I wouldn't look up, but I just heard on the news that all the planes were grounded and thought this was probably the last one I would see for a while, so I looked up," she said. "I didn't see the plane but I heard the plane's engine. Then I heard a loud thump that echoed off the hills and then I heard the plane's engine. I heard two more loud thumps and didn't hear the plane's engine anymore after that."

She thinks it might have been the plane that went down near Indian Lake in Somerset County.
A plane going over Shanksville wasn't anything unusual because it is a military flight corridor, said Kelly Leverknight, who lives in Shanksville, just a couple miles from the crash scene.

"I was sitting in my living room when I heard a plane. I ran out to the front porch and watched it go down," she said. "There was no smoke, it just went straight down. I saw the belly of the plane."
She said she heard the explosion, felt the blast, then saw smoke and fire coming out.
"I thought it hit the school," she said.

She didn't have a car, so she ran to the neighbor's house and the two drove to where the plane had crashed and went into the trees.

"The grass was burned. We saw a bunch of paper and pieces no bigger than a foot around scattered all over the place," she said. "We didn't think there were people on the plane because we didn't see anybody."
Kim Custer, 15, a tenth grader at Shanksville Stonycreek High School, said she was on the second floor of the school, located only a few miles from the crash site, when the plane went down.

"I looked up and saw the ceiling tiles jump up and down, then I felt the whole building shake," she said. "Then we heard a big boom, and a few minutes later the fire alarm system went off, so we all got out of there," she said.
Custer and other classmates had been following the events unfolding in New York City and Washington, DC when the plane went down.

"I was very scared," she said." Backup.