The calls came out of the sky -- a reminder of the caller's love, a warning they may never return. And then silence.
Sobbing, flight attendant CeeCee Lyles called her husband at home in Florida on her cell phone, said her aunt, Mareya Schneider.
"She called him and let him know how much she loved him and the boys," Schneider said. People screamed in the background, Lyles said "we've been hijacked" and the phone went dead, Schneider said.
The plane she was on crashed south of Pittsburgh.
The phone rang at Alice Hoglan's home just before dawn in San Francisco Tuesday morning. It was her son, Mark Bingham, on that same United Airlines jet.
"Hi Mom ... I love you very much," he told her. "I'm calling you from the plane. We've been taken over. There are three men that say they have a bomb."
Others called from passenger jets that later crashed into the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center.
Barbara Olson twice called her husband and described details of the hijacking, including that the attackers used knife-like instruments.
"She called from the plane while it was being hijacked. I wish it wasn't so but it is," her husband said. The jet she was on struck the Pentagon.
In New York, a Colombian waiter working in the World Trade Center made a last phone call to his brother from the 103rd floor minutes before the building collapsed.
"We are trapped. They can't rescue us and it's all full of smoke," Wilder Gomez Piedrahita said in a call from a mobile phone.
"We are sitting tight and can't get out," the 38-year-old waiter said again and again.
Clemant Lewin, a banker, said he looked from his window across the street from the towers and saw people jumping from the 80th floor.
A man and woman held hands as they plunged to the pavement.
"I'm traumatized for life," Lewin said. "This was somebody's father, this was somebody's sister, somebody's mother."
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