Posted on 09/11/2001 11:25:04 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Sept. 11 — On Tuesday four airliners were turned into deadly weapons. There is a nationwide hold on all commercial flights, the first ever in history, until at least midday Wednesday, maybe longer. And there are some chilling details of what may have been going on the cockpit.
THE string of events that resulted in four horrific crashes, began at Boston’s Logan Airport at 7:45 a.m. American flight 11, a 767 with 92 on board is supposed to fly from Boston to Los Angeles, but over New York state it was diverted and forced to fly south — directly into the north tower of the World Trade Center. A long day of carnage had then begun.
Back in Boston, United flight 175, another 767 with 65 aboard, was already in the air, also bound for Los Angeles. It was 15 minutes behind the first flight, when it, too, was hijacked. As news cameras rolled, the plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center.
At 8:10 a.m., American flight 77, a 757 with 64 aboard, had taken off from Washington Dulles Airport, bound for Los Angeles. It, too, was taken over and looped back into the Pentagon. It sliced in at an angle, leaving a deadly and ugly gash in the nation’s military nerve center.
And finally, at 8 a.m. out of Newark Airport, United flight 93, a 757 with 45 people aboard, was bound to San Francisco when it was hijacked as well — but it crashed short of whatever its intended target might have been, coming down in rural western Pennsylvania where eyewitnesses watched in horror.
“I heard a loud noise and I happened to look up and it was a plane that was real low to me,” says one man. “Sounded like it was running fine to me, and I just kept watching it, watched its nose dive straight into the ground.”
“You could see where the plane made initial impact and it was still on fire,” says another man. “It made a crater probably 30 feet by 30 feet and it’s probably 15 or 20 feet deep, and there’s just debris scattered probably within a half mile radius.”
GETTING TERROR ON THE PLANE
There are only two ways terrorists can sneak themselves or their weapons aboard planes: either through passenger screening, or by going unscreened through locked doors into off-limits areas or onto the tarmac.
Periodic FAA tests have found plenty of flaws, found when government agents tried to sneak into secure areas. They were successful more than two thirds of the time.
Testers were also often able to sneak fake guns and explosives, by x-ray screening. Once aboard, many speculate the hijackers must have disabled crews and taken over the planes, or, more likely that, then forcing a pilot with a gun at his head to fly right into the World trade Center, for instance.
“It is inconceivable to me that any airline pilot would allow anyone to force him to fly into an inhabited building,” says former American Airlines pilot Jim Tillman. “I cannot imagine how any pilot could be conscious or capable of doing anything to control that airplane at the time that the aircraft hit one of those buildings.”
“I suspect that what we are going to find is that the pilots were overwhelmed, perhaps dead already, and that trained pilots from the hijacker camp were in charge of those aircraft and were willing to die for their beliefs,” says terrorism specialist Neil Livingstone.
If there was time, the crews may have been able to press a button in the cockpit and send out a coded warning to controllers that there was a hijack in progress.
Controllers may then have radioed back inquiries, but if crews were disabled, controllers may have been left in the dark for real information. Whatever else, they must have been surprised, in disbelief. There hadn’t been a commercial plane hijacked in the U.S. for 10 years, since 1991. And now this.
SOUNDS OF TERROR
There is one unconfirmed report of a controller in New Hampshire, who overheard the first plane being hijacked, as pilots left their microphone on in the cockpit, overheard a hijacker saying to a pilot, in English, “don’t do anything foolish.”
Shortly after, the controller says the plane’s transponder, a locator device in the cockpit, was turned off, leaving controllers only a blip to watch — with no idea of the blip’s altitude.
There are several other reports of passengers, placing chilling cell phone calls to relatives, saying their flights had been hijacked. And there is one unconfirmed report that an American Airlines flight attendant told her company by cell phone that the pilots on her plane had been killed. If the report is true, it came from the last of the planes to go down, the one in Pennsylvania.
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I would like to see us prove we are not cowards...but our record is not good.
Given all the talk on TV about the symbolism of the various aspects of this tragedy, and how the perps were trying to send a message through their acts of terrorism, this tidbit I found struck me as eerie and worrisome.
The flight numbers were 11, 93, 175 & 77. 11, of course, was the date of today's tragedy, but if you add the other numbers up, you get: 9+3=12, 1+7+5=13, 7+7=14 - 11, 12, 13, 14. This could be a major coincidence, of course, and I'm not part of the Art Bell conspiracy group, but the symbolism talk got my mind thinking.
Could we be in for three more days of this garbage? I hope not.
Is suicide necessarily, or even usually, a brave act? If suicide does not generally imply bravery, why should it do so here?
These cowards deliberately attacked defenseless victims and committed heinous attrocities against them. I fail to see how commiting suicide by piloting a plane into the side of a building is any "braver" than committing suicide by putting a bullet into one's brain.
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