Posted on 09/16/2002 5:34:36 AM PDT by ConservativeNewsJunkie
THE FINAL three minutes of hijacked United Flight 93 are still a mystery more than a year after it crashed in western Pennsylvania - even to grieving relatives who sought comfort in listening to its cockpit tapes in April.
A Daily News investigation has found a roughly three-minute gap between the time the tape goes silent - according to government-prepared transcripts - and the time that top scientists have pinpointed for the crash.
Several leading seismologists agree that Flight 93 crashed last Sept. 11 at 10:06:05 a.m., give or take a couple of seconds. Family members allowed to hear the cockpit voice recorder in Princeton, N.J., last spring were told it stopped just after 10:03.
The FBI and other agencies refused repeated requests to explain the discrepancy.
The cockpit voice recorder a roughly 30-minute tape loop, is supposed to record the sounds inside the cockpit right up until the moment of impact and usually does.
Aviation experts said there could be several explanations for the gap.
They said it could mean that the FBI and other government agencies either failed to properly synchronize the times, or there were other problems in the retrieving or handling of the tape from the so-called "black box" recovered from the wreckage at Shanksville, Pa.
Or, experts speculated, it could mean there was a major on-board electrical failure on the plane three minutes before Flight 93 crashed, causing the recorder to quit working.
What's not told
The broader significance is that the three-minute gap points to how little is really known about how and why Flight 93 crashed - even as the saga of the doomed jetliner and cell-phone calls from some of the 40 passengers and crew continue to captivate the nation.
"That's part of the whole war aspect - we don't want to tell about what we did and didn't do," said Vernon Grose, a former National Transportation Safety Board member who says he still has questions about the Flight 93 crash. He said he doubts there will ever be "a nice, open public hearing with eyewitnesses telling what they saw."
However, in recent weeks, two books about Flight 93 have topped the best-seller lists, while President Bush and other top government officials continue to invoke the story - based largely on the cell-phone calls - of fighting between the passengers and the hijackers as a "Let's roll" rallying cry to continue the war against global terrorism.
But the FBI has clamped a tight lid of secrecy on the flight data recorder - which could best show how Flight 93 actually crashed - and on the cockpit voice recorder.
"We have no comment at all on the tape issue," said Sam Dibbley, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office in northern Virginia that presented the tape to families.
An FBI spokesman, Steven Berry, said the bureau continues to officially list the time of the Flight 93 crash as 10:03 a.m. The NTSB referred all questions to the FBI.
But the relatives of Flight 93 passengers who heard the cockpit tape April 18 at a Princeton hotel said government officials laid out a timetable for the crash in a briefing and in a transcript that accompanied the recording. Relatives later reported they heard sounds of an on-board struggle beginning at 9:58 a.m., but there was a final "rushing sound" at 10:03, and the tape fell silent.
What can be heard
"There is no sound of the impact," said Kenneth Nacke, whose brother, Lou Nacke Jr., is one of the passengers believed to have fought with the hijackers. Nacke confirmed that the government said the tape ended at 10:03 a.m.
He added: "The quality of the sound is really poor."
Vaughn Hoglan, the uncle of passenger Mark Bingham, said by phone from California that near the end there are shouts of "pull up, pull up," but the end of the tape "is inferred - there's no impact."
New York Times reporter Jere Longman, who spoke with relatives of all but one of the 40 Flight 93 victims, writes in the epilogue to bestseller "Among the Heroes" that "at about three minutes after ten, the tape went silent."
Lisa Beamer, the wife of passenger Todd Beamer, who heard the tape while working on her No. 1 best-seller "Let's Roll," also gives 10:03 as the end of the flight.
Seismologists - experts in the earth's vibrations - have almost exactly pinpointed the time of the crash of Flight 93 at 10:06:05.
"The seismic signals are consistent with impact at 10:06:05," plus or minus two seconds, said Terry Wallace, who heads the Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory and is considered the leading expert on the seismology of man-made events. "I don't know where the 10:03 time comes from."
Likewise, a written study commissioned by the Department of Defense - carried out by seismologists from Columbia University and the Maryland Geological Survey - also determined impact was at 10:06:05.
Normally, such a large discrepancy might be cleared up when the National Transportation Safety Board releases a written transcript of the voice recorder - edited for sounds of suffering or profanity - right before holding public hearings on an air disaster. But because the Flight 93 crash was part of a criminal act, no NTSB hearings are expected.
The Justice Department has also insisted that the cockpit tape can't be released because it will be played to the jury at the trial of admitted al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, now set for January.
Although Moussaoui is often referred to in the media as "the 20th hijacker," there's been no evidence that he was slated to be on board Flight 93 or the three other planes hijacked on Sept. 11. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers sought last week to block the use of the recording.
What could've happened
Last fall, as the saga of the Flight 93 passenger uprising became widely known, several relatives of the crash victims made an unusual request: They wanted to hear the actual tape. The FBI initially issued a cold refusal.
"While we empathize with the grieving families, we do not believe that the horror captured on the cockpit voice recording will console them in any way," FBI Assistant Director John Collingwood said last December. But under continuing pressure, the bureau changed its mind and agreed to the unusual April gathering at a Princeton Marriott hotel.
None of the family members interviewed for this story recalls any explanation of a discrepancy between the times on the tape recording and the actual crash at 10:06.
They were, according to the relatives and published accounts, given a talk by one of Moussaoui's prosecutors, who speculated that the passengers may have used a food cart to break into the cockpit.
But with government officials refusing to be interviewed, leading aviation experts interviewed for this story could only speculate about the tape discrepancy.
Possibilities they suggested:
• The FBI could have bungled this part of the investigation by failing to synchronize the time stamp of clocks onboard Flight 93 - which could have been set wrong - with air traffic control tapes and other tones that make it possible to determine the exact, correct times. Such a mistake would mean that the tape really did run until the impact, but that all the times given to the relatives on the transcript were off by three minutes.
Investigators typically nail down the correct times very early in a probe, experts said. Todd Curtis, who runs the Web site AirSafe.com, said the three-minute gap "does not make sense."
"From what I have heard about the flight's CVR [cockpit voice recorder], there was at least one transmission from the cockpit to air traffic control that would have been captured by the ATC tapes," Curtis said. "Those tapes should also have some kind of time reference."
• At 10:03, the hijackers - or possibly passengers and crew who were fighting to regain control of the plane - flipped a circuit breaker or switch that cut off power to the cockpit voice recorder.
Experts said this would explain why the tape ends abruptly, but they had no idea why the terrorists would do such a thing, especially so far along into their hijacking. And they noted that the location of cockpit circuit breakers makes it unlikely it was struck accidentally during a struggle.
"That would be a much tougher task than turning off the transponder," said R. John Hansman, an aviation professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "You would have to know exactly which circuit breaker to pull."
• There was a major on-board electrical failure before the crash - although it's not clear what could have triggered this. It has happened before. On Swissair Flight 111, which crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia in September 1998, the cockpit fire that caused the crash also killed power to the plane's two black boxes six full minutes before the crash.
New evidence that came out last week may support the electrical-failure theory. A federal air traffic controller from Cleveland, Stacey Taylor, told "Dateline NBC" that Flight 93's transponder, initially shut off by the hijackers, came back on briefly only to give out - at 10:03 a.m.
• There was some unknown problem either in retrieving the cockpit tape from the black box, or in its handling by government officials and contractors since last September, or in the presentation that was given in Princeton.
No one has stepped forward with any evidence of that.
But the three-minute gap is certain to fuel ongoing debates on the Internet over how Flight 93 really crashed, and whether the plane could have been shot down by military jet fighters that were sent aloft as the Sept. 11 hijackings unfolded. The government insists there was no shootdown.
Numerous witnesses in the Shanksville area have told the Daily News and other publications since last September that a mysterious, low-flying unmarked white jet, military in nature, circled the area at the time of the crash. The FBI has claimed this was a business jet that had been asked by air-traffic controllers to inspect the Flight 93 crater.
The debate has also been driven by the wide debris field from Flight 93 - including papers found eight miles away - and by conflicting accounts over whether a 911 caller reported an explosion and white smoke on board.
Grose, the former NTSB member, said he doubts the entire story of Flight 93 will ever be told.
"I don't think so," he said. "It's like David Crockett at the Alamo. We need heroes."
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
I am not going to argue what happened because it does not matter. HOWEVER, I'm not so sure you know too much about the nuts and bolts of operations but when you say they would not know...you have NO idea what you are talking about. There would be two pilots that know...air traffic controllers (because they would see the break up...or at least hear FOX 1 on the mike). When the aircraft came home, there would be ground crews that would notice the AIM-9 gone from the wingtip...and so would the loaders and the fuelers...so there is about a dozen people right there. Believe me...that would spread amongst the ground crews ASAP...so now knock that number up to a hundred or so. THe commanders of the weapons and the ops...finally the wing commander and staff would know. Lots of people.
Do not know yell "BECAUSE THEY WOULDN'T F*****G KNOW!!!!!" because when it comes to how the ops are going...you obviously don't know. It wouldn't be just the guy that fired the missile...but lots of people.
Comment: In the end, Flight 93 was ONLY 15.6 minutes away at 500mph (speeds from 400 to 600 were reported) from D.C. when it crashed.
Think about this - in order for us to NOT have intercepted Flight 93, fighters would have had to wait until nearly 10am before turning towards it. The 3 fighters (take your pick) that arrived over D.C. at 9:40am proceeded to do something else over D.C. for 15+ minutes WHILE we were well aware of an incoming Flight 93, then mercifully, finally turned toward Flight 93 and made 5-10 minutes progress - which puts them 60 miles out.
That is the Government position - and I think it's either untrue or the Air Guard failed to react as they apparently can now - within 9 minutes we are now able to intercept any aircraft according to Air Guard statements after 9-11-01. Considering 3 nuclear power plants were between Flight 93 and D.C., this failure is totally frightening. I'd like to think they got a fighter there. Wouldn't you?
2 F-15's were scrambled at 8:45 and arrived at the WTC about 9am. Why were the jets that responded BEFORE any crash so quick by comparison to the jets that responded AFTER 2 Towers had been hit?
Federal investigators said on Thursday that they have not ruled out the possibility that United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania, after three other hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
http://investor.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0-9900-1028-7147291-0.html
After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush gave the military orders to intercept and shoot down any commercial airliners that refused instructions to turn away from Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.
"I wholeheartedly concurred in the decision he made, that if the plane would not divert, if they wouldn't pay any attention to instructions to move away from the city, as a last resort our pilots were authorized to take them out," Cheney said on "Meet the Press."
Bush was in Sarasota, Fla., at the time. Instead of returning directly to Washington, Bush was shuttled to Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to the capital.
http://www.nandotimes.com/special_reports/terrorism/attack/story/80165p-1118358c.html
Another plane was in the area with no markings...
http://video.ibsys.com/popup.cfm?contentid=958495&owner=pit&site=c4k (videos were taken off line - but this was a local news media crew on the day of the crash))
But if United Airlines Flight 93 had not crashed in Pennsylvania, the three North Dakota-based F-16 pilots from Langley two of them commercial airline pilots themselves may have faced the nightmarish decision of whether to shoot down the commercial airliner, along with its 38 passengers and crew of seven.
"It kept us from having to do the unthinkable," said Maj. Gen. Mike J. Haugen, adjutant general of the North Dakota National Guard, "and that is to use your own weapons and own training against your own citizens."
The military has not allowed the pilots to be interviewed, and The Times has agreed not to print their names because of security concerns. But details of their activities on the morning of Sept. 11 have emerged through interviews with other Guard officials.
At 9:30 a.m., six minutes after receiving their orders from the
defense sector, code-named Huntress, three F-16's were airborne, according to the Norad timeline.
Then the pilots received the most surreal order of the awful
morning. "A person came on the radio," General Haugen said, "and identified themselves as being with the Secret Service and he said, `I want you to protect the White House at all costs.' "
Tuesday October 16 12:06 AM EDT
'We Have Some Planes,' Hijacker Told Controller
By MATTHEW L. WALD with KEVIN SACK The New York Times
Comment: Again, authorization was given while Bush was in Florida and after the first two crashes which puts it at 9:15 to 9:35 latest. Remember, the first fighters were airborne before 9am. Flight 93 went down at 10:10am. Why can't we interview the pilots... heck, they weren't even in the area. Right? Yea, right. They were airborne at 9:30. These F-16's had seen the Pentagon on fire, needed to protect the White House at all costs and had the OK to fire by 9:45 at the latest.
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, the--I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft.
"MR. RUSSERT: And you decided?
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: We decided to do it. We'd, in effect, put a flying combat air patrol up over the city; F-16s with an AWACS, which is an airborne radar system, and tanker support so they could stay up a long time...
"It doesn't do any good to put up a combat air patrol if you don't give them instructions to act, if, in fact, they feel it's appropriate.
"MR. RUSSERT: So if the United States government became aware that a hijacked commercial airline[r] was destined for the White House or the Capitol, we would take the plane down?
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yes. The president made the decision...that if the plane would not divert...as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out. Now, people say, you know, that's a horrendous decision to make. Well, it is. You've got an airplane full of American citizens, civilians, captured by...terrorists, headed and are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board?
"...It's a presidential-level decision, and the president made, I think, exactly the right call in this case, to say, "I wished we'd had combat air patrol up over New York."
--NBC, 'Meet the Press' 16 September 2001
Read about the mystery white jet if you haven't already.
Bottom Line - if it was shot down, would it have come down in a ball of flames? Witnesses report a largely intact aircraft coming down. Ground debris indicates the plane coming apart before impact. Hmmm.... on the military FAQ page I talk about stuff that probably belongs on this page - like cannon fire and the Nashua Air Traffic Controller that saw an F-16 hounding Flight 93 on radar.
From an email I received:
Someone close to me was involved in the improvements of air to air missiles after Vietnam war and various weapon systems during the cold war (primarily on the target tracking part and not explosive part) but he does not believe any air to air missile has the ability to blow a 757 to pieces. The mission of the missile is not to destroy the airplane, but to simply render it out of service by destroying its target's power plant or disrupt its flight. This way, the missile can be agile and fast. If missile was fired it would simply hit one of the two engines on 757. But given the size of the aircraft, it would remain in flight for a short period of time.
Comment: 2 Russian air to air missiles brought down a Korean 747 in 1983. That aircraft had cockpit voice recordings by the crew for two more minutes after the sound of the first explosion was heard. This verifies that a 747 (which is larger than Flight 93, a 757) would not be destroyed in the air when struck by a Russian air to air missile.
http://aviation-safety.net/cvr/cvr_ke007.htm
You can find lots' more info on the website http://www.flight93crash.com/
Pics, info on debris fields, etc...
Do you think it is even possible in the realm of existence that the plane was shot down???
Shape up and tow the line!!
I guess that says it all doesn't it? I was just about to ask you and others on this thread why exactly the U.S. Gov't would shoot down a plane and lie about it when, as even you say, it could only benefit them more to tell the truth in such a circumstance.
But now we know for certain. The U.S. Gov't is psychotic; thanks for the update there, that's good information to know as I continue to live my life in this country. Just knowing that the government is a totally evil and corrupt organization (or is it JUST psychoitic?) brings a warm and fuzzy feeling to my heart.
Thanks EPU! You must be a joy at parties too!
This is also a possibility...
About the only you CAN count on is this...
However the government says it went down is exactly the way it didn't go down...
It is part to the nature of exposing corruption and decifering media distortion and spin to see that some of these see the light of day. Long term forum readers see them for what they are: Alternate Theories, even when they are presented by some that are heavily invested in their prominance.
Without such free wheeling critical thinking and investigation, much of the scandals of the Clinton era, the Democrat Party and the Gore Election Attempted Hijack would be completely undiagnosed.
Thanks for your first hand account and rest assured in the certain knowledge that the sacrifice of your loved one and his fellows will be acknowledged by all that read our country's history and value its future.
Here is your answer:
It kept us from having to do the unthinkable," said Maj. Gen. Mike J. Haugen, adjutant general of the North Dakota National Guard, "and that is to use your own weapons and own training against your own citizens."
Sounds to me like he is saying it didn't happen.
Mmmmm, don't know about that one...
Doesn't make much sense though...
Why would f-16's launched to intercept the plane go up without ammo??
Were circuit breakers pulled on the planes that hit the WTC?
I know, I know. Usually when I have the urge to add facts to these discussions I lie down until it passes. Forgot to do that this time ;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.