United Airlines Flight 93
by kto9 Fri Jan 04 2002 at 5:42:30
We hope that they will take comfort in knowing that all of America embraces the passengers and flight crew of Flight 93 as heroes.
FBI spokesman announcing to victim's families that the FBI would not release full Cockpit Voice Recorder tapes or transcripts1 On the morning of September 11, 2001 terrorists hijacked four airplanes. One, United Airlines Flight 93, did not reach the hijackers' intended destination - which was apparently Washington D.C. The tragedy could have been much worse. We can be thankful that this airplane instead crashed into rural Pennsylvania - probably saving hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. Countless stories have been told of the heroic actions of the passengers of Flight 93. Their bravery cannot be diminished. It has been well documented - both in their phone calls home to their families during the hijacking and in the few snippets of conversation released by the government from the cockpit voice recorder - that they stormed the cockpit in an attempt to wrest control from the hijackers. They were determined not to let their plane be used as a weapon of mass destruction. What has not been documented are the questions surrounding the final fatal plunge of United Airlines Flight 93. Amazingly, the national news media shows no interest in finding out why Flight 93 crashed. We have recovered both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, but this information has been withheld - despite requests by the victims' families that it be released.
A day after the crash, a second debris field was discovered miles away from the main crash site, but the implications of this have been ignored. This secondary debris field indicates that something caused United Airlines Flight 93 to start to break up in the air, before it hit the ground. During the crisis the all-news channels (CNN, MSNBC, FOX News) would repeat the same stories over and over again. The news of the second debris field was carried on TV once and never went into rotation like all the other stories from that day. Few reports can be found anywhere other than local Pennsylvania newspapers. Residents and workers at businesses outside Shanksville, Somerset County, reported discovering clothing, books, papers and what appeared to be human remains. Some residents said they collected bags-full of items to be turned over to investigators. Others reported what appeared to be crash debris floating in Indian Lake, nearly six miles from the immediate crash scene. 2 The spread of wreckage over the ground considered in the context of the local terrain can tell us quite a lot about the arrival of the aircraft in terms of the amount of energy and the nature of the flight immediately prior to hitting the ground ... If the aircraft starts to break up in the air, particularly at significant height, then it will start to distribute pieces that will travel with the wind and be spread over sometimes many hundreds of square miles.
David F. King, Principal Inspector
England's Air Accidents Investigation Branch3
The military launched fighters to intercept the hijacked planes at both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but with scant notice they arrived too late. In the case of Flight 93 the military was notified nearly an hour before the plane eventually went down - yet denies it had any planes in the vicinity at the time of the crash.
When numerous witnesses came forward saying there was clearly another jet nearby - so close that it must have seen the whole crash - the government said that a civilian Lear jet was asked to do some reconnaisance. It is difficult for some to believe this. The military was in a state of alert; civilian craft were being grounded; commercial craft diverted; jet fighters scrambled - and the asset we relied upon was a civilian Lear jet that should already have been on the ground? As I said, some find this hard to believe.
"If you were here to see it, you'd have no doubt," Dennis Decker said. "It was a jet plane, and it had to be flying real close when that 757 went down. If I was the <