Any number of things can create the sound of “wind” on a crappy recording.
The fact about Flight 93 that always struck me as the fishy-est is the fact that a half-ton chunk of engine was found a mile away from the main debris field. A heat seeking missile fired from a fighter would have homed in on an engine.
This article from the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph on September 13, 2001 includes an off-hand remark that the local flight controllers learned, presumably through the “grapevine” since it was outside their airspace, that an F-16 was closely pursuing Flight 93, making 360 degree turns to keep pace with it. Maybe this was a wild workplace rumor, but you’d think that they would have better info than anyone else. As far as I know this the only flight controller to break an apparent gag order over the events of the day.
The mayor of Shanksville, PA in this article from the Philadelphia Daily News states that he “knows” that F-16 jets (note plural) were “very, very close”. He also claims that two local residents heard a missile behind fired, including a Vietnam Vet who knows what missiles sound like.
The fact that scattered debris (paper, books, human remains) were found six to eight miles away from the crash site (source says that the plane must have been “holed” in some way in the fuselage. This would explain the “wind” heard on the CVR. Now either the “bomb” the passengers reported one of the hijackers were wearing was real or a missile hit an engine and its shrapnel shredded the fuselage open.
Call it a conspiracy theory, but I think its quite clear that despite the latest story we still aren’t getting the full account of Flight 93.
In defense of that, I think the claim is that the jets were scrambled sooner, but they lied about it to prevent people from concluding that Flight 93 was shot down. The theory is that from the time that Cheney gave the go ahead to shoot down planes, they should have had time to do so with Flight 93 (based on the timing of the events and the speed of fighter jets), and that the administration obviously made up a phony time line of events after the fact so that they could claim they “didn’t get there soon enough”. I have no idea if that’s true, but I don’t think the conspiracy theorists are necessarily contradicting themselves in the way you say they are.
Not that I’ve seen. Of course, the beauty of the theory is that it’s pretty much unfalsifyable. If the government lied, they aren’t likely to keep records that are going to prove they lied. Some eyewitnesses saw another plane in the area, but it was described as being unmarked. The government claims it was a civilian aircraft, and the shoot-down theorists claim it was a government aircraft. And there was a single news report of an FAA person tracking an F-16 jet in pursuit of Flight 93, but nothing ever came of that story. It just kind of disappeared. So one could argue it was just bad reporting, or that there was a cover-up, and I don’t really see any way to prove it one way or another.
So it’s really just a lot of questions. Some of them are somewhat compelling questions, but still not enough to convince me that a shoot-down occured.
Oops, you beat me to the F-16 story. Sorry for the repetition.
I remember this being discussed on the message board originally on the site. IIRC, it turned out that the only thing that made it 6-8 miles was some bits of paper. Supposedly it was blown into the sky in the explosion and simply carried on the wind. I believe the human remains and heavier objects were found much closer to the crash site.
Of course a hijacker brought the plane down. There are only two options:
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Passenger uprising threatens to re-take plane. Hijackers put plane into ground so they can still die as martyrs/still kill Americans.
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Passenger uprising re-takes plane. For fun and giggles, the passengers decide to crash the plane.
There is no third option. You presume that there was a fight over the yoke and the plane went down due to that fight. That’s illogical. It takes a quite of bit of time for an aircraft to fall from many thousands of feet up. For one hijacker to avoid being pulled out of the pilot’s seat while keeping both hands on the yoke, while being attacked by however many passengers could squeeze into the cockpit, for all that time, seems extremely unlikely.
Sua
Yeah, that’s usually how it works with theories like this in my experience. Someone offers a scenario of A->B->C->D that sounds pretty logical, but only if you take into consideration that there’s no Proof of A (or the assumptions that go behind it), much less the rest of the chain.
My comment about the theories was mostly in jest. The people who are claiming Flight 93 was shot down aren’t (generally) the ones claiming that the US government was involved in the hijackings because the other 3 jets weren’t shot down.
Fiddlesticks, you said a moment earlier that it was outside their airspace, so there’s no reason to think they’d have better info than anyone else.
The first bit has no cite (since we don’t know how he knows what he says he does). The second bit, at the very least, is extreme hearsay.
On September 11, a few hours after the hijackings, the crawl on CNN said a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department. I don’t know where they got it, but it just plain didn’t happen. So I don’t think bad (or inaccurate) reporting is so hard to believe.
Well, I am not impressed with the shootdown theory.
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For all the theories and claims of inconsistency being thrown about not one person has produced actual evidence the plane was shot down. Not one witness who actually saw an F-16 firing, not one peice of an exploded missile, not even expert testimony on the nature of the crash. No photographs of the fighters, much less of the fighters releasing live missiles. I’m pretty unconvinced by reports of an unnamed “Vietnam vet” who “knows what a missile sounds like.” You know what a supersonic air-to-air missile sounds like from two or three miles above you, huh? Wow, was the guy hanging out at a weapons testing base during his tour?
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If the administration was quite up front about saying they were willing to shoot a jet down, why would they say this and then lie about actually doing it?
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Why would an F-16 have to “do 360-degree turns” to keep pace with an airliner? An F-16 can very comfortably fly at the same speed as an airliner. Jet fighters are not physically required to fly at supersonic speeds, and usually fly subsonic, just like an airliner. Sounds like a rumor to me.
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As blowero has pointed out, reports of wreckage being spread everywhere have been somewhat exaggerrated. If someone can provide actual evidence that the wreckage pattern was inconsistent with a straight crash, well, let’s see it, cowboy.
Surely a 360 degree turn leaves you going in exactly the same direction. How does that speed you up?
Ah, someone else noticed that. I figured it was supposed to be 180.
I can think of a few more…
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Passenger uprising occurs. During uprising, terrorist pilots lose control from passengers storming into the cockpit.
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Passenger uprising occurs. Terrorists begin descent to White House. Passengers re-take plane, attempts to correct descending flight path. Lack of anyone with experienced piloting skill results in crash.
Oh, sorry. I get you now. You were lampooning the folks who claimed the U.S. govt. set the whole thing up. Heh, heh.
Sua,
Eyewitnesses said the plane was flying very low to the ground before it crashed, and that it was rocking from side to side.
RickJay,
That’s got to be some kind of typo, don’t you think? 360 degree turns makes no sense. Maybe they meant 180 degrees? I believe Flight 93 did make all kinds of radical course changes before it crashed.
I agree that the shootdown theory is far from proven. But don’t you guys think the government is hiding something? What, I dont know, but it doesn’t make sense to me that it would take them this long to figure out that the highjackers brought the plane down. Obviously one of the first things they would have done would be to listen to the voice recorder. They would have known about this a long time ago, yet are only now fessing up. Contrast that to the Space Shuttle accident, where people were already commenting on the possible cause of the crash the very day that it happened.
Sua was saying this is a little hard to buy, seeing as how the plane would have to fall a long way and this would take a good bit of time. Perhaps he’s right, I couldn’t say.
I don’t think the course the plane took supports this option.
That’s been discussed a bit already. I’m willing to accept they were analyzing other data: they’ve made it clear this info doesn’t come just from the voice recorder, which they did decipher long ago. Even now, they’re saying they’ll never be 100% sure what happened exactly.
Very, VERY different. People were talking about possible causes for the space shuttle crash that fast because they didn’t know why it would explode like that. It took a lot of testing and guessing before they got it straight. Everyone knows what happened to Flight 93: it crashed. What we’re dealing with is minutiae by comparison: trying to figure out whether the passengers successfully stormed the cockpit and the plane crashed in a fight, or if the hijackers took it down on purpose. If the space shuttle crash had had a similar human element, it could have taken a long time to figure out as well. (Of course, I think the monitoring on a shuttle is much closer than that on an aircraft.)
No, it’s probably supposed to be 360. You want to loop around to get back behind it, after all. A 360 degree turn would be a good way to stay behind an aircraft that you can’t travel as slow as. A 180 would put you facing the opposite direction, and you’d have to 180 again to get facing the target again; 360.
…Not that an F-16 would have to, since it can fly just as slow as that airliner would have been going, but hey…
While I don’t buy any of these theories at all (remember the missle claims for Flight 800 over the Atlantic?), I think the “360 turns” claim is invoked to SLOW DOWN the jet, not speed it up.
Let’s say the airliner is traveling at 400MPH, and the slowest the F16 can travel is 600MPH. Then the F16 would have to do something to lose speed, like circling, to avoid shooting ahead of the plane it is following.
Of course, if an F16 can travel slowly enough, this would not be necessary.
What “other data” are you referring to? The USA Today article says that this latest finding is indeed based on the cockpit recordings, which they have had for, what, close to 2 years now? Are you talking about the flight data recorder? They’ve had that just as long.
[bolding mine]
That’s not the point. The point is, why would it take so long to analyze the voice recorder? And why is the data still being kept secret? They are only releasing little tidbits of information, and won’t let the families who heard the recording discuss it.
Exactly. It took a lot of testing. But the testing was done in a matter of weeks, not years. Investigations into plane crashes just don’t normally drag out for the length of time that Flight 93 has, and this level of secrecy is not standard procedure.
I disagree. What you’re saying is that it took close to 2 years to hear what they heard on that voice recorder. That’s preposterous. It may have been difficult to decipher, but it can’t possible have taken that long.
Like I said, I don’t know that I buy the shootdown theory; maybe it was as simple as them wanting people to believe the “nicer” story for awhile. It does play a little better to say that the passengers grappled the controls away from the hijackers, rather than the hijackers deliberately crashing the plane. Maybe they just wanted to let the nicer story float for awhile; I don’t know.
True. But then, this isn’t exactly a normal plane crash, is it?
Usually planes are brought down by something like engine failure, which I’d say is easier to figure out than determining who crashed the plane and whether or not it was intentional. I don’t know why we aren’t hearing every bit of information, but I’m not willing to say that my lack of complete knowledge supports tenuous explanations.
It says cockpit recordings, not the voice recorder. I’m not sure how many other kinds of information are kept, you’d have to ask a pilot or someone who knows. And even the question of “why does this take so long” doesn’t explain why the story would change. I think the idea that further analysis has yielded other hints is pretty reasonable.
One possibility: Since the families of the passengers wanted very badly to listen to the cockpit voice recording, they may have figured that to continue to deny them access would look really bad. But since they had been suggesting all along that the passengers crashed the plane, they had a problem, since hearing the hijacker order his fellow hijacker to crash the plane would let the cat out of the bag. So they may have figured that they either had to change the story, or continue to deny the families their request to listen to the tape, and simply opted for the former.
It gets confusing, though, because the one flying the plane supposedly said “no” to the one who ordered him to crash the plane. I’m guessing that there’s something later on that tape that makes it clear that he eventually did crash the plane. The article’s pretty short on details, probably because the details are still secret.
I’m not sure I understand this. The articles all say the families already heard the tape a long time ago…
How long is a “long time”?
According to the ABC piece,
Also, you mention it took the FBI a long time to come to this conclusion, but the bit of info this thread is about came out in July’s congressional report about September 11, and the USA Today link says “Citing transcripts of the still-secret cockpit recordings, Mueller told congressional investigators in a closed briefing last year that, minutes before Flight 93 hit the ground, one of the hijackers “advised Jarrah to crash the plane and end the passengers’ attempt to retake the airplane.””
So maybe it took a long time, but it didn’t just happen if the FBI decided last year that this is what happened. They didn’t go public with it for whatever reason (sensitivity, maybe), but it hasn’t taken two years. At most, if Mueller made this report to Congress last year, it took a little over 1 year.