Theorists claim the plane was breaking up before it crashed. Human remains were confined to a acre area directly surrounding the crash site. Paper and tiny scraps of sheetmetal , however, did land in the lake. Indian Lake is less than 1.
And the wind that day was northwesterly, at nine to 12 mph, which means it was blowing from the northwest—toward Indian Lake. I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down FACT: Saying he was reluctant to fuel debate by responding to unsubstantiated charges, Gibney a lieutenant colonel, not a major declined to comment.
David Somdahl, Gibney flew an F that morning—but nowhere near Shanksville. Jacoby confirms the day's events. Someone called to say an F was landing in Bozeman. From there we flew to Albany. Jacoby is outraged by the claim that Gibney shot down Flight Over the last two decades, visitors have left thousands of mementos—baseballs, menorahs, license plates, firefighter gear, a miniature U.
Military service members often visited on their way to, or home from, their duty stations, including Iraq and Afghanistan. One Army lieutenant remarked that travelling to Somerset County was the least he could do, to honor the civilians who fought back. The Flight 93 Memorial regularly hosts tributes where various groups—bicyclists, bagpipes players, Tibetan monks—come to pay their respects.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon two such tributes. Black-bereted members of the Knights of Columbus, sweating in their sashed uniforms and white gloves, disbanded after a ceremony at Memorial Plaza.
Several dozen members of the Leathernecks Nation MC, a motorcycle club for marines and some Navy corpsmen, were taking their place at the flagpole. The four members who presided over their tribute included Cannon, the sergeant-at-arms, a tattooed contractor with a long, gray beard. He opened a manila folder and read from a page printed on Leathernecks letterhead. The bikers held a moment of silence for the thirteen U. The bikers then filed silently to the marble wall. Each faced an engraved name, holding a carnation.
Then they left-faced and walked off. The visit was meant to encourage the sense of selflessness displayed by the passengers and crew two decades ago. About a hundred and thirty thousand people visited the Flight 93 crash site in The number was expected to reach half a million this year.
On the hot, clear Saturday when I visited, the memorial was pleasantly uncrowded. People strolled the grounds, framed by fields of early goldenrod. Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U. United Airlines Flight 93, a regularly scheduled early-morning nonstop flight from Newark, New Jersey , to San Francisco , California , departed at a. The plane carried seven crew-members and 33 passengers, less than half its maximum capacity. Also on the flight were four hijackers who had successfully boarded the plane with knives and box cutters.
Meanwhile, Ed Ballinger, a flight dispatcher for United Airlines, was taking steps to warn flights of possible cockpit intrusions. Ballinger informed pilots of the attacks on the World Trade Center; Flight 93 received his transmission at a. Captain Jason Dahl responded at a. At roughly a.
The flight data recorder also shows that Jarrah reset the autopilot, turning the plane around to head back east. After a brief discussion, a vote was taken and the passengers decided to fight back against their hijackers, informing several people on the ground of their plans. One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett Jr. I love you, honey. In response, the hijacker piloting the plane began to roll the aircraft, pitching it up and down to throw the charging passengers off balance.
Worried that the passengers would soon break through to the cockpit, the hijackers made the decision to crash the plane before reaching their final destination. Or, if there are people who do know, they are not telling. The shortage of available facts did not prevent the creation of an instant legend — a legend that the US government and the US media were pleased to propagate, and that the American public have been eager, for the most part, to accept as fact.
The legend goes like this: the passengers on the hijacked United flight, alerted on their mobile phones to the news of the other three hijacked planes, decide that if they are not going to save themselves at least they will do the patriotic thing and spare the lives of those who are the terrorists' intended targets; so they charge down the aisle, storm the cockpit, where a terrorist is at the controls, and, in the ensuing struggle, force the plane down.
President George Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the head of the FBI Robert Mueller, and numerous other senior government officials who have saluted the "heroes" of Flight 93, have consistently, and repeatedly, advanced this version of events.
So have the big national newspapers and all the big national television stations. The New York Time s, normally a model of legalistic precision, published this extraordinarily woolly sentence on 22 September upon learning, from unnamed "official" sources, that the plane's cockpit voice-recorder had registered "a desperate and wild struggle" aboard.
Vanity Fair magazine, going on little more information than was available to The New York Times , went ahead and published a highly detailed story on Flight 93, which, the magazine said, "may be remembered as one of the greatest tales of heroism ever told". Vanity Fair did recognise, though, that any suggestions as to what actually happened to force the plane down had to be, by necessity, "pure conjecture".
Two months later, Newsweek got hold of what it was told was a partial transcript of the voice-recorder and, upon that basis, narrated the story of "the Heroes of Flight 93" in even more vivid, drum-rolling, Hollywoodesque detail than Vanity Fair had done. The passengers were "citizen soldiers The transcript that Newsweek obtained did indicate that fighting had taken place aboard, curses had been uttered, prayers raised up both to the Muslim and the Christian god.
But for all the drama of the story, Newsweek did not draw attention to the fact that, in truth, they were guessing as to how or why the plane had crashed; that they did not know whether the passengers had even made it into the cockpit; that they had no clue what happened during Flight 93's decisive, desperate last eight minutes. Which is not to assert that the "hero" story is untrue, or even implausible.
Maybe the legend does indeed correspond perfectly to the facts. And certainly, based on the records of telephone calls made from the plane, there is no disputing that a number of the passengers did indeed intend to carry out actions of great courage.
But what those actions actually turned out to be is not known — or known only to a small group of people with a clear picture of what happened in the skies over Shanksville on the morning of 11 September, people in the US military who tracked the plane's last moments as well as people familiar with, but unwilling to reveal, the full contents of the material gleaned from the cockpit voice- recorder, which was retrieved in perfect working order after the crash.
The absence of official information has led to lively and often well-informed debate in the unofficial medium of the internet see www. But there are also a number of individuals in the aviation industry convinced that there do exist other plausible interpretations of what actually happened.
Because there are, most certainly, a number of important unanswered questions — questions based on evidence, as well as on a manifest absence of candour on the part of the authorities — which the national US media, typically so sceptical and inquisitive, have shown a curious reluctance to ask.
The alternative theories, both of which have been denied by the US military and the FBI, are a that Flight 93 was brought down by a US government plane; and b that a bomb went off aboard passengers had said in phone calls that one of the hijackers had what appeared to be a bomb strapped to him.
If doubts remain despite the denials, if conspiracy theories flourish, it is in large part because of the authorities' failure to address head-on questions centring on the following four conundrums.
The wide displacement of the plane's debris, one explanation for which might be an explosion of some sort aboard prior to the crash. Letters — Flight 93 was carrying 7, pounds of mail to California — and other papers from the plane were found eight miles 13km away from the scene of the crash. A sector of one engine weighing one ton was found 2, yards away. This was the single heaviest piece recovered from the crash, and the biggest, apart from a piece of fuselage the size of a dining-room table.
The rest of the plane, consistent with an impact calculated to have occurred at mph, disintegrated into pieces no bigger than two inches long. Other remains of the plane were found two miles away near a town called Indian Lake.
0コメント