- 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."
-
-
- http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/4084323.htm
|