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. All of these facts, widely disseminated, were confirmed by the coroner Wally Miller. The location of US Air Force jets, which might or might not have been close enough to fire a missile at the hijacked plane.
Live news media reports on the morning of 11 September conflict with a number of official statements issued later. What the government acknowledges is that the first fighters with the mission to intercept took off at 8. Flight 93, whose menacing trajectory was made known by the broadcast media almost immediately, did not go down for another 31 minutes.
Apart from the logical conclusion that at least one Air Force F — miles away in Washington at 9. Also, there was one brief report on CBS television before the crash that two F fighters were tailing Flight Vice-President Dick Cheney acknowledged five days later that President Bush had authorised the Air Force pilots to shoot down hijacked commercial aircraft. One telephone call from the doomed plane whose contents do not entirely tally with the hero legend and which is accordingly omitted in the Independence Day -type dramas favoured by the US media.
The Associated Press news service reported on 11 September that eight minutes before the crash, a frantic male passenger called the emergency number. He told the operator, named Glen Cramer, that he had locked himself inside one of the plane's toilets. Cramer told the AP, in a report that was widely broadcast on 11 September, that the passenger had spoken for one minute. He was very distraught. He said he believed the plane was going down. He did hear some sort of an explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane, but he didn't know where.
And then we lost contact with him. According to the information that has been made known, this was the last of the various phone calls made from the aeroplane. No more calls were received from the plane in the eight minutes that remained after the man in the toilet said that he had heard an explosion.
Eyewitness accounts of a "mystery plane" that flew low over the Flight 93 crash site shortly after impact. Lee Purbaugh is one of at least half a dozen named individuals who have reported seeing a second plane flying low and in erratic patterns, not much above treetop level, over the crash site within minutes of the United flight crashing.
They describe the plane as a small, white jet with rear engines and no discernible markings. Purbaugh, who served three years in the US Navy, said he did not believe it was a military plane. If it indeed was not, one suggestion made in the internet discussion groups is that US Customs uses planes with these characteristics to interdict aerial drug shipments.
Either way, the presence of the mystery jet remains a puzzle. How has the US government and its various agencies responded to doubts raised by the above questions? In the following ways:. The paper debris eight miles away, the FBI says, was wafted away by a 10mph wind; the jet-engine part flew 2, yards on account of the savage force of the plane's impact with the ground.
The FBI conclusion: "Nothing was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground intact. One expert expresses astonishment at the notion that the letters and other papers would have remained airborne for almost one hour before falling to earth. The Air Force jets were on their way but failed to make it on time, according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
Fighters did finally approach Flight 93, he acknowledges, "moments" before it crashed, but did not shoot it down. Which begs the question why they were unable to arrive sooner to intercept an aircraft that clearly had terrorists aboard and that was flying straight for Washington more than one hour after another United Airlines plane had crashed into the second World Trade Centre tower.
The report in the New Hampshire newspaper, and the one on CBS, have not been explained, and the air-traffic controllers in Cleveland who tracked the last minutes of Flight 93 on radar have been forbidden by the authorities to speak publicly about what they saw on their screens. Neither the FBI nor anyone else in authority has explained the reported phone call from the plane toilet, even though it appears to be the last of the phone calls made from the plane and even though it conveys the far from insignificant claim that there was an explosion on board.
The FBI has confiscated the tape of the conversation and the operator Glen Cramer has received orders not to speak to the media any more.
The explanation furnished by the FBI for the mystery plane, whose existence it initially denied, serves less to reassure than to reinforce suspicions that a cover-up of sorts is under way, that the government is manipulating the truth in a manner it considers to be palatable to the broader US public. The FBI has said, on the record, that the plane was a civilian business jet, a Falcon, that had been flying within 20 miles of Flight 93 and was asked by the authorities to descend from 37,ft to 5,ft to survey and transmit the co-ordinates of the crash site "for responding emergency crews".
The reason, as numerous people have observed, why this seems so implausible is that, first, by They pinpointed the location and then continued on. CLAIM: One of Flight 93's engines was found "at a considerable distance from the crash site," according to Lyle Szupinka, a state police officer on the scene who was quoted in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Offering no evidence, a posting on Rense. FACT: Experts on the scene told Popular Mechanics that a fan from one of the engines was recovered in a catchment basin downhill from the crash site.
Jeff Reinbold, the National Park Service representative responsible for the Flight 93 National Memorial, confirms the direction and distance from the crash site to the basin: just over yards south, which means the fan landed in the direction the jet was traveling. For something to hit the ground with that kind of energy, it would only take a few seconds to bounce up and travel yards.
CLAIM: "Residents and workers at businesses outside Shanksville, Somerset County, reported discovering clothing, books, papers, and what appeared to be human remains," states a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article dated Sept.
Since Flight 93 crashed west-southwest of Indian Lake, it was impossible for debris to fly perpendicular to wind direction. The FBI lied. 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 Gibney was with me at that time. It disgusts me to see this because the public is being misled. More than anything else, it disgusts me because it brings up fears.
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