Another view on Flight 93

From http://911research.wtc7.net/materials/flight93/flight93.html


This flyer is available as six-panel PDFsuitable for printing on both sides of an 8-1/2 X 11 sheet.DOWNLOAD

Was Flight 93Shot Down?
What Did the Witnesses Observe?
What Do the Debris Fields Show?
Why Did the 9/11 CommissionChange the Timeline?

Witnesses Heard Explosions Before Flight 93 Nose-Dived

A passenger inside a locked bathroom called emergency dispatchers using his cell phone. According to dispatch supervisor Glenn Cramer the man said the plane "was going down. He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane." [ Courier-Journal, 9/12/01 ]

Ernie Stuhl, the mayor of Shanksville: "I know of two people -- I will not mention names -- that heard a missile. They both live very close, within a couple of hundred yards... This one fellow's served in Vietnam and he says he's heard them, and he heard one that day." He adds that based on what he has learned, F-16's were "very, very close." [ Philadelphia Daily News, 11/15/01 ]
Laura Temyer of Hooversville: "I heard like a boom and the engine sounded funny. I heard two more booms -- and then I did not hear anything. ... I think the plane was shot down," insists Temyer, who said she has twice told her story to the FBI. What's more, she insists that people she knows in state law enforcement have told her the same thing, that the plane was shot down and that decompression sucked objects from the aircraft, explaining why there was a wide debris field. [ Philadelphia Daily News, 11/15/01 ]
Unnamed witness: ... said he heard two loud bangs before watching the plane take a downward turn of nearly 90 degrees. [ Cleveland Newschannel 5, 9/11/01 ]

Linda Shepley: She hears a loud bang and sees the plane bank to the side. [ ABC News, 9/11/01, cited by CooperativeResearch.org ] She recalls seeing the plane wobbling right and left, at a low altitude of roughly 2,500 feet, when suddenly the right wing abruptly dipped straight down, and the Boeing 757 plunged into the earth. [ Philadelphia Daily News, 11/15/01 ]
Debris From Flight 93 Was Scattered Far From the Crash Site
The accounts of many eyewitnesses and the shape of the impact crater confirm that Flight 93 plunged into the ground from a nearly vertical trajectory. Yet pieces of plane debris were found far from the crash site, in three separate debris fields.

Primary Debris Field: 2000 Feet Wide: A crater 10 feet deep marked the center of the primary debris field. A sector of one engine weighing one ton was found 2,000 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. [ Independent, 8/13/02 ]

Indian Lake and New Baltimore: 3 and 8 Miles Away: Eyewitnesses reported crash debris floating in Indian Lake, several miles from the crash site. [ Post Gazette, 9/13/01 ] "A second debris field was around Indian Lake about 3 miles from the crash scene. Some debris was in the lake and some was adjacent to the lake. "More debris from the plane was found in New Baltimore, some 8 miles away from the crash. [ CNN.com, 9/13/01 ]
The wind that day was 9 mph, and could not have carried debris from the impact crater to locations 8 miles away.

The 9/11 Commission Rewrote the Time of Flight 93's Crash

Flight 93 Crashed at 10:06 Although, seismic signals across the network are not as strong and clear as the WTC case (see Kim et al., 2001), three component records at station SSPA (Δ = 107.6 km) shown in Figure 6 are quite clear. The three-component records at SSPA are dominated by strong Lg arrivals, whereas the Pg waves are difficult to discern and have amplitudes comparable to the noise level. This is typical for seismic waves generated by airplane impacts and crashes. Hence, we infer that the Flight 93 crashed around 14:06:05 ±5 (UTC) (10:06:05 EDT). The uncertainty is only due to seismic velocity at the uppermost crust near the surface in which the Lg waves propagated. [ Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University ]

Forty-five seconds after telling Fritz to evacuate the Johnstown tower, Cleveland Air Traffic Control phoned again. "They said to disregard. The aircraft had turned to the south and they lost radar contact with him." It was 10:06 a.m. [ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10/28/01 ]
The Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday it turned over to the FBI a radar record of United Airlines Flight 93's route. The data traced the Boeing 757-200 from its takeoff from Newark, N.J., to its violent end at 10:06 a.m., just outside Shanksville, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. [ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/13/01 ]

Also, according to sources, the last seconds of the cockpit voice recorder are the loud sounds of wind, hinting at a possible hole somewhere in the fuselage. What caused the smoke and explosion? Why the wind sounds? [ Mirror.co.uk, 9/12/02 ]
The 9/11 Commission Claims the Crash was at 10:03 United 93 crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03:11, ... The 10:03:11 impact time is supported by previous National Transportation Safety Board analysis and by evidence from the Commission staff's analysis of radar, the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, infrared satellite data, and air traffic control transmissions. [ 9/11 Commission Report ]

Unfortunately, the public does not have access to any of the sources that the Commission claims supports its crash time of 10:03.
Claims Flight 93 Didn't CrashConceal Shoot-Down Evidence
A hoax theory that Flight 93 did not even crash in Pennsylvania is advanced by certain websites, books, and videos (i.e., Team8+, '9/11 Revealed', 'Loose Change'). Promoters make one or more of these false claims:

There was no plane wreckage at the alleged crash site.
Flight 93 landed and deboarded in Cleveland.
The cell phone calls from Flight 93 were faked.
Claim 1 exploits the counterintuitive tendency of high-speed crashes to reduce planes to small rubble. In fact, the remains of Flight 93 were recovered from the crater produced by the plane's plunge into the soft landfill.

Claim 2 was created from an erroneous news report stating that Flight 93 landed in Cleveland, and embellished with a fantastic scenario of passengers being herded into an empty NASA research building and disappeared.

Claim 3 is based on the dubious theory that cell phones don't work above 10,000 feet. Even if true, it would not make the calls from Flight 93 suspect, since the plane may have been below 10,000 feet when the calls were made. The nose-dive of Flight 93 into landfill in a reclaimed strip mine buried most of the plane and reduced it to small pieces.
The denial of the crash of Flight 93 appears calculated to alienate victims' survivors and the larger public from the 9/11 truth movement. It is part of a campaign to deny the crashes of each of the four jetliners, functioning to reinforce the false dialectic of gullible conspiracy theorists versus the official story.

Hiding Flight 93's Shoot-Down: the Tip of the Iceberg
Why did the Commission Change the Crash Time? The Commission may have changed the crash time to cover-up the last 3 minutes during which the shoot-down would have occurred. Possible reasons for a shoot-down to destroy the plane include:

To protect the Capitol if Flight 93 was under the control of the hijackers
To prevent Flight 93 from landing if it was under the control of the passengers
The debris trail supports the second possibility: a decompression miles east of the primary crash site suggests the passengers had gained control and reversed direction before being shot down. If 9/11 was an inside job, the landing of Flight 93 may have exposed the plan.
What Else is the Commission Hiding? The Commission's fudging of the timeline of Flight 93's crash is just the tip of iceberg of the Commission's dishonesty, which is documented in the scholarly book Omissions and Distortions by David Griffin.Here are just a few examples:
It completely rewrites the timelines for the notifications and responses for all four hijacked flights.

It makes no mention of WTC Building 7, the only alleged case of a steel-framed building totally collapsing from fires. It makes no mention that the

WTC structural steel was recycled
without forensic examination.
-->
It avoids mentioning that government officials and business leaders received warnings and avoided targets of the attack.
It calls the structural cores of the Twin Towers -- each of which had 47 massive steel box columns -- "hollow steel shaft[s]." It makes no mention of the

privatization of the World Trade Center
six weeks before the attack.
-->

It avoids mentioning that the Twin Towers were shredded and pulverized to dust.
further reading ...
911Research.wtc7.net Flight93Crash.com 911Review.com
For more information on Flight 93, see:
Flight 93 the crash site eyewitness reports crash analysis fudging the timeline



_________________________________________


From http://www.oilempire.us/flight93.html

The official story of Flight 93 is that the heroic passengers brought down the plane to spare the country the tragedy of a fourth attack, a tremendous sacrifice to save others. However, while it seems true that the passengers were revolting against their hijackers, the evidence shows that Flight 93 was actually shot down. Debris from the plane was spread out over 8 miles, which suggests major trauma to the plane while it was still in the air. Some media coverage of this crash in the first couple days strongly suggested a shoot-down, most of this is archived at the website www.flight93crash.com

It is probable that most citizens, regardless of their political philosophies, would have been able to accept the sad necessity to shoot down the fourth plane to avert a worse tragedy -- if the pilots were dead and the passengers doomed, the shoot down could have been easily justified to a traumatized nation. While it is easy to suggest that the "heroes of 9/11" story was a much happier message to tell the public, there are deeper reasons to cover up the shoot down.

The most critical issue that would be raised by admitting to the shoot down is why Flight 77 was not intercepted. Even if one believes the official story that 9/11 was a complete surprise, the fact is at 9:03 am, when the South Tower was hit, no one in the air defense system could have had any ambiguity about what was going on. Flight 77 was over the Ohio / West Virginia border at this point and was making a 180 degree turn to fly back toward the National Capitol, which would have caused the air defenses to "scramble" to intercept. There is no excuse for the fact that supersonic jet interceptors were not "scrambled" to investigate what this plane was doing, and defend the Capitol from attack. If necessary, most of the area that Flight 77 crossed between 9:03 and 9:38 (when it hit the Pentagon) was very rural and forested, and a shoot down would have posed minimal risk for "collateral damage" on the ground.

There are several theories on why Flight 93 was shot down. Which of these theories, or combinations, are true would require a full scale investigation, including access to the black boxes, radar tapes, classified communications, satellite imagery and electronic interceptions, and other evidence that is unlikely to ever be made public.

the military took that long to get their fighter planes ready, and Flight 93 was the first plane they were able to stop. This theory does not adequately explain why the military was not able to prevent Flight 77 from hitting the Pentagon, since 77 was at the Ohio / West Virginia border at 9:03 am, when the second tower was hit (and the entire air defense system knew that an attack was underway).

the passengers were about to regain control of the plane, and one passenger was a pilot who might have been able to safely land the plane, something the official conspirators could not allow, since this would have resulted in live hijackers who would have been interrogated. This theory suggests that the shootdown was the 9/11 equivalent of Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, covering up evidence that the conspirators could not allow to be cross-examined.
the story of the heroic passengers was always an intentional part of the psychological manipulation of the 9/11 plot. Once the Pentagon had been hit, there was no need for Flight 93, since the goals of the attack had already been met. The "let's roll" story was a "Wag the Dog" propaganda that was a part of the overall psychological operation (psyop).

The hijackers were planning to go to Three Mile Island (this has been floated in a few places, although without actual evidence), which would have been an unmanageable disaster much worse than 9/11.

Flight 93 was late taking off, and missed the window of opportunity to reach Washington before the air defense system was mobilized. After the Pentagon was hit about 9:38 am, the military defense of the national capital area went into full force. It is theoretically possible that the original 9/11 plan was to have all four (or more?) planes hit their targets nearly simultaneously, but the delays (especially Flight 93) made it impossible to allow the last plane to reach DC, and therefore it had to be shot down, since the longer the lack of response of the Air Force, the more suspicious the event would become.

Flight 93 hoaxes

The first hoax about Flight 93 was that the phone calls from the passengers to their relatives were faked. These calls told the passengers about the WTC crashes, who then decided to attack the hijackers. Ignoring the reality that modern planes have "air phones" that explicitly are designed to work on planes, the evidence for "no cell phone calls are possible" is ambiguous at best. The website physics911 seems to be the source for these claims, which were concocted by a Canadian physicist who staged an experiment to replicate cell-phone reception in a small plane flying in Canada. A real experiment to prove the calls could not have been made would have needed to replicate the locations and altitudes in the United States (since cell phone reception is completely dependent on location). Physics911 also pushes the no plane hit Pentagon hoax and has promoted the "pod."

While it is true that fake audio and video can be created with sophisticated software systems, this is probably the meme most calculated to alienate "9/11 researchers" from the family members. It is unlikely that a spouse would not know they were having a phone conversation with their partner, and the extra complication to the operation makes this theory one of the least credible. There is enough provable evidence of official complicity without claiming that 9/11 family members really didn't talk with their loved ones on the phone - at least for those sincerely interested in the truth.


Physics911 also promoted a science fiction story claiming that the passengers from all four planes were all brought to a single site (a secret military base) and then all relocated to a single plane, which was then crashed to dispose of the evidence. This fantasy has zero evidence for it. It would have massively complicated the operation for no benefit. It is likely that the only "plane swap" that happened was tampering with the navigation system to ensure the "success" of the attacks, not any substitution of one plane for another.

In September 2004, the American Free Press newspaper published an article implying that there wasn't a plane crash in Pennsylvania (even though a lot of people saw and heard it happen). This publication is part of an ultra right wing media group that also publishes the "Barnes Review," a Holocaust Denial publication that has praised Hitler. AFP / Barnes, by their own admission, works closely with KKK leader David Duke. Perhaps their motto should be "No Planes on 9/11 and No Gas Chambers in the Holocaust." The AFP acronym is also used by Agence-France Press, one of the world's leading media organizations, which could cause confusion and undeserved legitimacy for the American Free Press, which promotes (and creates) hoaxes that misdirect serious investigation into 9/11 complicity.
There is also a hoax that Flight 93 landed in Cleveland during the attacks, a variation on the plane substitution claims.