Final Moments of Flight 93

boloboffin

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I've prepared this synopsis of Flight 93's CVR and FDR for a thread over at DU, and I would appreciate any comments.

The CVR transcript is only excerpts because I wanted to keep this on one page. However, I think I've covered the main events of those last minutes. I hope the print isn't too small!

As far as IDs are concerned, several are from the 9/11 Commission Report, and several are from my own deduction. I tried to show questions where I wasn't sure, but if I was reasonably sure of an ID, I went ahead and made it positive. I'm happy to reconsider any of them.

The interesting thing here is what happens during the 9:59 minute. I was focused on that point because one of the main contentions at DU is that Lyz Glick told her husband Jeremy about 2 World Trade collapsing. Yet the revolt had already started at just before 9:58.

(Because of this, I've postulated that Jeremy and perhaps others had not joined the fight at this point. This may have been necessary because of the width of the one aisle in the plane. The passengers in the back could keep track of the progress, joining the fight as necessary. Jeremy was a judo champion and a natural choice to be one of the first ones up the aisle, but by coincidence, Flight 93 had an abundance of these fighter-types aboard. If there had been a second line, it sounds as strong as the first.)

What's interesting to me is the situation inside the cockpit. Jarrah is specifically IDed in the 9/11 Commission Report as telling Saeed to hold the door at the top of the minute. But twenty seconds later, he's telling him to sit down again. (IDing the other way really doesn't make sense. Does Jarrah get up from the wheel? Don't think so.) He tells Saeed to sit in English, which is strange. Is that indicative of scolding? At any rate, he has stopped shaking the plane to allow Saeed to stand, and it's probably this that makes him tell Saeed to sit down again. Saeed doesn't want to. Incredibly Jarrah again shakes the plane while Saeed is still standing. (Yes, the hijackers outside the cockpit are enduring this, too, but Saeed is Jarrah's last line of defense.) He then tells Saeed to sit again, to trust in Allah and in him (whoever "him" is). Saeed sits.

This maniacal frame of mind pops up again. Later, when Jarrah begins pitching the nose up and down (or is this yawing, technically?), he begins calling out the up and down motions. It sounds almost childish to my mind. As far as I can see, he's completely in a fugue state here.

Looking at the CVR and FDR information side by side also brings the heroism of the passengers into sharper focus. Even after Jarrah and Saeed had turned the plane upside down and were hurling it toward the ground, some of them were still in there, adapting to the G forces and the inverted cockpit, interfering with the hijackers enough to cause Jarrah to have to shake them off again. This is the stuff of Homer.

Again, comments, suggestions, and corrections are greatly appreciated.

ETA: I've also got a PDF of that image file. Anyone who wants it, please send me an email link by private and I'll send it over.
 
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boloboffin said:
The interesting thing here is what happens during the 9:59 minute. I was focused on that point because one of the main contentions at DU is that Lyz Glick told her husband Jeremy about 2 World Trade collapsing. Yet the revolt had already started at just before 9:58.
Click to expand...
Glick has said that, but in her book ("Your Father's Voice") it's a little different. She reports the last conversation like this:

There must have been a moment when he polled "the three other guys as big as me" but if he told me about it, it didn't stick in my memory. One of the twin towers collapsed somewhere during this interval, but I don't recall mentioning it or even knowing about it.

"Okay, I'm going to do it," he said...

"I think you need to do it. You're strong, you're brave, I love you," I said.

"Okay. I'm going to put the phone down, I'm going to leave it here, and I'm going to come right back to it,", Jer said...
Click to expand...

So, Glick doesn't know at what point he took the vote. She doesn't know if that came before or after the collapse, and can't be sure whether she told him about the collapse or not, or even whether she knew about the collapse herself. Her memory isn't the most solid foundation to be building more "anomalies", then.
 
MikeW said:
Glick has said that, but in her book ("Your Father's Voice") it's a little different. She reports the last conversation like this:



So, Glick doesn't know at what point he took the vote. She doesn't know if that came before or after the collapse, and can't be sure whether she told him about the collapse or not, or even whether she knew about the collapse herself. Her memory isn't the most solid foundation to be building more "anomalies", then.
Click to expand...

Wow, thank you. Do you have a page number on that quote from "Your Father's Voice"?

Regardless, I have been posting the phrase "Physical evidence trumps recollection of witnesses" over and over again already. It doesn't help that one specific documentary has Lyz telling Jeremy about the tower collapse, and then Jeremy leaning over to take a vote. The person I'm debating is so hyper-literal about everything, it drives me up the wall sometimes.
 
boloboffin said:
Wow, thank you. Do you have a page number on that quote from "Your Father's Voice"?
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It's page #194 in my hardback copy, towards the end of a chapter called "Arrivals and Departures". There's more relevant bits here, though too much to copy, but the points people would see as relevant here are:

a) Lyz tells him about the Pentagon attack, and says she believes that's what persuaded him they must do something
b) She places Glick saying he'd take a vote, after he heard about the Pentagon crash
c) Lyz says she only heard his voice over the phone, there was no sense of anything else going on in the background
d) She describes very little going on between telling Jeremy of the Pentagon attack, and him putting the phone down - the conversation laid out here could have taken place in less than a minute. (Doesn't mean it did, just that there's no reason given here to believe there was a lengthy gap between the two events)
e) As quoted before, Lyz says the collapse happened during this interval (before he said they'd agreed to attack), however also says she doesn't know if she mentioned it to him, or knew about it herself. Which suggests her placing the collapse before they took the vote is something Lyz figured out after the fact for some reason, and not something she actually observed. There's clearly room for doubt here, anyway.
 
Very nice work, boloboffin! I spent a lot of time studying (at great strain to my eyes) the FDR printout of Flight 93. My only (constructive) criticism might be that the value of measurement grids are not visible at the edge. Other than that, having the CVR transcript and FDR printout side by side makes for a rather chilling image of what happened.
 
boloboffin said:
<snip>
I've prepared this synopsis of Flight 93's CVR and FDR for a thread over at DU, and I would appreciate any comments.
Click to expand...

Nice work, boloboffin. The juxtaposition of the FDR (which displays cold, hard data) and the CVR (which displays hot, raw emotion - and evil) like that was an excellent idea on your part. It tells the story of Flight 93's sad fate in a very vivid fashion while simultaneously putting the cold hard data into perspective for those who may otherwise tune it out because they don't understand it.

Very well done, indeed.
 
boloboffin said:
[...]

This maniacal frame of mind pops up again. Later, when Jarrah begins pitching the nose up and down (or is this yawing, technically?), he begins calling out the up and down motions. It sounds almost childish to my mind. As far as I can see, he's completely in a fugue state here.
Click to expand...

Since we only have to rely on the transcript, we don't know how Jarrah said it. Maybe (possibly) he screamed it. Would he need help from Saeed to make those movements?

[...]

Again, comments, suggestions, and corrections are greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

In all, it's bone chilling. Especially as I immediatly had the scene of United 93 playing in the back of my mind. Very well done.
 
Does what Ziad Jarrah and Al-Ghamdi say in this fit what they were saying in the movie at the end?
 
Undesired Walrus said:
Does what Ziad Jarrah and Al-Ghamdi say in this fit what they were saying in the movie at the end?
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I don't exactly recall the "Up, down, up, down" ,"Cut the oxygen" and "In the cockpit" bits, but most other text I recognize. I have the DVD and saw the movie three times, but when this scene plays (the passengers assaulting the hijackers) tears spring to my eyes and I get to emotional to pay attention to every detail.

Discovery's The Flight That Fought Back (very good documentary) also reenacts these last moments to the same detail. That documentary also mentions one of the hijackers holding up an axe infront of the peephole, from inside the cockpit. Boloboffin, do you have the transcript for that bit? It appearantly was something spoken about by the hijackers.
 
Peephole! The CVR transcript has that entire line except for that particular word, which is too indistinct for the transcribers to make out. Or too obscure a reference for them, if the Discovery documentary was able to make it out.

The hijackers are discussing bringing the other two into the cockpit after the first steep descent (40,000 to 20,000 in about six minutes). Jarrah sets the controls for a more gradual descent to 7,000 feet, and only after that's done do they discuss this. Apparently the other teams had all retreated into the cockpit from the very beginning of the hijacks.

The ax statement comes up in this context. I read this as the hijackers in the back not wanting to retreat. So Jarrah suggests the ax maneuver. This is well before the revolt, BTW, although they can see it brewing. I thought the missing word was "curtain", as in the curtain dividing first class from the rest of the plane. I'm at work, so I'm not looking at the precise wording right now.

Unless the documentary makers or someone else actually heard the tape and made out the word "peephole", I like my guess better. Does the peephole really look into the cockpit, and not out at the plane? But how then would the hijackers know when someone was looking in to be able to wave the ax? I see this as a way of letting the others get into the cockpit to approximate the defensive plan the other teams must have had - two hijackers in the seats, three in the aisle. But while they were trying to work that retreat out, the passengers attacked.
 
The documentary shows an interview with one of the relatives talking about one of the hijackers holding up the axe in front of the peephole to scare of the passengers who are attacking, and comments (laughingly) on how idiotic this was, expecting the passengers to be able to look from outside the cockpit into the cockpit through that peephole and see the axe.
 
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