Flight 93 cockpit recording is a hoax

I will stick my neck out and declare it a hoax: Jurors in the al-Moussaoui trial were shown alleged cockpit voice recordings of the final stages of the hijacking of United Airlines flight 93. It was played to the court accompanied by a video showing gruesome pictures of charred bodies, so it was intended to stir emotions rather than to provide hard evidence. The defence team's objections to the type of evidence were over-ruled.

It took the authorities a long time to come up with evidence from the flight recorders which they had earlier stated were not recoverable. It seems to me they still did a rather sloppy job when replacing the real recordings with this dramatic production. Here is why:

First of all, Cockpit voice recordings and recordings of air traffic communications are separated, yet in this case they appear together. I only have the transcript to go by since the actual recordings have not been released. I cannot establish from the transcript at what volume certain parts of it appear. It is possible that the crew instead of using headsets would have switched air traffic communications onto the cabin loud speakers so that they would also be audible in the cockpit. It does, however, not explain why we can hear communications from air traffic control and another plane on the frequency, but we cannot hear the communications by flight 93 crew to air traffic control, although those should have been a lot more audible.

According to the transcript air traffic control received a communication that there was a bomb on board, but we do not hear the pilots stating so. Air traffic control ask another plane on the frequency whether this is what they heard and they confirm. This means that the pilots must have stated so on the frequency. Air traffic control could not have gauged this information from the transponder code selected by the pilots as this would not be accessible to the crew of the third plane nor would it be specific. There is a transponder code for hijacking, but not for a bomb on board. Air traffic control could not have taken this information from what the hijackers said either, since to transmit a message to air traffic control the pilot has to press a push-to-talk button and the noise cancelling microphone will not pick up anything from the background.

However, let's assume, unlikely as this is, that they did pick up what the hijackers said according to the transcript, namely: "Ladies and Gentlemen. Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit." Here the script writers for the audio/video presentation made their biggest blunder. According to the script those remarks were made in Arabic. Air traffic could have got them translated, although not instantaneously, and they would have had to figure out what language they were dealing with first, but there is no chance that the crew of Executive Jet 956, the third plane on the frequency, could have understood those remarks.

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9 - 1 1 R e s e a r c h

Cockpit Voice Recorders
Missing Evidence About the September 11th Flights

Cockpit voice recorders (CVRs) record all of the conversations between the pilots and air traffic controllers. They are contained in black boxes that are designed to survive the worst fiery crashes and, like the flight data recorders, are recovered after crashes to determine what went wrong.

The only plane whose cockpit voice recorder was supposedly recovered and successfully read was Flight 93. The recorders on the other three jets were deemed unrecovered or too damaged to read. The FBI refused to release an audio record or transcript of Flight 93's voice recorder with the excuse: "we do not believe that the horror captured on the cockpit voice recording will console them in any way." 1 Then, in April of 2006, a transcript of Flight 93's CVR was published in conjunction with the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.

After the December 21, 2001 announcement by the FBI that it had deciphered Flight 93's CVR but would not release information about it, Accuracy in Media submitted a Freedom of Information Act requesting to have a transcript released but the FBI refused to comply. 2

According to the NTSB:

The content and timing of release of the written transcript are strictly regulated: under federal law, transcripts of pertinent portions of cockpit voice recordings are released at a Safety Board public hearing on the accident or, if no hearing is held, when a majority of the factual reports are made public.

Thus federal law apparently would have required the release of the contents of the Flight 93 CVR when the 9/11 Commission closed its doors in late 2004.

Cockpit Voice Recorder
Time recorded 30 min continuous, 2 hours for solid state digital units
Number of channels 4
Impact tolerance 3400Gs / 6.5 ms
Fire resistance 1100 degC / 30 min
Water pressure resistance submerged 20,000 ft
Underwater locator beacon 37.5 KHz; battery has shelf life of 6 years or more, with 30-day operation capability upon activation
3

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References

1. FBI won't release Flight 93 tape, CNN.com, [cached]
2. What Are They Hiding About Flight 93?, Philadelphia Daily News, 12/28/01 [cached]
3. Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) and Flight Data Recorders (FDR), NTSB.gov,

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