| The tape also recorded unnerving background sounds. A two-tone alarm sounded because the plane was flying up to 150 miles per hour faster than the instructed limit of 425 m.p.h. for its low altitude, officials said. The air resistance as the plane rushed so close to the ground created a constant rush of wind.
"It could have even broken the sound barrier for a while," said Hank Krakowski, who was director of flight operations control at United's system control center near O'Hare Airport in Chicago on Sept. 11.
Recent reporting has revealed other intriguing information about what was said and done on the flight. While authorities have said that the hijackers on the four flights had knives and box cutters, one passenger aboard Flight 93, Mr. Burnett, told his wife in a cellphone call that the terrorists also had a gun.
On a tape of a 911 call made by Mr. Burnett's wife, Deena, to the sheriff's department in Contra Costa County, Calif., Ms. Burnett said: "My husband just called me from United Flight 93. The plane has been hijacked. They just knifed a passenger and there are guns on the airplane." Investigators said they found no evidence of a gun at the crash site.
Earlier reports have said that a previously unidentified passenger, Edward Felt of Matawan, N.J., said in a 911 call from a restroom that he saw a puff of smoke and heard an explosion, leading some to cite this as evidence that the plane was shot down by the military to prevent it from crashing into sensitive targets. But the 911 dispatcher, John Shaw, and others who have heard the tape, including Mr. Felt's wife, Sandra Felt, say he made no mention of smoke or an explosion when he said, "We're going down."
Officials said the victims' remains were too badly damaged in the crash to tell whether anyone had been stabbed or injured in the struggle.
But Patrick Welsh, the husband of Deborah Welsh, the flight's purser, said he was told by United that one flight attendant had been stabbed early in the takeover. It was "strongly implied," he said, that his wife had been a victim, given her position in first class and the likelihood that she would have stood between the hijackers and the cockpit. "Knowing Debby, she would have resisted," Mr. Welsh said. "She didn't meekly submit to anything. She could handle herself."
Alice Hoglan, a United flight attendant who was phoned by her son, Mark Bingham, a passenger on the plane, while the hijacking was in progress, called him back at 9:54 a.m. and left two messages on his cellphone, urging him and the other passengers to rush the cockpit because the flight appeared to be a suicide mission. Her son, who she believes helped try to retake the plane, apparently never got the messages, but Ms. Hoglan later retrieved them from the phone company.
"Mark, apparently it's terrorists and they're hellbent on crashing the aircraft," Ms. Hoglan said in the second message, urgency in her voice. "So, if you can, try to take over the aircraft. There doesn't seem to be much plan to land the aircraft normally, so I guess your best bet would be to try to take it over if you can, or tell the other passengers. There is one flight that they say is headed toward San Francisco. It might be yours. So, if you can, group some people and perhaps do the best you can to get control of it. I love you, sweetie. Good luck. Goodbye."
More than six months later, Ms. Hoglan said, she did not expect to gain any consolation from hearing the voice recorder. Still, she wants to listen.
"I hope," she wrote in an e-mail message, "that as we families sit together and listen to the tape, we will, amid all the violence and confusion and ugliness, be able to recognize some brief familiar voices of our heroic sons and daughters, husbands and wives. I hope we can be assured that our loved ones spent their last half-hour engaged in the purposeful, focused and urgent labor of defeating the murderers aboard — distracted from the thought that they were living the last moment of their lives."
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New version of denied shutdown order of Cheney
Source: Democrats.com
With a Jet Fighter Near, Cheney Ordered Flight 93 Shot Down 3 Times Without Hesitation
According to the Washington Post, when Bush's plane took off at 9:55 am on 9-11, Cheney recommended military pilots be authorized to shoot down a civil airliner. "I said, 'You bet,'" Bush recalled. "We had a little discussion, but not much." "With Bush's approval, Rumsfeld passed the order down the chain of command. In the White House bunker, a military aide approached the vice president. 'There is a plane [Flight 93] 80 miles out,' he said. 'There is a fighter in the area. Should we engage?' 'Yes,'
Cheney replied without hesitation... The military aide repeated the question, this time with even more urgency. The plane was now 60 miles out. 'Should we engage?' Cheney was asked. 'Yes,' he replied again. As the plane came closer, the aide repeated the question. Does the order still stand? 'Of course it does,' Cheney snapped. [He] said later that it had seemed 'painful, but nonetheless clear-cut. And I didn't agonize over it.'" The Pentagon says it didn't shoot, but who believes them?
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