09.31.57 EST, September 11 2001
Hijacker: ”Ladies and gentlemen. Here the captain. Please sit down, keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So sit.”
Air traffic controller: ”Er, uh … calling Cleveland centre … You’re unreadable. Say again slowly.”
Hijackers: [to passengers] ”Don’t move. Shut up … Don’t move. Stop. Sit, sit, sit down. Sit down … [in Arabic] That’s it, that’s it, that’s it … [in English] Down, down … ”
09.33.20
Air traffic controller: ”We just, we didn’t get it clear … Is that United 93 calling?”
Hijacker: ”Jassim.”
Hijacker [in Arabic] ”In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate … ”
09.35.40
Unidentified voice: ”I don’t want to die.”
Hijacker: ”No, no. Down, down.”
Unidentified voice: ”I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
09:37:36
Hijacker: [in Arabic] ”Everything is fine. I finished … ”
09:38:36
Hijacker: ”Yes”.
09:39:11
Hijacker: [in English] ”Ah. Here’s the captain: I would like to tell you all to remain seated. We have a bomb aboard, and we are going back to the airport, and we have our demands. So, please remain quiet.”
The recording lasts 32 minutes. It begins just after 9.30am — the moment that passengers would first have known for certain that something was wrong — and ends just after 10am, when voices in Arabic can be heard repeating ”Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest.”
Then there is nothing but static. Sandwiched between those two points were the dreadful final moments of United Airlines flight 93, brought closer on Wednesday than ever before with the first public playing of the tape from the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder.
As the hijacking begins, sounds can be heard that may signify the hijackers stabbing crew members. As people plead for their lives, air traffic controllers on the ground can be heard struggling to make sense of what is happening on board. But the chaos in the cockpit only grows as the hijackers apparently realise that a passenger revolt is under way.
”Is there something?” one hijacker asks another, at 9.57am. ”A fight?”
”Yeah,” comes the reply.
The tape, played at the trial of the French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui in Virginia on Wednesday, seems to document two attempts by passengers to storm the cockpit, with the terrorists responding to the first by threatening them with the plane’s emergency axe. ”The guys will go in,” a voice says in Arabic. ”Lift up the [unintelligible] and they put the axe into it. So everyone will be scared.”
But by 9.59am the hijackers sound as if they are confused or panicked. ”There are some guys,” one says. ”All those guys.”
What follows are chaotic attempts to control the plane’s steering yoke — ”Pull it down! Pull it down!” — interspersed with appeals to Allah, as the hijackers apparently crash the plane rather than surrender control to the passengers. They may also have been trying to throw the passengers off balance by swinging the aircraft violently left and right.
”Is that it? Shall we finish it off?” one terrorist asks at 10am exactly.
”No. Not yet,” another answers. ”When they come, we finish it off.”
”In the cockpit,” says a voice, presumably that of a passenger. ”If we don’t, we die.”
Seconds later, there comes a version of the words attributed to passenger Todd Beamer — the phrase that came to define the attempt to defeat the hijackers: ”Roll it.”
Crashing sounds on the tape underline the speculation that the passengers may have used the plane’s food trolleys in their uprising, and that Beamer’s words were a specific command to use a trolley as a battering-ram.
The passengers had been alerted to the other attacks already in progress that day during cellphone calls to people on the ground.
A struggle follows, and at 10.01am, the order comes, in Arabic, to ”cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen.”
”Hey, hey. Give it to me. Give it to me,” a hijacker yells at 10.02am.
At 10.03 and nine seconds, the tape goes silent.
The plane nosedived, then rolled over while still in the air, hitting the ground nose first and upside down. It had been carrying 33 passengers, seven crew members, and four hijackers.
Prosecutors had been given permission to play the tape — which was released outside the courtroom only in the form of a transcript — as part of their efforts to convince a jury that it should decide to execute Moussaoui, a self-confessed al-Qaeda loyalist who they claim could have chosen to prevent the September 11 attacks by alerting the FBI when they arrested him in August 2001.
Neither his guilt nor his eligibility for the death penalty are at issue, but defence lawyers are expected to argue that he is mentally unstable and seeking martyrdom. He is the only person to have been charged in the United States in connection with the attacks.
On Wednesday, the defence was given permission to call as a witness an unidentified individual, believed to be the would-be ”shoe bomber” Richard Reid.
Though the tape paints a horrific picture of events in the air, it does little to clarify several theories about exactly what happened — confirming neither the idea that passengers killed a hijacker, nor the surmise by the official 9/11 investigation that the hijackers killed a crew member.
But speaking on the courtroom steps, Hamilton Peterson, whose father and stepmother were on board, said the recording showed that ”brave Americans overcame a horrific challenge … What was going through my heart was that this was an example of ordinary citizens stepping up to the plate on a moment’s notice, and protecting the United States capital from a terrorist attack.”
Perhaps because the flight 93 crash never took on the iconic significance of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, it has been deemed the appropriate focus of the first feature film about 9/11. United Flight 93, by the British director Paul Greengrass, premieres at the Tribeca film festival the week after next.
One New York cinema pulled the trailer for the movie following customer complaints, and similar reactions were reported in Los Angeles, but Greengrass has said that all the flight 93 relatives he spoke to strongly supported the idea of the film being made. – Guardian Unlimited Â