Families of passengers who rebelled against hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 said on Friday the FBI theory that the terrorists deliberately crashed the plane into a Pennsylvania field was based on "limited and questionable interpretations" of the cockpit recording.
The theory -- described by FBI Director Robert Mueller and disclosed deep within a congressional report on the Sept. 11 attacks -- suggests insurgent passengers may not have successfully fought their way into the cockpit and grappled to seize the plane's controls, as has been popularly perceived.
"Without a doubt, the passengers breached the cockpit," said Randall Greene of New York, whose brother Donald, a pilot of smaller aircraft, was onboard. "I'm surprised by the theory attributed to the FBI director that the passengers did not take control of the aircraft."
In a joint statement by Families of Flight 93, relatives said they believe the passenger revolt primarily was responsible for the crash. US officials have said they believe the hijackers intended to fly the Boeing 757 into the White House.
"Until someone can produce specific translations of these tapes that are more than theory then it appears there is sufficient evidence to support the heroic acts of the passengers and crew in bringing Flight 93 down," the families said.
The FBI has steadfastly maintained that its analysis isn't conclusive and doesn't detract from the heroism demonstrated by passengers, who are believed to have rushed down the airliner's narrow aisle to try to overwhelm the four hijackers.
In phone calls from the plane, four passengers said they and others decided to fight the hijackers after learning of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York that morning.
But the suggestion from the government that the hijackers in the cockpit decided to crash the plane -- though under pressure from defiant passengers in the cabin -- appears at odds with what families of some passengers have come to believe.
"I don't think the FBI got it right, what happened," said Tom Crowley of Atlanta, whose niece's husband, Jeremy Glick, died aboard the flight. He said Glick's widow, Lyzbeth, was among family members permitted last year to listen to the cockpit recording and she believes she heard Glick delivering a judo strike to one hijacker.
"No question, any family member who listened to the tape will tell you the same thing, that they [passengers] were in the cockpit," said Crowley, who urged the government to make the recording public.
The plane went down far from the White House, in a field near the rural town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All 33 passengers, seven crew members and the four hijackers died.
The cockpit recording was played privately in April last year for family members of victims, and the FBI also provided them with its best effort at producing an understandable transcript.
"In the cockpit! In the cockpit!" the passengers were heard yelling, according to Alice Hoglan of Los Gatos, California, who listened to the recording. Her son, Mark Bingham, died in the crash. She said the recording and a transcript the FBI provided to her and other families "doesn't leave very much doubt at all that passengers were able to get that cockpit door open."
Hoglan said the FBI's transcript quotes one hijacker after fighting breaks out in the cabin asking another hijacker in the cockpit in Arabic, "Finish her/it now?" She said she believed they were discussing whether to crash the plane. The response from the second hijacker, she remembered, was either "wait" or "not now."
Some family members indicated after hearing the tape that they were led to believe that passengers used a food cart as a shield and broke into the cockpit.
Hoglan said the hijackers inside the cockpit are heard yelling "No!" at the sound of breaking glass -- presumably from the food cart -- and that the final spoken words on the recorder seemed to be an inexplicably calm voice in English instructing, "Pull it up."
She said the English voice toward the end of the recording was so distinct that she believes it's evident the speaker was inside the cockpit.
Citing transcripts of the still-unreleased cockpit recordings, Mueller told congressional investigators in a closed briefing last year that, minutes before Flight 93 hit the ground, one of the hijackers "advised Jarrah to crash the plane and end the passengers' attempt to retake the airplane."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema