The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [21]
Instead, at 9:32, came a stranger’s voice, panting as though out of breath. It intoned: “Ladies and gentlemen. Here the captain. Please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So sit.” Some investigators would surmise that lack of familiarity with the communications system led this hijack pilot—and, earlier, his accomplice on Flight 11—to transmit not to the passengers as intended, but to ground control.
Though the United pilots could no longer transmit, we know a good deal of what went on in the cockpit. Unlike voice recorders on board the three other hijacked flights, all either never found or irreparably damaged, Flight 93’s Cockpit Voice Recorder survived. So did the Flight Data Recorder. Though often difficult to interpret, the voice recorder made for a unique partial record of the final thirty-one minutes aboard the plane.
The cockpit recording began four minutes into the hijack, as the hijacker “captain” tried to tell passengers to remain seated. The microphones picked up a clattering sound, followed by the voice of someone giving orders: “Don’t move … Come on. Come … Shut up! … Don’t move! … Stop!”
Then the sound of an airline seat moving, and more commands: “Sit, sit, sit down! … Sit down!” More of the same, and a voice repeating in Arabic, “That’s it, that’s it …” Then in English, loudly, “SHUT UP!” Someone other than the terrorists was alive in the cockpit, and evidently captive.
Though one cannot know for sure, the person being told to sit down and shut up was almost certainly one of the female flight attendants. Perhaps she was senior attendant Deborah Welsh, who spent much of her time in First Class. Or perhaps she was Wanda Green, who was also assigned to the front of the airplane. Some United attendants carried a key to the cockpit, and one key was usually kept in the forward galley. By arrangement with Captain Dahl, reportedly, his attendants could also gain access to the cockpit by means of a coded knock. Welsh, aged forty-nine, was a veteran with a reputation for being tough. She had once managed to shove a drunken male passenger back into his seat. Green, the same age as Welsh, doubled as a real estate agent and had two grown children. One of these two attendants was likely used to gain access to the cockpit.
The woman in the hijackers’ hands did not keep quiet or sit down. A minute into the series of orders to the captive, a terrorist’s voice is heard to intone in Arabic the Basmala: “In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” This is an invocation used frequently by observant Muslims, often before embarking on some action.
Next on the recording, the man exclaims: “Finish, no more. NO MORE!” and “Stop, stop, stop, STOP!” Repeatedly: “No! No, no, no, NO!” Time and time again, frantically: “Lie down! … DOWN! … Down, down, down … Come on, sit down, sit!”
For two minutes of this, the captive has not spoken. Now, however, a female American voice is heard for the first time. She begs, “Please, please, please …” Then, again ordered to get down, she pleads, “Please, please, don’t hurt me … Oh, God!”
According to Deborah Welsh’s husband, the attendant had spoken of Muslim terrorists with scorn, thought them cowards. If the captive in the cockpit was Welsh, perhaps she now tried an acid response. After another minute of being told to stay down, the female voice on the recording asks, “Are you talking to me?” Her reward, within moments, is violence.
Barely has the hijacker started in again on his mantra of “Down, down!” than the woman is heard pleading, “I don’t want to die.” She says it three times, her cries accompanied by words—or sounds—that are blanked out in the transcript as released. Then, the transcript notes, there is the “sound of a snap … a struggle that lasted for few seconds.” Moments later, a voice in Arabic says, “Everything is fine. I finished.” The woman’s voice is not heard again.
Two minutes after the silencing