The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [28]
In Arabic, “Up down. Up down … Up down!”
From a distance, perhaps from Todd Beamer, “Roll it!”
Crashing sounds, then, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! … Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?”
“Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.”
“Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! … Up down. Up, down … Up down.”
More violent noises, for as long as a minute, then—apparently by a native English speaker: “Shut them off! … Go! … Go! … Move! … Move! … Turn it up.”
In Arabic, “Down, down … Pull it down! Pull it down! DOWN!”
Apparently from an English speaker, “Down. Push, push, push, push, push … push.”
In Arabic, “Hey! Hey! Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me.”
Intermittent loud “air noise” on the cockpit recorder.
Moments later, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”
Sounds of further struggle, and a loud shout by a native English speaker, “No!!!”
Two seconds later, in Arabic, in a whisper now, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”
Jeremy Glick’s father-in-law, still listening on the ground, heard high-pitched screams coming over the line Glick had left open when he left to join the rush to the cockpit. Then “wind sounds” followed by banging noises, as though the phone aboard the plane was repeatedly banging on a hard surface.
After that, silence on the phone. Silence on the Cockpit Voice Recorder. Then, in less than a second, the recording ended.
NEAR THE LITTLE TOWN of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a man working in a scrapyard had seen an airliner, flying low but seemingly trying to climb, just clear a nearby ridge. The assistant chief of Shanksville’s volunteer fire department had been talking on the phone with his sister, who said she could see a large airplane “nosediving, falling like a stone.” A witness who saw it from his porch said it made a “sort of whistling” noise.
Half a mile away, another man saw the final plunge. It was “barely fifty feet above me,” he said, “rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed … There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.”
United Airlines Flight #93 Cockpit Voice Recorder Transcript
Key:
Bolded text = English translation from Arabic
10:00:06 There is nothing.
10:00:07 Is that it? Shall we finish it off?
10:00:08 No. Not yet.
10:00:09 When they all come, we finish it off.
10:00:11 There is nothing.
10:00:13 Unintelligible.
10:00:14 Ahh.
10:00:15 I’m injured.
10:00:16 Unintelligible.
10:00:21 Ahh.
10:00:22 Oh Allah. Oh Allah. Oh Gracious.
10:00:25 In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die.
10:00:29 Up, down. Up, down, in the cockpit
10:00:33 The cockpit.
10:00:37 Up, down. Saeed, up, down.
10:00:42 Roll it
10:00:55 Unintelligible.
10:00:59 Allah is the Greatest. Allah is the Greatest.
10:01:01 Unintelligible.
10:01:08 Is that it? 1 mean, shall we pull it down?
10:01:09 Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.
10:01:10 Unintelligible.
10:01:11 Saeed.
10:01:12 … engine …
10:01:13 Unintelligible.
10:01:16 Cut off the oxygen.
It was 10:03. Thirty-five minutes had passed since the hijackers struck, four minutes since the passengers counterattacked.
The grave of Flight 93 and the men and women it had carried was an open field bounded by woods on the site of a former strip mine.
“Where’s the plane crash?” thought a state police lieutenant, one of the first to reach the scene. “All there was was a hole in the ground and a smoking debris pile.” The crater was on fire, and the plane itself had seemingly vanished. On first inspection, there seemed to be few items on the surface more than a couple of feet long. The voice recorder, recovered days later, would be found buried twelve feet under the ground. There were no bodies, it appeared, only shreds of clothing hanging from the trees. For a while, a white cloud of “sparkly, shiny stuff