Flight 93 was shot down (Part 1)

By Tom Kovach

As I begin to type this column, I'm waiting for the start of a Discovery Channel TV special: Flight 93 — the Flight That Fought Back. As I wait, I'm seething inside, because I already know that they will not tell the whole story. They can't, because — despite their corporate connections to big cable-system operators and their corporate connections to the News Corporation — the Discovery Channel also has interlocking connections with the money behind the "mainstream" media (MSM). And, the MSM cabal has been keeping a dirty secret for four years: Flight 93 was shot down.

Over two years ago, I did research for an e-book about this topic. No publisher would touch it. In retrospect, I now understand that publishers were not only afraid of retributions by the Federal government. They were also afraid of reprisals by the MSM and their lawyers. Why? Because, if a book proved that the MSM had lied to the American public (and the world) about such a key event, then it would open the floodgate for questions of MSM credibility about a host of other issues. And, it could open the floodgate for lawsuits by families of the victims of the "9-11" attacks.

So, I have decided to release a column that tells at least some of the story of what happened to Flight 93. We can never know the entire story, because the same Federal government that shot down the airliner also keeps the official records of all aviation mishaps. After the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) tapes of Flight 93 were publicly released, it was reported that the final minutes of the tape transcript were missing. Without those final minutes, we can never prove exactly what happened to a degree of certainty that will overcome all criticism. But, I believe that my research can provide a "four corners" examination that will satisfy most rational readers.

Deficient documentary

On the documentary's Web page on the Discovery Channel site, people that believe Flight 93 was shot down are dismissed as "conspiracy theorists". But, for people that have seriously examined the cover-up of the cause of the Flight 800 crash, such glib dismissals are to be expected — and refuted.

But, that same documentary indicates that the CVR transcript ends at 1003 hours. This is interesting when compared with seismographic reports that Flight 93 crashed at 1006 hours. Thus, the TV documentary helps to raise some of the same questions that it supposedly puts to rest. (Not only did I end up watching the documentary, I taped it, and played back portions several times as I typed this column.)

Information starvation

At the time that several publishers turned down my e-book inquiries, I was furious. It was not only the blow to my ego, or the fact that any hope of making money from my research was dissolving before my eyes. It was the fact that I knew that, eventually, the source documentation that I had uncovered would eventually disappear. That has already happened. An official White House page, containing a transcript of an interview by Tim Russert with Vice President Richard Cheney, now has an error message at that address. The interview took place on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, 16 September 2001. During that interview, the Vice-President admitted that orders had been given to shoot down hijacked airliners in order to protect Washington, DC. (Scroll about halfway down this page from the History Channel.)

(NOTE: From the search window on the official White House page for the Vice-President, under the keyword Russert, the specific interview comes up as the top result. But, when clicking onto that address, an error page comes up instead. Here is the address link.)

In between the "9-11" attacks and the Vice-President's interview, a press conference was held. At that press conference, the then-director of the Air National Guard, Major General Paul A. Weaver, Jr., told reporters that Flight 93 was not shot down. The Newsday online article of that press conference no longer exists. (Few other outlets covered it directly. Instead, they merely repeated what Newsday had published. Weaver had connections at Newsday.) But, the vague comment by Weaver at the press conference — that the interceptors "flew like a scalded ape" — has been quoted by numerous Web sites. My e-book was titled Minister of Truth, because it exposed a series of lies that spanned General Weaver's entire career in uniform. My premise was that Weaver was the perfect candidate to lie to the press, because he had so much practice at it. Some of those lies are described in my previous MND column, "Bush Basher's Credibility Crumbles". In that press conference, on 14 September 2001, General Weaver tried to claim that Air National Guard interceptors were too far away to have shot down Flight 93, even though they purportedly tried to catch it by "flying at over 500 miles per hour." The reality is that the F-15 interceptors, launched from Otis ANG Base, are capable of flying at more than three times that speed. Thus, given the time from the first notification that something was wrong with Flight 93, the interceptors could have easily reached it over Cincinnati if necessary. Southern Pennsylvania was clearly within timely reach of any of the airborne interceptors and combat air patrols that were launched on that fateful day. To say otherwise is a lie of insulting magnitude.

Eyewitness reports shortly after the Flight 93 crash indicate that a single jet aircraft circled the crash site immediately after the crash. But, the sparsely populated area did not have an abundance of air traffic — especially since aircraft nationwide had been ordered by the FAA, almost an hour prior to the crash, to land at the nearest airport. Although the untrained civilian witnesses differ slightly in their descriptions of the lone jet, those descriptions could describe an F-15 fighter. And, if our Air Force did shoot down the airliner, it would be standard to circle the crash site in order for the gun cameras to take footage for the intelligence debriefing. And, just as was the case with Flight 800, a senior government official later "misspoke" by saying that Flight 93 was shot down.

Another source that has disappeared from the Internet is the text of a speech by General Russell C. Davis, who was Chief of Staff of the National Guard Bureau (NGB) at the time. The NGB is over both the Army and the Air National Guard nationwide. General Davis described the interceptors that were launched that day as "the first sword unsheathed in the war against terrorism." But, not only have those remarks disappeared from the Internet (the full text had been available on the NGB site), there is now not even any cross-reference that the speech itself ever took place. (It was part of his remarks at a "senior leadership conference" for National Guard personnel in November of 2001.)

To the credit of General Davis and other leaders, including President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, there may have been no other effective option to prevent even worse destruction. If that were true, then the American people would have shouldered the burden. What our citizens are not willing to bear, however, is being told repeatedly that something didn't happen when it obviously did. The purpose of this series is to point out the forked-tongue approach that the government has used with regard to the facts of the incident. And, this same approach — which includes trying to discredit numerous eyewitnesses — was also used in the Flight 800 missile strike and Flight 587 apparent internal bombing.

Another report now missing from the Internet is an article from The Telegraph of Nashua, New Hampshire. That article quotes an air-traffic controller from Boston Center as specifying that an F-16 was in "hot pursuit" of United Airlines Flight 93. Soon after that report, the controller was "gagged" by the government. Given that several other air-traffic controllers gave high-profile media interviews about their jobs on "9-11," why was this particular controller placed under a gag order?

For all its many good points, the Discovery Channel documentary Flight 93: The Flight that Fought Back is seriously flawed in its assertion that the airliner could not have been shot down because "the nearest F-16s were 150 miles away." While that statement might even be true, it totally disregards the fact that a pair of F-15 interceptors were specifically assigned to catch Flight 93 — because it was the only remaining threat still in the sky after Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. And, the documentary totally overlooks a wealth of information that supports the assertion that Flight 93 was shot down.

As I originally said in Minister of Truth, the two scenarios are not mutually exclusive. There is nothing in the shoot-down scenario that negates the heroism of the passengers and crew of Flight 93. There is no doubt in my mind that they did, in fact, breach the cockpit door and physically attack the hijackers. But — as even the Discovery Channel documentary notes — shortly after the door was breached, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) picks up the sound of the wind. The sound had not previously been recorded, even though the recording is continuous, and despite the fact that it picked up other sounds outside the cockpit. That fact alone indicates that something suddenly happened to the airliner that allowed the wind to enter the cockpit. That something was most likely the firing of a 20-milimeter anti-aircraft cannon aboard the F-15 interceptor. (If a missile had been fired instead, then the CVR would have picked up the sound of an explosion, not the sound of wind. This would also explain the debris field a mile from the crash site; but, no pre-crash explosion — as there would've been with a missile.)

So, even while attempting to pooh-pooh the assertion that Flight 93 was shot down, the Discovery Channel documentary actually provides some valuable evidence to support the shoot-down scenario. That is not the only piece of supporting evidence provided by the documentary, but it is the most significant.

Part Two of this series will examine other aspects of the shoot-down scenario.


© Tom Kovach