The black boxes from the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were found and retrieved in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, a significant amount of evidence indicates. And yet government officials and the official investigation into the attacks have asserted that these devices were never recovered.
A plane’s two black boxes record important information about a flight. The black boxes from American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175–the planes that hit the World Trade Center–could therefore have helped investigators determine what happened on these aircraft before they crashed on September 11.
A number of people who were involved in the recovery effort in the weeks after 9/11 have said they saw or helped recover objects at the World Trade Center site that appeared to be black boxes from a plane. One worker unearthed an object that looked like a black box at Pier 25 on the Hudson River. FBI agents who inspected the object initially said enthusiastically that it appeared to be a black box, but subsequently said they didn’t think it was one of these devices. A firefighter has described helping FBI agents retrieve three black boxes at Ground Zero and a colleague of his recalled seeing one of these being recovered.
Additionally, investigators reportedly detected a signal that was being emitted by one of the black boxes from Flight 11 or Flight 175, and recovery workers were sent to search the location where the signal was coming from.
One government official actually said off the record that all four black boxes from Flight 11 and Flight 175 were recovered. This was certainly a reasonable assertion. It would in fact have been unusual if the devices were never found, since a plane’s black boxes are made to survive extreme conditions, and so the black boxes on Flights 11 and 175 should have withstood the conditions they endured on September 11.
Furthermore, experts have said they knew of no plane crashes, other than those at the World Trade Center, after which the black boxes weren’t recovered. Indeed, the black boxes from the two other planes that were hijacked on September 11–American Airlines Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight 93–were recovered within a few days of the 9/11 attacks.
If the accounts of the black boxes from Flights 11 and 175 being found are correct, we need to consider why the discoveries went unreported. And why has it been officially claimed that no black boxes were found at the World Trade Center site?
Might it be because the information on the black boxes is inconsistent with the official account of the 9/11 attacks? Perhaps it indicates that rogue individuals in the U.S. government and military were involved in planning and carrying out the attacks. So in order to maintain the official account of 9/11, it has been necessary to prevent the information on the black boxes from being made public.
Point Flt-4: Unexplained Black Box Anomalies for the Four 9/11 Planes
The 9/11 Commission dealt with two sets of aircraft: those involved in the World Trade Center, and those that were not:
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The black boxes for the two planes that struck the Twin Towers – AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 – were never found.
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The black boxes for UA Flight 93 and AA Flight 77 were found, but the CVR for AA 77 was badly burned and the information recorded on it was not recoverable.
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A transcript from UA 93’s CVR was released by the FBI in the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.
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According to the American Society of Engineers’ 2003 Pentagon Building Performance Report, the AA 77 data recorder was “found nearly 300 ft into the structure.”
The official claims above are contradicted by a substantial amount of evidence to the contrary:
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Contrary to the official claim about AA 11 and UA 175, an FDNY fireman who worked in the cleanup of Ground Zero, Nicholas DeMasi, and volunteer Mike Bellone, described their discovery in October 2001 of three of the four black boxes in the rubble of the Twin Towers.
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A September 18, 2001, memorandum to Governor George Pataki from New York State Emergency Management Office Director Edward F. Jacoby, Jr., reported that “Investigators have identified the signal from one of the black boxes in the WTC debris.”
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Gen. Paul Kern, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, reported in 2002 that “Radio frequency detectors developed at CECOM [Communications Electronics Command] were used to find “black box” flight recorders from the airliners that crashed into the two towers.”
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Although the four virtually indestructible black boxes were reportedly never found, the passport of alleged AA 11 hijacker Satam al Suqami was reportedly found near Ground Zero, and life jackets and portions of seats from AA 11 were reportedly found on the roof of the Bankers Trust building. How could they survive when the black boxes could not?
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Except for the two WTC flights, the black boxes of only one flight over land have ever been lost, and it crashed extremely high in the Andes. (As for flights over water, the only ones that have not been recovered have been over very deep water.) Just a priori, therefore, it seems unlikely that the black boxes from the two WTC airplanes would not have been found.
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With regard to AA 77, which reportedly hit the Pentagon, the 2003 Pentagon Building Performance Report said that the flight data recorder “was found almost 300 feet inside the structure.” However, this claim contradicts what was publicly reported. A Newsweek story in 2001 reported that before 4 AM three days after the attack, two firefighters, Burkhammer and Moravitz, discovered them “near the impact site”:
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“[They] were combing through debris near the impact site. Peering at the wreckage with their helmet lights, the two-spotted … two odd-shaped dark boxes, about 1.5 by 2 feet long. They’d been told the plane’s ‘black boxes’ would in fact be bright orange, but these were charred black. … They cordoned off the area and called for an FBI agent, who in turn called for someone from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) who confirmed the find: the black boxes from AA Flight 77.”
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Likewise, Arlington County spokesman Dick Bridges said that members of the FBI’s evidence response team found the two recorders “right where the plane came into the building.”
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According to a file released by the NTSB in response to a FOIA request from Aidan Monaghan, the flight data file for American Flight 77, which was based on this FDR, was created at 11:45 PM on Thursday, September 13. This is a serious contradiction within the official story: According to the Pentagon, the FBI, and even the NTSB, the FDR was found early on the morning of Friday, September 14, and authorities later in the day we're hoping that information on it could be recovered. And yet according to the NTSB file released only after there was a FOIA request for it, the file based on the flight data file for AA 77 had already been created the previous day. How could the file based on the AA flight data have been created a day before the FDR itself was found?
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According to an NTSB investigation handbook, accident investigators are required to list the manufacturer/model, serial number, and maintenance readout of the Flight Data Recorder. However, there have been no serial numbers published for any of the recovered black boxes from the four flights. Retired Air Force Colonel George Nelson, a specialist in aircraft accidents, reports that every plane has many “time-change parts” which must be changed periodically because they are crucial for flight safety. Each time-change part has a distinctive serial number. These parts are virtually indestructible, so an ordinary fire resulting from an airplane crash could not possibly “destroy or obliterate all of those critical time-change parts or their serial numbers.” That the serial numbers on the AA 77 black boxes were not reported is another serious problem with the official account.
Conclusion
Given
- the strong official evidence contradicting the extraordinary claims that:
- the two sets of black boxes from the World Trade Center were never found and that
- the Cockpit Voice Recorder from the Pentagon Flight AA 77 was too damaged to be readable;
- that the flight data file for AA 77 was made before the FDR itself was reportedly found;
- that the official report contradicted the public stories about where the black boxes were found (by 300 feet); and given
- the failure to provide the required serial numbers for any of the allegedly retrieved black boxes,
the official account’s claims about black boxes from the 9/11 planes appear to be false.
