By Reid Collins on 4.4.02 @ 12:02AM
Coming soon to Princeton: Flight 93.
September was the horror month and for a chosen few April will
be, as Eliot wrote, "the cruelest month." On the 18th, in a
secluded room in Princeton, New Jersey, the families of the forty
passengers and crew members killed in the terrorist crash of United
Flight 93 in Pennsylvania will hear the onboard voice recording of
the last 30 minutes of the flight.
The FBI had resisted the first request of the survivors to hear
the tape, but finally relented and agreed to the private playing.
Those who have heard it or read the transcript say it reveals
little of the drama aboard except for the last few minutes. One of
the hijackers is heard to shout, "They're coming." Presumably a
warning that four passengers and two flight attendants were coming
down the aisle to try and wrest control of the cockpit from the
four who had overcome the pilots. As we know, cell phone
conversations from loved ones on the ground had told some
passengers the grim reality: that other commandeered planes had
struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
On the voice tape there is the sound of scuffling, a woman begs
for her life, several cries of "Allah is great!" and what may be
dishes smashing, a throat-like gurgling, and the warning tones
generated when an aircraft exceeds safe speed for its altitude.
Sounds picked up from the pilots' headsets and a cockpit roof
microphone. All subject to interpretation. And now all to be
listened to by loved ones straining to detect a voice somewhere in
the jumble of noise that might have been -- well, could have been,
might have been. And mental pictures of where he or she was sitting
when the sound was heard, a straining, hopeless reconstruction of
unspeakable moments.
The true story of flight 93 is not on this tape. It is in the
conversations, many of them, on cell phones between passengers and
loved ones. Last words of devotion, the Lord's Prayer, and
decision. Passenger Todd Beamer's immortalized words heard on the
phone he had just put down: "Are you guys ready? Let's roll."
The decision to travel to Princeton and to be transported back
into the September skies of Pennsylvania is a personal one and not
subject to interpretation by any outsider.
Outsiders can do but one thing on April 18: pray that it
helps.
topics:
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