Yet despite this, passengers Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and Edward Felt all managed to place calls from Flight 93 on the morning of September 11. Peter Hanson, en route to Disneyland with his wife and daughter, phoned his dad from Flight 175. Madeline Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant, made a very dramatic call from Flight 11 as it sped to the North Tower. Barbara Olson made two calls, collect, to her husband at his government office from Flight 77 as it made its way to the Pentagon. - Alan Cabal, New york press

Sept. 12, 2001

Cell phone calls provided glimpses of the terrifying ordeal aboard two of the doomed commerical jetliners used to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday.

"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" a passenger ? locked in a bathroom ? on United Flight 93 told a 911 dispatcher.

Minutes later, the United jetliner crashed in western Pennsylvania with 45 people aboard. It was the last of four terrorist attacks on the United States yesterday morning that have stunned the world.

Tuesday's attacks began at 8:45 a.m. (EST) when hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 92 people from Boston to Los Angeles, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Minutes later, hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 65 people from Boston to Los Angeles, dove into the Center's south tower. Then, about thirty mintues later, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 64 people from Washington to Los Angeles, hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

The fourth plane, United Flight 93, was bound for San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey. According to some reports, passengers aboard Flight 93 were ordered to call their families to say good-bye.

The attacks, which some have compared in intensity to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, forced the evacuation of key buildings and the closure of financial markets and schools.

Barbara Olson, a victim on the hijacked plane that struck the Pentagon, called her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, twice on her mobile phone before the aircraft crashed, according to CNN.

Olson told her husband that all the passengers and the flight personnel, including the pilot, were herded to the back of the plane, reported CNN. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.

Olson said his wife made no reference to the nationality or motive of the hijackers.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, three families of passengers aboard the doomed United Flight 93 reported that loved ones had contacted them by cell phones.

Thomas Burnett called his wife and reportedly told her that he and others knew that the hijackers were planning to use the plane as part of the terrorist blitz, and indicated that they were hoping to prevent further carnage. "I know we're going to die ? there's three of us who are going to do something about it," he told her.

Alice Hoglan received a call from her son, Mark Bingham, 31. "He said, 'I want you to know I love you very much. I'm calling you from the plane. We've been taken over. There are three men that say they have a bomb,'' Hoglan told KTVU-TV in San Francisco. The phone went dead a short time later.

Another passenger on the same flight, Lauren Grandcolas, was returning from her grandmother's funeral and called her husband. "We have been hijacked," she told him, according to press reports. "They are being kind. I love you." - source

[Flight UAL 175] "At 8:52, in Easton, Connecticut, a man named Lee Hanson received a phone call from his son Peter, a passenger on United 175. His son told him:

"I think they've taken over the cockpit An attendant has been stabbed and someone else up front may have been killed.

The plane is making strange moves. Call United Airlines Tell them it's Flight 175, Boston to LA."

Also at 8:52, a male flight attendant called a United office in San Francisco, reaching Marc Policastro.

The flight attendant reported that the flight had been hijacked, both pilots had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and the hijackers were probably flying the plane.

The call lasted about two minutes, after which Policastro and a colleague tried unsuccessfully to contact the flight.

At 9:00, Lee Hanson received a second call from his son Peter:

"It's getting bad, Dad' A stewardess was stabbed'

They seem to have knives and Mace They said they have a bomb It's getting very bad on the plane Passengers are throwing up and getting sick'

The plane is making jerky movements' I don?t think the pilot is flying the plane'

I think we are going down '

I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.

Don't worry, Dad' If it happens, it'll be very fast. My God, my God."

Michel Chossudovsky

Without the 'eminent' Barbara Olson and her alleged emotional telephone calls, there would never be any proof that humans played a role in the hijack and destruction of the four aircraft that day. Lookalike claims surfaced several days later on September 16 about passenger Todd Beamer and others, but it is critically important to remember here that the Barbara Olson story was the only one on September 11 and. 12. It was beyond question the artificial ?seed? that started the media snowball rolling down the hill.

And once the snowball started rolling down the hill, it artfully picked up Osama Bin Laden and a host of other ?terrorists? on the way. By noon on September 12, every paid glassy-eyed media commentator in America was either spilling his guts about those ?Terrible Muslim hijackers?, or liberating hitherto classified information about Osama Bin Laden.

'Oh sure, it was Bin Laden,' they said blithely, oblivious to anything apart from their television appearance fees. - Barbara Olson's "Phone Call" From Flight 77 - Joe Vialls

16 July 2004

Passengers could soon make cellphone calls during a flight using onboard transceivers currently being flight tested. But concerns remain over possible interference with aircraft electronics.

American Airlines demonstrated the new in-flight phone system, installed in one of its aircraft, during a short flight on Thursday. The aircraft took off from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and circled at 25,000 feet for the demonstration.

Passengers were able to make and receive calls using cellphones compatible with the network standard Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA. Cellular phones connect to a "pico-cell" base station aboard the plane before being linked to an orbiting satellite.

Calls are then linked to a gateway on the ground before being forwarded on to a normal cellular network. Users reported experiencing short delays of about a second during Thursday's calls. The time lag is caused by the satellite connection. - NewScientist.com news service

American Airlines warns passengers that cell phones "may interfere with the aircraft's communication and navigation systems." Similar warnings come from Delta, United and Continental. British Airways links cellular interference to potential problems with compasses and even cabin pressure.

What the airlines don't tell passengers is that there is no scientific evidence to support these claims. What concerns there are about cellular phones in airplanes dwell in the realm of anecdote and theory -- and to some extent in that of plain finance. There is money to be earned or lost by cell-phone companies and airlines if cell phones are used in-flight.

JON G. AUERBACH - Wall St Journal

April 14, 2004

In one of the first major projects of its kind, a European Commission-funded consortium is preparing to trial a system designed to allow mobile phone use inside a passenger aircraft.

[snip]

Allowing mobile phones to operate on planes is more complicated than setting up a data system, but not because of interference with the plane's avionics systems; in fact, phones are banned from flights because they interfere with terrestrial base stations. Another technical hitch is that to communicate with base stations on the ground, phones must transmit at their maximum power, which can cause interference with other devices in the cabin. - more

The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the American public and most of the victims families heard for the first time on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney. They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant conflict.

"My wife's call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day," said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers on Flight 11.

She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men 'by name' even before the first crash.

[Note: How does this compute when there were no Arabic names on the passenger lists?]

She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account of a bomb on board.

"How do you know it's a bomb?" asked her phone contact.

"Because the hijackers showed me a bomb," Sweeney said, describing its yellow and red wires.

[snip]

Amy Sweeney's account alerted the airline that something extraordinary was occurring.

She told Mr. Woodward she didn't believe the pilots were flying the plane any longer.

She couldn't contact the cockpit. Sweeney may have ventured forward to business class, because she relayed the alarming news to Betty Ong, who was sitting in the rear jump-seat.

In professional lingo, she said: "Our No. 1 has been stabbed," referring to a violent attack on the plane's purser, "also No. 5," another flight attendant. She also reported that the passenger in 9B had had his throat slit by the hijacker sitting behind him and appeared to be dead. Betty Ong relayed this information to Nydia Gonzalez, a reservations manager in North Carolina, who simultaneously held another phone to her ear with an open line to American Airlines official Craig Marquis at the company's Dallas headquarters.

The fact that the hijackers initiated their takeover by killing a passenger and stabbing two crew members had to be the first tip-off that this was anything but a standard hijacking.

"I don't recall any flight crew or passenger being harmed during a hijacking in the course of my career," said Peg Ogonowski, a senior flight attendant who has flown with American for 28 years. AFPN

An American Airlines pilot stayed at the helm of hijacked Flight 11 much of the way from Boston to New York, sending surreptitious radio transmissions to authorities on the ground as he flew.

Because the pilot's voice was seldom heard in these covert transmissions, it was not clear to the listening air-traffic controllers which of the two pilots was flying the Boeing 767. What is clear is that the pilot was secretly trying to convey to authorities the flight's desperate situation, according to controllers familiar with the tense minutes after Flight 11 was hijacked.

The pilot was apparently triggering a "push-to-talk button" on the aircraft's yoke, or "wheel" - a feature that enables pilots to have their hands on the controls while communicating, the controllers say. By doing so, the pilot gave controllers a way to hear much of what was said and other noises in the cockpit. His ability to do so also indicates that he was in the driver's seat much of the way to the plane's fiery rendezvous with the World Trade Center.

"The button was being pushed intermittently most of the way to New York," a controller told the Monitor . "He wanted us to know something was wrong. When he pushed the button and the terrorist spoke, we knew. There was this voice that was theatening the pilot, and it was clearly threatening."

During these transmissions, the pilot's voice and the heavily accented voice of a hijacker were clearly audible. At other times, the transmission was clear, but exactly what was happening in the cockpit was confused.

All of it was recorded by a Federal Aviation Administration traffic-control center. Those tapes are now presumed to be in the hands of federal law-enforcement officials, who arrived at the flight-contol facility minutes after Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center. The tapes presumably could provide clues about the hijackers - and may become even more important if the plane's "black boxes" are damaged or never found. - CS Monitor

Monday, March 27, 2006 NEW YORK (CNN) -- The mayor's office is sending letters this weekend to the families of 24 victims of the 9/11 attacks, informing them of unreleased recordings of 911 calls made by their loved ones.

One recipient called the letters "totally crass."

"I had one family member call me today, she was hysterical. She actually fainted," said Bill Doyle, whose son died after two planes crashed into the WTC towers. "She opened it up in an elevator and she couldn't believe it, because she never heard from her husband that morning, but apparently he called 911."

Doyle called the letters notifying families this week "totally crass" and shocking to families. He sent an e-mail to victims' families Saturday.

"We are sending this e-mail to you because we do not want you to be blindsided by the information, and we want you to be able to choose where and when you read the information and with whom," Doyle's e-mail to families said.

Jonathan Greenspun, commissioner of the Mayor's Community Assistance Unit, in a written statement responding to Doyle's complaint, said his office had intended to send an e-mail to WTC support groups Friday to give them advance notice but a "miscommunication" delayed the warning until Saturday.

Families of those heard on the 911 calls can request a CD with the unedited recording, Greenspun said. As part of a court decision last year, it will be left to those next of kin to decide whether the New York Fire Department recordings will be made public. Letters began arriving by special delivery Friday, sent by New York officials to the families offering them copies of the calls and informing them of their right to keep them private or make them public.

Edited versions of the calls, including only the voices of the 911 operators and dispatchers, will be released to the news media this week by the New York Fire Department, Greenspun said. The New York Court of Appeals last year ruled that the final words of a private citizen calling 911 were protected by privacy rights that could only be waived by next of kin. The court's decision in a suit filed by the New York Times and the families of nine firefighters who died also resulted in last summer's release of emergency radio recordings and 12,000 pages of oral histories taken in the weeks after the attacks.

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