Officials Find Data Recorder at Site of Pa. Crash

Officials Find Data Recorder at Site of Pa. Crash

The New York Times
September 14, 2001
http://www.azstarnet.com/attack/14recorder.html

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. - Investigators Thursday unearthed the data recorder from United Airlines Flight 93.

The crucial instrument might reveal signs of a struggle between hijackers and several passengers in the final moments before the flight crashed into a field on Tuesday, killing all 38 passengers and seven crew members aboard.

FBI Agent Bill Crowley said at a news conference that the recorder was found in the large crater gouged by the impact of the Boeing 757.

Crowley said the recorder, one of two to be recovered from the four hijacked planes that crashed here and in New York and Washington on Tuesday, would be taken immediately to the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington.

Crews were still looking for the plane's voice recorder, which would have recorded the conversation in the cockpit, and presumably any struggle between the hijackers and the crew members and passengers.

Cellular telephone calls from two passengers to their wives suggest that passengers might have tried to overcome the hijackers to keep them from slamming the jet into a Washington landmark.

Typically, a flight data recorder on a 757 captures more than 50 categories of data, including direction, speed, altitude, latitude and longitude. It also indicates whether the nose of the plane was up or down and records automated warnings in the cockpit.

When the box is read, experts will be able to critique the skills of whoever was at the controls.

The data recorder was found as teams of law enforcement officials searched for a second day through the thousands of small pieces of debris that remain of Flight 93, which was bound from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco.

Interviews Thursday with people who saw the plane in the final minutes before it crashed seemed to support the possibility of a cockpit struggle.

The witnesses said the jet was flying east-southeast, low and wobbly above the steep hills of the Laurel Mountains before it slammed into the ground at a speed law enforcement authorities said might have approached 300 mph.

Rodney Peterson and Brandon Leventry were outside in nearby Boswell when they noticed the jetliner appearing to lumber through the sky at about 2,000 feet.

Both men said the aircraft dipped sharply to the left, then to the right, casting a blinding glare from the sun.

The plane leveled off but began descending away from the airport, Peterson said. Five minutes later, he learned that the plane had crashed.

"If they were fighting with the hijackers, I guarantee it happened right here," he said. "It dipped left and dipped right. No plane that big flies like that."

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