Final 32 minutes of mayhem in Flight 93

The cockpit recordings of Flight 93 were heard publicly for the first time yesterday. It was played out to the jury sitting in the terrorism trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.

The recordings give us some insight on the final minutes before the hijacked plane crashed on a Pennsylvania field on Sept 11, 2001, killing all 44 people on board - 33 passengers, 5 flight attendants, 2 pilots and the 4 hijackers (pix).

Flight 93 had taken off at 8.42am from Newark, New Jersey, bound for San Francisco. Investigators believe that the four hijackers intended to fly it into the US Capitol in Washington.

The hijackers, travelling first class, struck at 9.28am. While travelling at 35,000ft above eastern Ohio, the plane suddenly dropped 700ft. Air traffic control in Cleveland received the first of two radio transmissions from the cockpit.

During the first the captain, Jason Dahl, can be heard shouting “Mayday!” amid the sounds of a physical struggle. In the second, he or the first officer can be heard shouting: “Hey, get out of here! Get out of here! Get out of here!”

It was from this point yesterday that the court heard the cockpit voice recording. One of the hijackers, the al-Qaeda pilot Ziad Jarrah, makes an onboard announcement:

“Ladies and gentleman. Here is the captain. Please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So sit.”

He then repeats it again, by saying:

"I would like to tell you all to remain seated. We have a bomb aboard, and we are going back to the airport, and we have our demands. So, please remain quiet."

The New York Times reported this:

Long silences in the 31-minute recording were punctuated by the cries of the hijackers at the controls, the passengers who were trying desperately to break down the cockpit door and the crashing of objects around the cabin.

There are also the sounds of what may have been the killing of a flight attendant as the hijackers took control: a woman in the cockpit moaning, "Please, please, don't hurt me." Her voice soon appears again for the last time as she is heard to say, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die" followed by one of the hijackers saying in Arabic: "Everything is fine. I finished."

The recording ends with a three-minute crescendo of noise as a passenger apparently just outside the door shouts: "In the cockpit! If we don't, we'll die!" On the other side of the door, two hijackers are heard deliberating before deciding to end the flight to avoid being overcome.

"Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?" one asks in Arabic and the reply is, "Yes, put it in it and pull it down." They then both scream repeatedly "Allah is the greatest" in Arabic as the planes goes down at 10:03 a.m.

Read the full transcript of the recording here and here.

No doubt the heroic passengers emerged victorious by bringing down the plane in an open field and not in some government complex or public building where the human cost could have been higher. And now we are to see their heroism depicted in a movie to be released soon.