by Carlhole » Wed 27 Jun 2007, 02:48:40
[url=http://pilotsfor911truth.org/amrarticle.html]Could Barbara Olson Have Made Those Calls?
An Analysis of New Evidence about Onboard Phones[/url]
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PilotsFor911Truth.org', 'b')y David Ray Griffin and Rob Balsamo
Prefatory Note: When we, in this jointly authored article, need to refer to only one of us, the appropriate initials---DRG or RB--are used.
06/26/07 - Did American Airlines 77---the flight that, according to the official conspiracy theory about 9/11, struck the Pentagon---have onboard phones? This question is relevant to the possible truth of the official theory, because Ted Olson, who was then the US Solicitor General, claimed that his wife, Barbara Olson, called him twice from this flight using an onboard phone.
He did, to be sure, waver on this point. CNN, which mentioned in a story posted just before midnight on 9/11 that Barbara Olson had used a cell phone to call her husband, reported in a more extensive treatment, posted at 2:06 AM (EDT) on September 12, that Ted Olson had told it that his wife “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77.”1 But on September 14, Olson said on Hannity & Colmes (Fox News) that she had called collect and therefore must have been using the “airplane phone”---because, he surmised, “she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards.”
...
The claim that she must have called collect because she did not have her credit card, however, does not make any sense, because a credit card is needed in order to activate a passenger-seat phone.8 If she did not have a credit card, therefore, she could not have used a passenger-seat phone, whether to call collect or otherwise.9
By settling on this version of his story, nevertheless, Olson at least appeared to make defensible his claim that the calls occurred. We say this because of the extremely strong evidence that her reported calls could not have been made on a cell phone, given the cell phone technology in 2001. Cell phone calls from an airliner were, as DRG has argued extensively elsewhere, generally possible only if it was flying slowly and low,10 but Barbara Olson’s first call, according to the 9/11 Commission, occurred “[a]t some point between 9:16 and 9:26,”11 when the plane was flying too fast and too high for cell phone calls to have been possible. According to the Flight Data Recorder information released by the National Transportation Safety Board, the plane at 9:16 would have been over 25,000 feet, which is far too high (as well as too fast: 281 knots [324 mph]), while at 9:26 the plane would have been flying at 324 knots (370 mph), which is much too fast (as well as still too high: almost 14,000 feet).12 By settling on the claim that his wife used an onboard phone instead of a cell phone, Ted Olson avoided this problem.
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But was a call from an onboard phone even possible? In 2004, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan, [doing research for their book]having asked American Airlines whether their “757s [are] fitted with phones that passengers can use,” received this reply from an AA spokesperson: “American Airlines 757s do not have onboard phones for passenger use.” To check on the possibility that Barbara Olson might have borrowed a phone intended for crew use, they then asked, “[A]re there any onboard phones at all on AA 757s, i.e., that could be used either by passengers or cabin crew?” The response was: “AA 757s do not have any onboard phones, either for passenger or crew use. Crew have other means of communication available.”13
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This a brand new article - longish, very detailed but very good.
It discusses the likelihood of there being airphones onboard Flight 77 at all.
I didn't know this until now, but apparently the government now also claims that the cell phone/airphone call from Barbara Olsen to Ted Olsen NEVER HAPPENED!!
Also, Ted Olsen has consistently maintained that Barbara had had to call him collect because "she didn't have any credit cards on her". Well, you can't make a collect call from an airphone!
It's the kind of thoroughgoing, detailed analysis of events that I wish were more prevalent when it comes to 911 reporting in general.
'She Asked Me How to Stop the Plane'$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('by Toby Harnden
The Telegraph
March 5, 2002', 'U')S Solicitor General Ted Olson's wife, Barbara, was the first victim of the September 11 terrorist attacks to be named. He tells Toby Harnden of her bravery during her final call from the hijacked plane - and of his determination to fight back.
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Ted Olsen is the man who argued in the Supreme Court for the winning side in the Bush versus Gore case that decided the presidential election in 2000. As a result, Olson's Democratic opponents in the Senate came close to blocking his nomination as the Bush administration's chief courtroom advocate. Soon, he will be defending Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to hand over documents to Congress as part of the investigation into the Enron scandal, and he will have to do so without his staunchest ally.
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That morning, a nightmare began to unfold in the room where we are now sitting. "Someone rushed in and told me what had happened. I went into the other room, where there's a television," Olson says. "It went through my mind, 'My God, maybe - Barbara's on an airplane, and two airplanes have been crashed', you know."
Then his secretary told him that Barbara was on the line. "My first reaction when I heard she was on the phone was relief, because I knew that she wasn't on one of those two airplanes." But Barbara then explained calmly that she had been herded to the back of the Boeing 757 she was on, along with the other passengers.
"She had had trouble getting through, because she wasn't using her cellphone, she was using the phone in the passengers' seats," says Olson. "I guess she didn't have her purse, because she was calling collect, and she was trying to get through to the Department of Justice, which is never very easy."He was able to tell her about the World Trade Centre attacks before the line went dead, then he called his departmental command centre to let them know another plane had been hijacked. The phone rang again and it was Barbara.
"She wanted to know, 'What can I tell the pilot? What can I do? How can I stop this?' I tried to find out where she thought she was - I wanted to know where the airplane was and what direction it was going in, because I thought that was the first step to being able to do something.
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