Horror of 9/11captured by audio files

NEWLY posted audio files depict the horror of 9/11 unfolding in the sky as air traffic controllers struggled to follow the faint tracks of hijacked planes, fighter jets tried in vain to chase them down and a flight attendant made a desperate appeal for help.

The sound files add a layer of emotion to previously published transcripts, as puzzlement and frustration seeps into the voices of controllers, military commanders and even pilots watching the attacks from the sky.

There is shouting and ringing phones in the background — the soundtrack usually omitted from written transcripts.

In one chilling excerpt, screaming and a shouted “Hey” is heard over the radio as hijackers storm the cockpit of United Flight 93. It is followed by a strange, strained cry.

Stunned controllers and other pilots discuss the sounds, trying to make sense of what they heard.

“No dry words on a page can capture that; you really have to hear it,” said John Farmer, dean of the Rutgers University School of Law and former senior counsel to the government’s 9/11 Commission.

The sound files were posted online days before the 10 year anniversary of the attacks, to accompany a monograph published by the Rutgers University Law Review.

The monograph was written by Mr Farmer and other investigators working for the 9/11 Commission but was not completed by the time the commission released its final report in 2004.

Mr Farmer and another investigator, Miles Kara, decided to finish the document and add the audio after their draft and the original Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recordings were declassified last year.

The military learned about the hijacking of Flight 11 nine minutes before it crashed into the World Trade Center and was never notified about the other hijackings before those planes crashed.

“The confusion on that day is something that we sometimes forget about,” said Andrew Gimigliano, editor-in-chief of the Rutgers Law Review.

“The idea that hijacked planes would be used in that manner just was not something that people were thinking about, and this is really illustrative of what the real tenor was on that morning.”