THE FLIGHT DATA RECORDER {masterlist}

A BLACK BOX SURROUNDED BY A MOAT OF MYSTERY
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
last update 8/24/07
Last updated 3/4/08

Much Ado About... Nothing?

Much has been made recently of the reconstruction of data from Flight 77’s Flight Data Recorder, the so-called black box found at the crash scene inside the Pentagon. The "9/11 Truth" analysis of the data is largely based on the fragmentation of the supposedly coherent data in the flight data recorder (FDR) of the attack plane – different versions have appeared, between which different parameters are found to be "altered," leaving each piece neither totally false and dismissable nor totally true and acceptable. Thus they hover in a middle space to be analyzed by experts – primarily Pilots for 9/11 Truth and their expert allies. Predictably, the data as read and shared offers different answers to different questions at different times, depending it seems on the circumstance. The answers consistently challenge the official account, but fail to prvide a rational alternative, and often conflict with each other…

Various aspects of the NTSB animation based partly on the FDR are covered in my three-part video series "That Darn NTSB cartoon," compiled with notes here.

--- About the Sources ---
- The Evidence Trail - NTSB, FBI, 9/11 Commission, and the National Security Archive keeping the data under wraps, and its final revalation to the public in mid-2006.

- The FDR Specialist's Study: A closer look at the verifiably NTSB-provided FDR data.

- The CSV file

- "Three CD's: Where's Snowygrouch's DVD?" The Pilots' Transatlantic animation connection examined. Snowygrouch and the animation's first appearance. NTSB status at the time: unclear IMO, and yet...

--- Analysis ---
- Pilot X and the 440-foot gap: Altitude Questions raised by the NTSB animation

- Created in Translation: the altitude re-set NOT in the animation - where is it then? at FL018... forthcoming

- A somewhat dated but interesting analysis thread by myself and others @ Above Top Secret: Great insights, explanations, obfuscation, and fumbling with appearances by John Lear, John Doe X, and others.

- Ten Degrees From true: THE "NTSB Animation" is Flat Wrong Demonstrating that the north of the Citgo flight path shown is in fact at least 20 degrees off from the Black Box data it's supposed to be based on.

- Final Altitude: Eight Readings: At least four altitudes attributed the the FDR, compared to flyover "witnesses," and the "official story." I did forget radar accounts which place altitude by accounts of it dropping beneath their coverage just before impact. This is said to confirm the official story and probably does.

- 20 Minutes and 20 Miles from True: CSV longitudinal offset

- NTSB animation internal geography {masterlist} My most tedious chapter yet - five posts with one or two more to come.
- A Turn For The Worse: The culmination of the animation studies above: visual proof that the animation's final overlay map is rotated to about the same tune the plane appears north-of-the-Citgo.

- Csv/animation altitude discrepancy. Kind of a mess, mostly intended as a self-correction.

- CSV final plots: Using timeline seconds to determine geographic seconds.

- Missing Seconds: My Last FDR post

- Bank Notes: Draws on FDR bank/roll readings as part of a larger argument

--- My own NTSB FOIA Search ---
- News Coming A half-ass rundown of why I was finally contacting the NTSB.

- NTSB FOIA Response recieved - no discs enclosed

- NTSB's "Goebbels" and Me When I talked to the director - not important but a tad interesting

- Video: That Darn NTSB cartoon part 2 - the Authenticity Sidetrack Snowygrouch et al. and my discless response explained by me in a video.

FDR 1: THE EVIDENCE TRAIL

FDR 1: THE EVIDENCE TRAIL
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Updated 5/23/07

Researchers curious about the Flight data recorder from the Pentagon attack plane, from 9/11 to mid-2006 anyway, were frustrated by an uncooperative government. The National Transporatation Safety Board (NTSB) Web site announced “the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Safety Board provided requested technical assistance to the FBI, and any material generated by the NTSB is under the control of the FBI. The Safety Board does not plan to issue a report or open a public docket." The FBI of course released nothing as its PENTTBOM investigation ground on, and so the data the NTSB had gleaned remained behind closed doors for years.

The data did form a partial basis of the 9/11 Commission’s work. The path for Flight 77 the Commission published in mid-2004 was based on this, not that they ever explicitly said so, and reflected the official story. Oddly, the Commission never mentioned anything about Flight Data Recorder from any flight but 93, neither confirming nor denying the existence of the other three in its Final Report, even in the footnotes.

FOIA lawsuits for the entire NTSB record of 9/11 planes were finally successful in the wake of the Moussaoui trial’s conclusion in mid-2006. The National Security Archive at George Washington University announced on august 11 “the documents were released in their entirety to the National Security Archive and were received directly from the NTSB.” The “entire” catalog of info posted online at the Archive’ site that day included three types of reports:

1) Air Traffic Control recording logs: presented for all four flights
2) Flight path and altitude studies for flights 11, 175, and 77, the first two with complete paths and altitudes based on radar returns, 77’s path partially drawn-in due to a radar gap, but showing the final grand loop over Washington, as seen on Dulles radar, over a topographic map in close detail.
3) A detailed report on the Flight Data Recorder of Flight 93.

Regarding the third category of one, the archive’s announcement read in part: “in addition to the Flight Path Studies and Air Traffic Control Recording transcripts, the NTSB released a February 2002 “specialist’s factual report of investigation” on United Airlines Flight 93 based on the flight's recovered digital data recorder.” Since its cockpit Voice Recorder, the only one recovered and readable, is still under wraps, this clearly means the FDR. “According to the report, the flight recorder functioned normally,” and provided investigator with “graphic analysis of the data recovered from Flight 93.” But oddly, this release made a claim I’ve never heard explicitly elsewhere: Flight 93’s was “the only surviving recorder from the hijacked planes on 9/11.”

Wow! I knew the Black Boxes and CVRs in New York, while three of four were allegedly found but were buried and never admitted to having survived. But I had always heard that the Black Boxes were found at both Shanksville and at the Pentagon and had yielded data in both cases. But after seeing this and seeing no mention of such a study in the 9/11 commission’s report, it almost seems reasonable to ask if the FDR even survived at all.

But of course that’s not where it stands, and this is clearly just a mistake, perhaps by an intern asked to write up apiece beyond her understanding, taking Flight 77’s FDR study not being included as a sign it didn’t have one. That still doesn’t explain [i]why[/i] it wasn’t included, of course, and it is still telling.

The evidence of the recorder surviving is thick enough. Just after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI took over the crime scene, and brought in the NTSB to help locate plane parts and especially the black boxes. By about 4:00 am on September 14, the cockpit voice recorder and the FDR were found, according to CNN and other sources. According to the ASCE's Pentagon building performance Report, the FDR at least was found near the end of the plane's trajectory in ring C (see above). The recorders were turned over to the NTSB laboratory in Washington that same day, where technicians set to summoning the data within. The CVR was found to be useless, and so we had no audio directly from inside the plane, but on the 15th FBI Diretor Mueller said useful information was gleaned from the data recorder.

The 9/11 Commission had referenced this data indirectly, via the NTSB flight path study. As with the same for Flights 11 and 175, it included an altitude mapping, but while those were based on radar returns (with no FDRs “found”), flight 77’s altitude chart is listed as a readin from the FDR. Finally, I just found, the NTSB does have a site for downloading the once-elusive Specialist's Study for Flight 77 in PDF format: "Frequently Requested Items." That's one part of the story made less mysterious. [direct PDF download link]

Back to FDR Masterlist