Release of Flight 93 Flight Recording Transcripts

The actual audio is still embargoed, owing to the objections of victims' families. But after four and a half years, they've finally released the transcripts.

Further proof, if proof can have any effect on certain people at this late date, that evil exists, and good exists, and they will always clash, and sometimes good wins, and the fact that it does so can be an inspiration to people and times far beyond those immediately concerned. "Plains of Marathon", you know.

This evening I also watched a tape of that Discovery Channel docu-drama from last autumn The Flight That Fought Back. I got so jacked up with helpless rage I had to switch it off three quarters of the way through.

I remember being at work on 9/11, stunned and barely functioning. I had the radio on, listening to the horror. By early afternoon, the broadcast was mostly anchors treading water with experts from the rolodex. The local station would stay with one network, and then switch to another whenever some new grist seemed to come along. I clearly remember the announcement that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, no immediate details, and I clearly remember taking no especial notice of it--if that makes sense. I was becoming numbed. Later I would boil over with impotent fury. I've said elsewhere many times that, if I had been in charge that day, the world would look like a half-eaten apple inside of two weeks. Thank God the grown-ups were in charge...

As for Flight 93, whatever happened on board, they are heroes. They always will be, no matter how obscenely political correctness perverts their memorial. I would love to see memorials that have more of a tone of anger and defiance, and not shrines to some feng shui idea of grief therapy. Well, to that end, have this stirring example of air force nose art: