Flight 93 Crash - What's Missing
The recent crash of a Chinese airplane brought to mind Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA, and SilkAir Flight 185, as all three flights ended in near-vertical nose-first crashes.
This also brought up all the Flight 93 conspiracy theories and how it was all fake. So I wanted to do a little comparison.
So let me get this straight, a Chinese flight (China Eastern Airlines flight #MU5735 a Boeing 737-89P en route from Kunming to Guangzhou, China) (source), crashed into a mountain at an estimated 350 mph, nose first, nearly straight down some 20,000 feet in just a few seconds over 2 minutes. And then burst into flame, catching the ground and forest around it on fire, yet……
…yet, there are large pieces of the plane on the ground. We have a video of the plane actually crashing and the aftermath, yet for 9/11/01 crash of Flight 93 (United Airlines Flight 93 a Boeing 757-222, en route from Newark International Airport in New Jersey to San Francisco International Airport in California), we get a photo of a cloud of smoke and little to no debris. We get a chunk of the fuselage with two windows (measuring about the size of a dining room table) and part of the tail (depending on what photos you believe) and a piece that appears might be part of an engine fan. The FBI only found only 600 pounds of human remains, that is 8% of all the remains that they should have discovered (44 passengers with an average of say 190 per with 50 pounds of luggage) (and 16 pounds carry-on = 11,265 or 5.5 ton).
The quality of the photos that the public got to see are a small and grainy image of the crash site, that shows what appears to be a tail and nothing else (again depending on what photos you want to believe).
In contrast, Chinese flight MU5735, which crashed a little under 24 hours ago (22 hours to be exact), at the time I’m drafting this post, and we already have an animated video of a representation of what happened, dozens of videos, high resolutions photos and more.
We have video of the actual plane crashing, going straight into the ground, photos of boots on the ground, and large chunks of the airplane itself. A stark difference between the two crashes, even though both crashes took place in remote locations, but 20 years apart. But, some twenty-plus years later we still don’t have any better photos or video of the Flight 93 crash.
In 2001, we had 6-megapixel DSLR cameras available to the consumer, and 2-megapixel point-and-shoot cameras were available as well. 45% of the American population had a cell phone (source) and about half of those phones had cameras but those cameras were only 1.3 megapixels at best (1280×1024). I had a Motorola Razr in 2001. (). A 1-megapixel photo is a far better quality than the photos we have still today of the crash of Flight 93.
So why are these the best photo we have of the crash scene? (Click to see the official FBI photos) and why does the official crash ariel of Flight 93, looks strangely like Vladivostok Air flight 352 that crashed two months prior on the outskirts of Irkutsk, Russia? That is because that is a photo of Vladivostock Air Flight 352 and not Flight 93, even though just about every media outlet at the time reported that as Flight 93.