There's no evidence the passengers suicided. They were attempting to save themselves. There was a struggle in the cockpit, and the aircraft crashed. It may even have been that the terrorists crashed the plane when they realized they weren't going to make it to their target.

This meme is unhealthy, and disrepectful to the fallen.

There is no meme. There is no disrespect. There is no claim of suicide in that comment.

Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground. The passengers' phone calls in the article suggest they knew they were likely to die whether acting or not, and as it happened they acted before the fighters could intercept. The article includes conversation of the hijackers in the cockpit deciding to take the plane down before the passengers could get control back.

There is absolutely a meme. Google "United Flight 93 heroic sacrifice".

>a group of civilian passengers made more or less the same decision

What decision was this? The decision to sacrifice their own lives, as the fighter pilots were prepared to sacrifice theirs? Because that makes no sense. The passengers were trying to regain control of the aircraft to prevent it from crashing. Likely the hijackers downed the plane rather than relinquish control; the other possibility is that there was a struggle in the cockpit, and the plane crashed accidentally. What almost certainly did not happen was a passenger obtained full control of the aircraft, and intentionally flew it into the ground.

>Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground.

considering all the passengers are dead, you can't make that claim. We'd all love to believe the passengers were selfless, and it definitely made for a great movie, but pretending like we knew what their intentions were is disingenuous at best.

We have the phone call information. The passengers knew the fate of the other planes, and decided to try and regain control to avoid that. This is clear from the phone calls. They weren't selfless at all; they were trying to save their own lives.

I don't think there's anything disingenuous or speculative in what I'm saying. I'm being very general and going by the article's phone call information (I haven't seen that movie).

There is no disrespect in GP comment.

> They were attempting to save themselves.

Yes, and also the other innocent lives on the plane, maybe even on the ground.

So there's a conspiracy involving every level of the US government, the US Air Force, D.C. Air National Guard, the NTSB and possibly more, over...something that would be completely acceptable to do under the circumstances?

Plus the family members of passengers whose last conversations with their loved ones ended with some variation of, "we're going to try and rush the cockpit, I have to go".

Not only that, but the conspiracy involves the military trying to convince everyone that they were completely unprepared. "We didn't shoot down an airliner, even though that's what anybody with sense would have done in that situation, because our fighters didn't have missiles" doesn't sound like a cover story that inspires trust.

I must admit I had a hard time believing there were no armed alert aircraft ready 24/7 on the tarmac at Andrews AFB on the morning of 9/11.

Since the Kennedy assaibation, the US Secret Service pre-secures everywhere the president goes, including armored escort cars snipers on the roofs of buildings.

Not having armed aircraft always ready to support Air Force One or Two seemed inconceivable to me. Even in a post-Cold-War environment.

  I had a hard time believing there were no armed alert aircraft ready 24/7

This is precisely the state of "readiness" that had devolved under the previous administration. For one example, this report[0] was published almost exactly one year before the attacks.

[0] https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/the-facts-about-mili...

Interesting post with a more interesting publication date. The source is of course not known as a neutral publication, but I think it’s pretty clear in hindsight that Clinton gutted the military.

Construct the black box audio tapes and the phone call recordings as well? Also compromise all of the ntsb agents in a way that they wouldn’t whistleblow with the many pieces of evidence that would be obvious to them of a shoot down?

Why would they? It'd be a sad story, but I can't imagine anyone would see the US's actions there as unjustified.

I don't think this is a conspiracy at all. But I could see people having this conversation if they did shoot it down.

Maybe to make the victim's family feel better. To avoid lawsuits. Avoid repercussion if they were wrong. Avoid repercussion if we found later this plane was going to hit a building that would have little loss of life vs passenger count.

There could be rationale there if people made a panicked decision.

In the atmosphere after 9/11, and especially before Iraq, it was unlikely if not unthinkable that there would be "lawsuits" or "repercussions" for the government. The reason Flight 93 ended the way it did was because every American who witnessed or heard about what happened in New York that morning fundamentally understood that a hijacked aircraft was no longer a hostage situation, but rather a weapon of mass murder. Nobody would have questioned the decision, just as virtually nobody questioned the other decisions made by the US government in the initial months after the attack.

"hit a building that would have little loss of life vs passenger count"

You seem to imply that if the plane hits a building all the passengers survive?

Yeah... fair point on that.

You got downvoted, but still there is no certainty on this.

Fighter planes were there, they knew where they were headed. Shooting down the plane above non-residential area seemed like the best option.

On the other hand, passengers overmastering the terrorist through the cockpit door already seems unlikely, and more unlikely still once overmastered, not trying to land safely.

So yeah, bringing news that you shot down a plane with your own civilians is bad. Bringing a story how people sacrificed themselves is way better.

I'm comfortable there is certainty. There is considerable evidence that the passengers attacked the hijackers, from multiple different sources including mobile calls from passengers to family, air traffic control and the plane's black box. Each one of these lines of evidence involved at least dozens of people who would know there was a cover up, maybe hundreds. None of the people involved in accumulating that evidence have any vested interest in supporting a cover story. So the cover up would have to encompass civilian, government and military personnel, employees of multiple companies and victim family members. That's way too many for me to accept as remotely reasonable, especially when much of the evidence came out very quickly, before any possible cover up operation could have come into play.

As with any of these conspiracy theories, it's useful to consider who would know about the cover up, who would have to be actively involved in promoting it, and what their motivation would be. Take the flat earth as an example. There are tens of thousands of aircraft in the air at any given moment, all of them navigating using systems that assume the earth is a globe. Before modern systems, pilots and navigators calculated routes by hand. They all assumed the earth is a globe and if they were wrong their calculations would all have been massively in error. So essentially every single aviator in all of history and every nation on Earth would have to be in on the conspiracy. I've not even started on marine navigation.

> I'm comfortable there is certainty.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/unanswered...

If the plane had been blown up by a bomb or shot down, it would have broken up into chunks which would have landed largely intact, because fuselage sections are quite light compared to their volume. You can see this in pictures of other downed or bombed planes, such as the one shot down over Ukraine. Most of the bodies would have fallen out of the plane or come down in the fuselage sections and been mostly intact. Bombs and missiles simply don't destroy the whole vehicle so completely.

The only way the bodies could all have been so thoroughly destroyed is if the plane smashed into the ground as a single piece under power at full speed, which would require full control authority for the pilot. Even if it had drifted or spun into the ground, perhaps due to loss of control from a small bomb or weapon damage, it would have been too slow for the observed effect, because we know what those crashes look like as well. The speculative electronic interference weapons would also have induced a more conventional crash, not one at full speed under power.

Also the article even opens with an eye witness account of the intact plane hitting the ground under power, the witness even describes the engine noise.

It is possible a small bomb or grenade did go off, but wasn't powerful enough to disable the plane. However if it did happen that just supports or at least is consistent with the passenger revolt theory.

What the article tries to do is throw out as much information presented in as discordant a way as possible, to create openings for speculation. However the conspiracy scenarios presented don't actually fit the evidence at all. all the rest about mysterious planes and such is irrelevant noise to the facts of the crash itself.

> You can see this in pictures of other downed or bombed planes, such as the one shot down over Ukraine.

There is a solid chance the person you reply to is also an MH17 truther. It's a package deal.

So, I used to believe this too. There's a lot of information that has come out since then, a whole investigative commission, many details, and a lot of people who would have needed to lie consistently and continually to this day.

Sure, it's possible that that happened. Lots of things are possible. It's just so astronomically unlikely at this point that it's not really worth considering until some evidence appears.

Right, but then you say "We would have shot them down anyway" and then what's the point?