Lee Siegel on Flight 93:
What I would like to see is a different kind of movie about Flight 93. I would like to see a movie showing a passenger--of whatever gender, race or age--sitting in his seat in anguish and terror, at times weeping for his precious life, sitting in anger and terror over the possibility of never seeing the people he loves again, of not living beyond that moment. That would be the film. It should be as long as Flight 93 lasted.
He's got to be the only one. So far as Flight 93 goes, various folks have convinced me that the plane was actually shot down by scrambled fighter jets. I don't tend to go in for conspiracies, and I don't think it much matters one way or the other, but I basically trust the sources here. As I understand it, the way the plane's wreckage lay wasn't consistent with an on-the-ground crash, but rather with an in-air explosion. Various parts of the engine were miles away from each other, debris was found eight miles from the crash site, etc. If you're interested, there's a collection of info here, but as I said before, I fail to see how it matters. The passengers did fight to retake control, and if the government shot down the plane (a perfectly defensible decision) but preferred to credit American heroism, well, they've done worse.
Update: Professor Farley has some good points about how screwy the motives would have to be for this tale to be correct. As I said above, this isn't something I've really thought through. I just trust the guy who told it to me, and it's my chosen conspiracy theory. But Farley definitely makes some good points. And people seem to be taking this as an expression of my mistrust for the administration. Not at all. I just knew a pilot who'd seen the evidence and knew some of the investigators. He may be wrong. And I guess I find it somehow harder to believe that we never knocked down one of these airborne missiles than that the administration, somewhat humanely, decided to give the American people a largely-factual moral victory on a truly horrific day.
