#SUDDENLY AUDIO HIJACK IN MY HEADPHONES SOUNDS AWFUL SERIES#
He listened hundreds of times over four years to the cockpit tapes of USAir Flight 427, which went down near Pittsburgh in 1994, killing all 132 aboard.įinally, he was able to match a series of grunting sounds by the co-pilot with data replicating a malfunction of the Boeing 737's rudder. "Speech is very close to how a person thinks."īrenner believes he has gotten to know some pilots as one would a friend by repeatedly listening to snatches of the last half-hour of their lives to figure out how they died. "You are really very close to the soul," said Malcolm Brenner, an NTSB psychologist who specializes in voice analysis. Investigators regard this room as the agency's inner sanctum, a workplace in which they witness struggles that reveal both the harsh finality of death and the power of the human will to live. At the end of the table sits a large computer monitor, so everyone can see as an NTSB technician transcribes what is heard on the tape. There is a table and chairs, with headphones at each seat. They work from a National Transportation Safety Board laboratory in Washington that is stacked with mangled recorders, reminders of life's fragility. Like coroners with headphones, the investigators seek to uncover the hidden causes of tragedies through painstaking analysis of the most minute clues.
Their relatives apparently tried to take back control of the plane from four hijackers, and thereby thwarted another terrorist attack.Īs they listen, the families will enter a zone normally inhabited only by a small corps of investigators hardened to bitter reality. They felt they had a right to listen, to know. Today, families of the 40 passengers and crew of United Flight 93 will hear the 30 minutes of tension and chaos that preceded the crash of the jetliner into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. government has never played the cockpit tapes of an air disaster for families who lost loved ones, insisting that the sounds would be too raw.