Friday, September 14, 2007

AA 77 Airfones, the Final Story

To finish off a story that has been long in developing, we now have the documents showing when the air phones from American Airlines 77 were deactivated. This whole saga started when David Ray Griffin, in his book "Debunking 9/11 Debunking" claimed that AA 757s never had air phones. After we pointed out that they had them, but they were removed in the spring of 2002, he corrected himself, only to immediately turn around and decide that this was too big of a concession to reality and start trying to prove they didn't exist again.




With the help of Rob Balsamo from "Pilots for 9/11 Truth", Griffin finally came up with an anonymous American Airlines' mechanic who gave him a document describing the removal of the phones, discussed here, here, here and here. The problem with the document they provided though, was that they did not show the original Engineering Change Order (ECO) removing the phone. The fact that the phones were removed was not under contention, it was only a matter of when. According to a press release by American, it was sometime after February 2002. According the the "Pilots for 9/11 Truth" it was some unspecified date before January 2001.



Well now, along with a bunch of other supporting documents, we have the original ECO (FO871)ordering the phones to be deactivated. The ECO mentioned by Balsamo (FO878), is the order to actually physically remove the components. This, of course, occurs at an even later date. (The document is unaltered by me except for additional blacking-out of personal information)




















Click to enlarge.

To no surprise, the date of March 2002 matches up perfectly with the public statements of American Airlines' press release, and not, as the truthers allege, over a year. This is just when the original order was given though, this does not say when it was carried out. We have that list too though, one of which is displayed below.



























All of the deactivations were done in April of 2002. Flight 77 is not among them of course, since it crashed into the Pentagon 7 months earlier.



So this should pretty much settle this story, verified from mutiple sources, including internal documents, news articles and public statements from AA77. The air phones on flight 77 had not yet been removed in September 2001. Once again David Ray Griffin, the high priest of the 9/11 denial movement is shown to be wrong. It is probably too much to hope for, but maybe someday he will realize all this and let the victims of this fatal flight rest in peace.

Labels: , ,