Latest revision as of 17:53, 28 June 2012
Thomas Edward Burnett Jr. (May 29, 1963 – September 11, 2001), also known as Tom Burnett, was the vice president of Thoratec Corporation, a Californian medical devices company. He died age 38 on board United Airlines Flight 93.
Phone calls
Tom Burnett's wife Deena has told the press that he made four phone calls to her on 9/11. Her original FBI interview was less definitive, saying only "3 to 5" (see below), but the "four phone call" version is the one that's passed into history. Each call is described here.
Call 1
Here's the first call as reported by the Tom Burnett Foundation:
And here's how it's reported in Jere Longman's "Among the Heroes":
Call 2
What happened next, according to the Foundation:
And Jere Longman:
Deena [Burnett] was giving the FBI agent her husband's flight number and destination, when her call-waiting interrupted again. It was Tom. Again, Deena noted the time: six thirty-four on the West Coast, nine thirty-four on the East Coast.
"They're in the cockpit," Tom told her, using an Airfone this time.
The man who had been knifed was dead. Tom had tried to help, but he felt no pulse.
Deena quickly told him what she knew. Two planes had hit the towers of the World Trade Center. Terrorists seemed to be hitting desginated targets. Tom immediately pieced things together. The hijackers could be planning to use his plane for a similar purpose.
"Oh my God," he said. "It's a suicide mission."
Deena heard Tom relaying the information she gave him.
"Who are you talking to?" Deena asked.
"My seatmate," Tom replied.
Were commercial airlines being hijacked? he asked. Which airlines? How many planes were involved? Who was involved?
Deena answered with what little information she had. Television newscasters were speculating that the hijacked planes were cargo planes, private planes or commercial jets. When she was a Delta flight attendant, she became familiar with the distinctive markings on various airlines, but she could not identify the planes she'd seen on television.
His plane seemed to be turning east, Tom reported, then said, "Wait, wait, we're turning back the other way. We're going south."
What could he see? Deena asked. He said it was a rural area, just fields.
"I've got to go," he said.
Among the Heroes, Jere Longman
Call 3
The Burnett Foundation says the third call went like this:
While Jere Longman tells it this way:
The phone rang. It was Tom [Burnett], a third time, calling again on his cell phone. It was six forty-five, nine forty-five in the East...
"Tom, you're okay?"
"No, I'm not," he said.
A third plane had hit the Pentagon, she told him.
He repeated her words to others sitting around him. What else could she tell him?
The planes seemed to be commercial airliners originating on the East Coast, Deena said.
Tom gave the impression that he was walking around, trying to see where the hijackers were positioned.
"Do you know who's involved?" he asked.
"No," Deena said.
Again, he seemed to be relaying information, his voice growing muted then louder again. He asked about the likelihood of a bomb onboard. Before Deena could answer, Tom said, "I don't think they have one. I think they're just telling us that."
Had she called the authorities?
Yes, Deena told him. "They didn't seem to know anything about your plane."
The hijackers, Tom said, were talking about crashing the plane into the ground, "We have to do something."
He and others were making a plan. "A group of us." Don't worry, he told Deena. "I'll call you back.".
Among the Heroes, Jere Longman
Call 4
Here's the Foundation version of events:
Jere Longman's account is very similar:
9-11 Commission MFR
The memorandum recording Deena Burnett's interview with the 9/11 Commission has been released. This again talks of four calls, the first being a cellphone as it shows up on caller ID, although interestingly that call didn't appear on his cellphone bill.
COMISSION SENSITIVE
UNCLASSIFIED
MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD
Event: Deena Burnett, 9/11 family member.
Type: Conference Call
Date: April 26, 2004
Prepared by: John Raidt
9/11 Personal Privacy
Special Access Issues: None
Team: 7
Participants (non-Commission):
Participants (Commission): John Raidt and Lisa Sullivan
Location: GSA conference room
John Raidt and Lisa Sullivan called Deena Burnett [redacted] at 11 AM from the GSA conference room of the 9-11 Commission office.
She lost her husband Tom Burnett on VAL flight 93. He was a first class passenger on the flight. She confirmed she spoke to her husband four separate times from the plane.
_ Burnett's exact words to Deena were, "I think one of them has a gun."
_ He also said, "One of the passengers has been knifed."
_ He did not say how many hijackers were on the plane .
_ Deena thought the hijackers took over the cockpit and sent the passengers to the back of the plane concurrently. The pilots were taken by surprise. They were holding a woman (possibly a flight attendant) at knife point.
Call #1: Deena believes he called her from first class. She thinks he was crouching in his seat as the hijackers were trying to get into the cockpit. She believes this because there were many sounds she could hear in the immediate background,as he narrated to her
what was going on. She also thinks this was the one call he placed to her from his cell phone, because she recognized the number on the caller ID .
Call #2: She believes he told her the hijackers had entered the cockpit. He was further back in the plane for the call, and the other two calls that followed.
Call #3: This call was also placed from further back in the plane. He was looking out the window describing to her where they were located. She thought he was moving around the cabin.
Call #4: She did not give any specific information relayed during this call.
The call Burnett made from the cell phone did not show up on the cell phone bill, neither did the one he placed to his secretary before take-off.
Burnett spoke with his friend Charles from England before take-off. He mentioned the flight was delayed but did not give a reason.
She turned the notes she took on her conversations with Tom into a typed transcript and gave it to the FBI and Burnett's parents. She threw away the handwritten notes.
She thought "in the cockpit" and "I'm injured" were her husband's words recorded on the CVR. She said it was not hard to recognize his voice. Other family members were also confident they heard the voices of their loved ones on the recorder.
NARA source
Cellphone or airfone
The Burnett calls, in particular the first two, have been the subject of some controversy. The argument runs something like this.
The original reports of Burnett's calls, including the account of his wife, Deena, say he used his cell phone to make them.
It's virtually impossible to make cell phone calls from planes flying above 8,000 feet, though. Burnett's first call would have been made at nearer 40,000 feet, and so cannot have come from Flight 93 (at least, not following the flight path as described by the NTSB). The calls must therefore have been faked, or made from somewhere else.
The conspirators realised this problem at some point, and "changed their story". A Flash animation was released at the Moussaoui trial that said he made only three calls, and all by airfone:
There's a core of truth to some of these claims.
As we've seen, the Tom Burnett Foundation transcript does refer specifically to cell phone calls. The original FBI interview with Deena Burnett also talks of "three to five cellphone calls", and includes the following:
In an ideal world we'd be looking for a definitive statement that each of the calls (or, at least, all but one) were made from Burnett's own phone. Instead this leaves us to infer it, which leaves open the possibility of an error or misunderstanding. If Deena Burnett saw Burnett's cellphone number on one or two occasions, for instance, and an airfone on three, then she would recognise the caller ID for the airfone (assuming it provided one). Burnett could then tell the FBI both that she recognised his caller ID, and all but one of the caller IDs were visible, without meaning they all showed his cellphone number.
The 9/11 Commission MFR (above) does seem to imply that she saw his caller ID only once, and also adds a note that the call didn't show up on his cell phone bill.
She also thinks this was the one call he placed to her from his cell phone, because she recognized the number on the caller ID.
The call Burnett made from the cell phone did not show up on the cell phone bill, neither did the one he placed to his secretary before take-off.
There are those who will Deena Burnett cannot be mistaken on any details, but then she had just been plunged into the most terrible nightmare: it's a little unrealistic to expect perfect recall. There's a perfectly understandable sign of this when the FBI say Burnett received between three and five calls. In the press (and her book) she's said definitively said four, based on notes she took with times of the calls, but the first reaction here on 9/11 is that she couldn't be sure. If we can't take her later word on how many calls were received, then can we be completely sure about other details?
In any event, there were some reports that Tom Burnett used an airfone long before it became an issue.
Dateline NBC seem to say the second and third calls were by airfone, for instance, although again this isn't defined as clearly as we'd like:
NBC News Transcripts
October 2, 2001 Tuesday
SHOW: Dateline NBC (10:00 PM ET) - NBC
No Greater Love: The Story of Flight 93; Stories of how passengers resisted terrorists told by victims' families
PAULEY: (Voiceover) Deena Burnett told DATELINE's Maria Shriver that she had the TV on while feeding her two children when she got the first call from her husband, Tom.
(Deena talking to reporter)
Ms. BURNETT: I asked him immediately if he was OK, and he said no. He said, 'I'm on the airplane, United Flight 93, and it's been hijacked.' And he said, 'Please call the authorities,' and he hung up...
PAULEY: (Voiceover) Passengers may, at first, have thought this was the kind of hijacking in which hostages are held until demands are met. But Tom Burnett made a second call to his wife, saying ominous news was circulating among the passengers.
(Scenes of inside plane; air phone)
Ms. BURNETT: He asked me about the World Trade Center. He asked if it was a passenger airline, and I told him I didn't know. And he said 'OK,' and he hung up again, said that he had to go...
PAULEY: (Voiceover) Tom Burnett called Deena a third time.
(Air phone)
Ms. BURNETT: I said, 'Tom, they just hit the Pentagon.' He said, 'OK. OK.' I told him I had called the authorities. He said, 'We can't wait for the authorities. We have to do something.'..
PAULEY: (Voiceover) Now Tom Burnett called his wife, Deena, a fourth and final time.
(Scenes from home video of wedding)
Ms. BURNETT: He said, 'OK. There's a group of us, and we're going to do something.' I said, 'No.' I said, 'Please sit down and be still, be quiet. Don't draw attention to yourself.' And he said, 'No.' He said, 'If they're going to drive this plane into the ground,' he said, 'we've got to do something.'
And on the first anniversary of 9/11 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) wrote:
Press quotes aren't good evidence, of course, as we've no idea how they decided whether a cellphone or airfone was used. But what we can see is that reports of Burnett using airfones didn't originate at the Moussaoui trial.
There's still an apparent clash with that Moussaoui trial evidence, however, which reports only three calls made from Burnett, all by airfone. So does this mean he didn't make any cellphone calls at all? No: here's the relevant part of the Moussaoui trial transcript, where Detective Sergeant Ray Guidetti of the New Jersey State Police and FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Newark is answering questions about Tom Burnett's phone calls:
The FBI explicitly said that Tom Burnett may have made "additional cell phone calls" to his wife. They are, therefore, not denying that Deena Burnett could have seen his caller ID. Contradictions still exist: Deena Burnett seems to be clear that the first call was made by cellphone, for instance, while the phone records used in the Moussaoui trial point to it being the last. But again, that's assuming she received only four calls, and the FBI interview showed Burnett herself wasn't sure about that.
But isn't it almost impossible to make cellphone calls from altitude? Well, no. The so-called evidence for this involves testing phones while flying over an urban area, where cellphone base station ranges are relatively short. Base stations out in the countryside can have considerably greater range, so this wasn't a fair test (see AK Dewdney and Project Achilles), and in reality there are multiple accounts supporting the idea that calls can be made from aircraft at cruising altitudes (see Mobiles at altitude).
This poses something of a problem for the "faked calls" theory. If brief cellphone calls really can be made from altitude, then why would the conspirators need to pretend that Burnett had called from an airfone, therefore bringing GTE (airfone providers) into the coverup? What's really more likely: the conspirators decide to fake multiple calls to Deena Burnett instead of just one, and all for no good reason (because if she'd received no calls then events would have continued in precisely the same way), she fails to realise that this is an imposter, the conspirators go to the trouble of faking a caller ID, only later to try and conceal that when it's entirely unnecessary? Or that a young mother, in the worst day of her life, doesn't have perfect recall of a sequence of phone calls?
You decide.
Saw a gun
It's occasionally claimed that Burnett said he saw a gun:
...sitting in the middle of events in first class, Burnett calmly says that the hijackers have just stabbed a passenger; he reports seeing a gun that was officially determined not to be present.
9/11, The New Evidence, Ian Henshall
However, as we've seen above, that's not quite what happened. Burnett is actually reported as saying "one of them has a gun". He may have said this because he saw a gun, yes, but it's also possible that he heard one of the hijackers saying he had a gun, or another passenger said they thought one hijacker was armed. It seems unlikely there was an obviously visible weapon as no-one else reported this, but without more information there's no way to be sure.
Incidentally, we'd also suggest this is evidence against the idea that the calls were faked. Because if they were scripted, why would the conspirators have had Burnett say something so inconvenient and out of step with everyone else?