Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The K Stands for Kook

A.K. Dewdney recorded a video for the recent Vancouver "Truther"-Fest. He claims that an employee of Canada's air security agency told him that he was placed on a "no-fly" list and didn't care to test that by attending the conference. Of course, it is far more likely that the conference organizers didn't want to pay his expenses and provide an appearance fee for the man who orchestrated "Project Achilles" even if he did provide a Canadian flavor to 9-11 crackpottery.

Dewdney continues to claim that the "cellphone calls" could not have been made from the hijacked planes. At about 1:26 he shows a poster with the "Official Story", the Flight #s, the calls made from that Flight, and the altitude the plane was at when the calls were made. But, as you probably guessed, Dewdney is wrong when he claims that the official story says these were all cellphone calls.



Among the items of evidence presented at the Moussaoui trial was a Flash presentation showing the various flights, the seat assignments, and the phone calls. They even have audio for two of the calls (Cee Cee Lyles first phone call to her husband, picked up by the answering machine, and Betty Ong's phone call to American Airlines).

If we look at the portion of the Flash presentation for Flight 175 we can see the problem with Dewdney's analysis. Here are the phone calls made by Peter Hanson from the Flash presentation.

As you can see, the Hanson's seat assignments were in Row 19, but the phone calls were made from Row 30. How does the prosecution know this?

Because the phone calls were not made from a cellphone, but from an Airfone installed on the seatback of Row 29. If we look at the phone calls made by a flight attendant, we see the same thing except these calls were made from Row 31. Ditto with the Garnet (Ace) Bailey phone calls, from Row 32.

The Flight 77 calls are more problematic; the Flash presentation does not indicate they were made with Airfones. However, you can see that the phone calls on that flight were made at a much lower altitude (Dewdney estimates 7,000 feet), and thus are more likely to connect.

And the Flight 93 calls? The only ones made by cellphone were Cee Cee Lyles' second call to her husband and Edward Felt's call from the rear lavatory, both of which were again made at low altitude.

We'll have more on Airfones later in the day.

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