抖阴ap

Alexandria, Va. – Passengers and flight attendants aboard the hijacked plane that crashed Sept. 11, 2001, in a Pennsylvania field made more than three dozen frantic phone calls depicting chaos and fear aboard United Flight 93 and a realization by many passengers that they were about to die, according to court testimony Tuesday.

Although the phone calls described brave schemes for battling the hijackers – a flight attendant was boiling water to throw on them; another passenger was hoping to fight back with a breakfast knife – the scene suggested a fatalism at odds with the sometimes upbeat story line in books and movies about the heroic effort by a group of passengers to wrest control of the plane from the four terrorists.

The calls also showed that most of the passengers were confused about how many hijackers had commandeered the plane, where they came from or whether their weapons were knives or a bomb, or both.

And their chance at survival seemed all the more futile when they learned through the phone calls that two other planes already had been flown into the World Trade Center in New York, and so they expected that their hijackers “were going to take this one down as well.”

The calls were summarized by a police officer testifying in the Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing trial.

Prosecutors plan to wrap up their case today by playing the cockpit recording tape that was recovered from the stripmining field near Shanksville, Pa., where the plane crashed. That recording has only been played for relatives of the dead passengers and crew.

“I’ve waited 4 1/2 years to talk about this,” said Sandy Dahl, widow of Jason Dahl, the plane’s captain.

“Jason’s place in history and Leroy’s (Leroy Homer, the first officer) will be out there.”