This first official account is of interest because in 2006 it was contradicted by the FBI, and The 9/11 Commission Report can be seen, when read in light of this later FBI report, to have explicitly endorsed only two of the reported cell phone calls, both of which came from low elevations (as reported in Point PC-4: “Cell Phone Calls from the Planes: The Second Official Account”).

Passengers and flight attendants on the 9/11 flights were able, reported the media, to use cell phones (as well as onboard phones) to let people on the ground know what was happening on their planes:

• The day after 9/11, a BBC story said: “A senior U.S. intelligence official told MSNBC.com that mobile phone communications [cell phone calls] from [UA] Flight 93 indicate that three passengers overpowered the hijackers but were unable to maintain control of the plane.” [2]
• The next day (September 13, 2001) a Washington Post story said: “[Passenger Jeremy] Glick’s cell phone call from Flight 93 and others like it provide the most dramatic accounts so far of events aboard the four hijacked aircraft.” [3]
• The same Post story about this flight said: “The plane was at once a lonesome vessel, the people aboard facing their singular fate, and yet somehow already attached to the larger drama, connected again by cell phones.” [4]

The media also gave accounts of particular passengers and flight attendants on the planes who used cell phones to communicate with people on the ground. (Wherever possible, the FBI interview of the recipient of the cell phone call, usually conducted the morning of 9/11, is sourced in the footnote):

• On the afternoon of 9/11, CNN reported that US Solicitor General Theodore “Ted” Olson told CNN that his wife, well-known CNN commentator Barbara Olson, had “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77,” stating that the plane had been taken over by hijackers armed with “knives and cardboard cutters.” [5] When interviewed by the FBI, Olson said that he did not know if her calls were made from her cell phone or the telephone on the plane. [6] In subsequent media interviews, Olson went back and forth on whether his wife used her cell phone or a seat-back phone, but her call was almost unanimously reported in the media, in line with the initial CNN story, as a cell phone call.
• Later on 9/11, an Associated Press story reported that businessman Peter Hanson called his father – Lee Hanson of Connecticut – from United 175. The AP stated that “a minister confirmed the cell phone call to Lee Hanson.” [7]
• According to The Washington Post on September 13, Kathy Hoglan talked about her nephew, Mark Bingham. In “his cell phone call to her” from UA 93, she reportedly said, he “managed only to tell his aunt and mother, Alice Hoglan, that the plane had been hijacked and that he loved them.” [8]
• On September 16, a Washington Post writer David Maraniss, discussing UA 175, said: “Brian Sweeney called his wife Julie: ‘Hi, Jules,’ Brian Sweeney was saying into his cell phone. ‘It’s Brian. We’ve been hijacked, and it doesn’t look too good.’” [9] According to the FBI’s interview with Julie Sweeney on October 2, 2001, she had been out when her husband called. She “returned home to find that her husband had left a message, made from his cell phone aboard the plane, on their answering machine. The answering machine recorded that the message was left at approximately 8:58 AM.” [10] At that time, UA 175 was reportedly at about 25,000 feet. (It is important to note that the message was on Julie Sweeney’s answering machine, which would make it difficult to argue that her report – that her husband had called on his cell phone – was based on faulty hearing or memory.)
• Maraniss also, saying that people aboard UA 93 were “connected [to the larger drama] by cell phones,” added: “Thomas E. Burnett Jr., a California businessman, called his wife, Deena, four times.” In an AP story on September 12, Martha Raffaele wrote: “In a series of four cellular phone calls, Burnett had his wife, Deena, conference in the FBI.” The FBI’s report of its interview with Deena, carried out on 9/11 itself, indicated that she had spoken of “three to five cellular phone calls.” [11] A year later, McClatchy reporter Greg Gordon wrote that Deena Burnett had been “strangely calmed by her husband’s steady voice over his cell phone.” [12] A segment about Deena Burnett on CBS’s Early Show said: “Tom Burnett made four cell phone calls from Flight 93 to Deena Burnett at home, telling her he and some other passengers were going to ‘do something.’” [13]
• On September 22, a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about UA 93 passenger Marion Britton began: “She called longtime friend Fred Fiumano, from whom she had borrowed a cell phone.” [14]

Summary: Responses by the 9/11 Commission and the FBI

• The most extensive of these reports were by Canadian mathematician and scientist A. K. Dewdney, who for many years had written a column for Scientific American. [19] In 2003, he published reports of experiments he had carried out in single- and twin-engine airplanes, showing that at 20,000 feet, there was a one-in-a-hundred chance of successful calls from a single-engine plane, and in a twin-engine plane (which has greater insulation), the success rate at 7,000 feet was 0 percent. He also pointed out that cell phone failure would occur at even lower altitudes in large airliners, which are even more insulated. [20]
• When the times of the reported phone calls are compared with the official flight data paths, it is clear that some of the cell phone calls reported in the mainstream press occurred when the planes were above 40,000 feet, and all of them occurred above 20,000 feet. [21]
• Dewdney’s report did not stand alone. Several other articles published between 2001 and 2004 cast doubt on the cell phone calls as being credible. [22]
• In 2004, Qualcomm announced a successful demonstration of a fundamentally new kind of cell phone technology, involving a “picocell,” that would allow passengers “to place and receive calls as if they were on the ground.” American Airlines announced that this new technology was expected to be commercially available in 2006. [23] This technology, in fact, first became available on commercial flights in March 2008. [24]
• The cell phone companies have, even before 9/11, kept extensive coded data on each call from the 3-sided cell phone towers, and these data provide triangulation location points. [25] Such data are routinely requested for court cases and would have been used in the massive cell phone investigation that ensued. [26]

Therefore the above-reported cell phone calls almost certainly could not have been received from any of the 9/11 planes.

From 2001 until 2006, such stories appeared to be supported by the FBI and the 9/11 Commission. The Commission reported the stories about Barbara Olson from American 77; Peter Hanson and Brian Sweeney from United 175; and Mark Bingham, Marion Britton, Tom Burnett, and Jeremy Glick from United 93. The 9/11 Commission and the FBI, moreover, did nothing to cast doubt on the belief that these people had, while in 9/11 planes, used cell phones to talk to people on the ground. [27]

Therefore, the (first) official account of phone calls from the 9/11 planes, which fleshed out the dramatic public story, is objectively so improbable as to be unbelievable – a fact that casts doubt on the credibility of the official account of 9/11 as a whole.