"Do cell phones work on airplanes?"-- the Tom Burnett miracle

[spooked911]

I was watching the A&E movie "Flight 93" yesterday with my family and we got to the scene where Tom Burnett calls his wife with his cell phone. My wife, who doesn't pay any attention my 9/11 conspiracy stuff, asked me "do cell phones work on airplanes?"

It was THAT obvious to her.

Burnett's first phone call was early on in the hijacking when the plane was at high altitude, and clearly is very suspicious.

Cell phones simply don't work at that altitude.

If Burnett's cell phone call was really from flight 93, I'd sure like to know what cell pone service he has. He made FOUR CALLS, at least two were from high altitude, before the hijackers descended the plane, at 9:27 am and 9:31am.

More on Burnett's phone calls here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=48029&mesg_id=48029
and here:
http://covertoperations.blogspot.com/2005/05/flight-93-phone-calls-part-i-tom.html

[Woody Box]

1. Did they show Jeremy Glick talking to his wife?

I'd be interested where he was when his wife told him that the South Tower just had collapsed at 10 am, 2 minutes into the passenger uprising, 3 minutes before the crash, while the plane was flying close over the Allegheny mountains...

"will they fly our plane into the WTC, too?"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x6210

[spooked911]

4. they showed Glick talking to his wife but left out the part where she

tells him the WTC fell. They did show her watching it on TV though.

They also left out the part where Glick tells her the hijackers stood up, put on redheadbands, yelled and rushed into the cockpit.

[trotsky]

2. Sure they do.

http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Article_Index1&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=3309
Cell phones certainly work on airplanes in flight, but do they interfere with other communications signals?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-5727009.html
A cell phone signal falling to Earth from a phone aboard a plane encounters no significant obstacles to slow it down, so it's strong enough to reach the ground and find a network on its particular frequency.

In fact, the more likely conspiracy going on is that the airlines pushed the "cell phones won't work on planes" and/or "cell phones will interfere with the plane's controls" myths so that people would be forced to use the on-board phones which generate more revenue for the airlines.

[spooked911]

3. They do not work at high altitude. There is no signal.

Have you ever used one in a plane?

Try it.

[MercutioATC]

5. I have gotten a signal (2-3 bars of 5) at 29,000'.

Being an air traffic controller, I was hesitant to attempt a call (rules 'n stuff) but I DID get a signal.

[Klimmer]

7. Bull Dung. This last summer I went across the US from West . . .

to East coast and back. I posted my experiences here at Sept. 11 forum. I purposefully experimented and kept my cell-phone on and hidden so I could still view the screen the entire way across, both ways. And with my circa 2001 Kyocera model #2135, the only signals I got were on take-off and landing. The highest off-the-ground signal I ever got was about 3000' and I'm a very good judge of altitude since I fly paragliders. My phone would stay bar-less (no signal) until we got back to that very low altitude or less. Even then it was only getting a weak signal and jumping around. Trying to make a call even then it would have dropped me. My phone requires steady signal with at least 2 bars or so to stay connected. And the bars better not be jumping around.

Cell phones do not work at all from any significant altitude. Many others have done thorough experiments and have debunked the myth of making cell phone calls at altitude. See the "physics911" website.

Don't even tell me cell-phones work --- bullshit.

On edit: I say everyone should become a scoff-law the next time you fly, and experiment with your cell phone. Don't make a call, but check the signals through-out the flight and prove it to yourself. See the evidence for yourself.

[drdtroit]

8. Which service provider do you have? n/t

[Klimmer]

10. Verizon --- can you hear me now? Not above 3000' or so . . .

in a commercial passenger jet airliner, I can't.

[MercutioATC]

11. It was either Alltel or AT&T..

I don't remember if it was before or after I switched providers.

[drdtroit]

14. I was just curious because I have Sprint and have never been able

to get a signal. I guess you would just have to be low enough.
:patriot:

[RC]

6. The signal from the cell towers is donut shaped.

Not much signal goes up. It is shaped to go out. That way they will get a stronger signal with less power to where most of the users are, on the ground. Above 5,000 ft., cell phones are unreliable, above 10,000 ft, basically useless.

The same goes for the receiver, They receive same on the plane as the transmitter transmits.
A cell phone working at 29,000 feet? Try it sometime. It may be able to receive a signal from some distant tower, but the puny signal from the cell phone from inside the metal plane will never reach back to that tower.

Also, electricity costs money. Lower power transmitters are cheaper and cheaper to operate than higher power transmitters.

[trotsky]

18. That is true, but the earth is curved.

Signals sent out in a "donut" shape extend towards the horizon, but the "horizon" is fairly high up when you are a good distance away from the source.

http://yarchive.net/phone/airplane_cellular.html

It seems more like a "donut". They do not want to waste power transmitting "up", but put most of it out in a "disc" toward the horizon. When flying, it is important to "lock down" the cell phone to a single system. You can force it to only work with one system, by entering the system ID. If you don't lock it down, it would sometimes lock up to Chicago while far south as Indy! Cells that you are close to are weaker then those 60-80 mi away! It seemed that no matter where in the midwest I was, I was always seeing SOME cell site with a signal strength of 40-45! This seems be similar to the "silent pileups" reported by the Astronauts working 2 meter Ham radio, when the whole country tried to contact them at once.

[we can do it]

32. BEST POST EVER!!! News Flash the Earth Is Curved!

:rofl:

[PerpetualYnquisitive]

9. LOL

Thursday, September 22, 2005 - Page updated at 12:17 PM

Even passengers watch plane's drama on TV

By Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press
-excerpt-
Passenger Zachary Mascoon, 27, said it was surreal to watch the coverage. At one point, he said, he tried to call his family, but his cellphone call wouldn't go through.

Article: http://tinyurl.com/al4s8

Four full years after 9/11 and he couldn't call from a plane flying over an urban area saturated with cell phone towers. I wonder how many cell towers Flight 93 was flying directly above, in the middle of rural Pennsylvania?

[dchill]

12. Recently saw a link...

around here that showed a major airline had installed a cell unit ON A PLANE to get the cell phones to work. Kinda casts a little doubt on those reported 9/11 cell calls, eh?

[trotsky]

17. "his cellphone call wouldn't go through"

Because of a plane's position in the air, a phone can pick up signals from many towers. In the L.A. area, I'm sure this number is astronomical. Maybe his particular phone couldn't figure out which one to latch on to. In rural PA, there's probably only a few covering any given area, and that might make it easier for communication.

According to this page, a passenger's Blackberry worked. http://www.rhino.com/rzine/StoryKeeper.lasso?StoryID=600

Regardless, experts with no ties to 9/11 or any of the massive conspiracies say it's completely possible to make cell calls from a plane, and it has been done before.

[dchill]

13. "Hi, Mom... this is Mark Bingham."

They may have made the calls. But they weren't made from the airplane.

[wildbilln864]

15. So where are we then?

How do you explain the phone calls?
I too have heard many times that you can't make cell calls on planes. So, were there ever really any calls at all? How did they fool the families?
This must be solved in order to gain credibility to the 911 was inside job notion.

[dchill]

16. We are in truthless limbo.

From USA Today July 7, 2004:

"The race is on to enable airline passengers to make and receive cell phone calls in flight."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2004-07-19-aircells_x.htm

"In-flight cell service could be introduced within two years and become commonplace within four, developers believe."

Hmmm. I thought they were making them right and left over four years ago. Must have been some kind of voodoo that let all those cell phone calls be made in September of 2001...

Or, the people who made them (from somewhere on the ground - like Cleveland Hopkins Airport) were coached, led to believe that they were helping to thwart an attack on their country.

"You believe me, don't you, Mom?" (Mark Bingham)

[annofark]

19. Then how did they know

To attack the terrorists????

[Ezlivin]

20. It was written on the back of each seat: In case of hijacking, attack!

The official 9/11 story is a house of cards. There are so many problems with it that once you start examining it, any questions that arise immediately cast serious doubt on the official account.

If repeated attempts to use cellphones at altitude show that it's highly unlikely that they can function, it throws into question the official account.

Do you ever call home and immediately identify yourself to your parents with your full name?

Spend some time in this forum, look around and you will come away with serious doubts about what we've been led to believe.

[dchill]

21. How do we "know" that they did?

[Ferry Fey]

22. "This is Mark Bingham."

I HAVE had a family member call home and absentmindedly identify herself by her full name.

Let's drop that one from the list of useful clues.

[dchill]

23. Let's not.

"Do you believe me, Mom?" (He asked her this more than once.) :)

[frylock]

40. mark bingham..

you believe me, don't you mom? W.T.F.

[ryan_cats]

24. Not for me they haven't

I tried several times.
1) Leaving Sacramento, > LA. No signal once off the ground until back on the ground.
2) LA > Sacramento No signal once off the ground until back on the ground.
3) Maui>Oahu>Kauai. No signal once off the ground until back on the ground.
4) Kauai>Oahu>Sacramento. No signal once off the ground until back on the ground.
5) JFK>Paris. No signal once off the ground until back on the ground.
6) Frankfurt>Chicago. No signal once off the ground until back on the ground.

I've been surreptitiously trying this for several years. Once we get more than a minute in the air, no bars on phone.

Oh, yeah, leaving the phone on didn't bring the plane down either.

This story is easily proved wrong B.S. There was no way they used a regular cell phone, an air phone yes, but not a cell phone.

I have a Sony Ericson concrete core phone with Cingular.

[Kevin Fenton]

33. Where are BTS

You tried to get a cell phone signal on the way from JKF to Paris and from Frankfurt to Chicago?
How many BTS do you think there are in the middle of the Atlantic?

[ryan_cats]

34. What?

What? From take off to altitude is what I'm talking about. Over conus, I tried and it didn't work either.

[Kevin Fenton]

36. Take-off to altitude

Most major airports are by major cities. The range of BTS is "artificially" lowered in cities, so more base stations can be packed into them - because one base station can only handle so many calls and there are lots of people with mobile phones in cities who want to call. A mobile phone is never going to work over a city, maybe over the countryside. It also depends on how powerful a phone is - older phones (especially the really old analogue ones) were much more powerful. How fully charged a battery is should be meaningless apparently. Your position in the aircraft might also have something to do with it - try sitting by the window.

[Robb]

25. Still asking this one?

Geez. Well, I've gotten bars twice, both times I tried. 2002 and 2003, Alltel, Nokia 6150, el Cheapo.

Some folks haven't. Well, I'd say that clears that up. :D

[JackRiddler]

26. what about air phones?

Don't tell me it's known reliably for all calls whether they are from air phones or cell phones (regardless of what's reported).

If Burnett's call was at 10 am, then the altitude could have been very low.

I'm sick of hearing what Bingham would have or should have said to his mom. Do you have any idea how you'd be reacting in that situation? I find it plausible that he'd nervously blurt out his own name and repeat "you believe me, don't you" out of anxiety. He doesn't believe what's happening himself, and wonders if his mother is. He knows he might have only minutes to live.

Are the calls unlikely? Perhaps. Barbara Olsen's seems to be a hell of a whopper. Nice for discussions among 9/11 skeptics, but can you show anything about the calls so definitive that you can convince anyone new, or get probable cause for a case?

Aren't you guys sick of working with entirely non-definitive fragments and pretending they'll add up to anything certain?

The case for an inside job was established years ago, in fact, most of it was obvious on the day and within a few weeks of 9/11. Why not stick to the solid stuff, keep repeating it, and forget all this hypothesizing about cell phones, lagoon landings, and 38,000 possible scenarios?

The chain of command made themselves scarce during the actual attacks, and have produced obviously contradictory and unlikely excuses.

The air defense system failed to follow standard procedures, and produced a wealth of contradictory timelines; most of these are necessarily lies.

The idea that AA77 made it to the Pentagon 50 mins. after the first crash and 45 mins after it was hijacked, without a standdown, flown by Hani Hanjour, and hitting the empty section, is laughable.

The military was staging wargames based on the 9/11 scenario on the day itself, and these appear to have been intended to circumvent air defesne response; at any rate, coincidence on that scale is laughable. The wargames = foreknowledge.

The supposedly incompetent officials who fucked up were all promoted.

The top spin doctors delivered obvious lies ("no one could have imagined").

The first investigation was run by two guys who on 9/11 were meeting with the financer of the hijackers, but somehow forgot this. (Ahmad, Goss/Graham)

A primary long-term Bush security adviser was appointed to pretend to hold the second investigation. (Zelikow, the Commission)

The Commission delivered a joke report that constantly runs away from the evidence suggesting government complicity.

The patsies (or hijackers, whatever) were under surveillance years in advance, contrary to four years worth of propaganda, and the Commission left that out of its report.

The investigators who could have bagged the patsy/hijackers were blocked, obstructed, as a matter of high-level policy.

Dozens of people have gone on record with stories of accurate and specific foreknowledge.

Speculators bet on the outcome using advance knowledge and the SEC tried to wiggle out of confronting it (four years later) by simply ignoring the vast majority of suspicious transactions. The head of the bank responsible for some of the transactions resigned suddenly on Sept. 12.

The buildings were blown up - certainly 7 was, and that unravels the rest of the demolition, since there is no way it could have been prepared for implosion on the same day.

The war in Afghanistan was planned in advance and set for launch in mid-October, lacking only a casus belli.

Would the long-planned invasion of Iraq have been possible without 9/11?

Rumsfeld chose Sep. 10 to slip in the announcement that a Halliburton "audit" under PNAC author and Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim had successfully heisted 2.3 trillion dollars.

The Osama confession video and audio are crude fakes. Why would anyone want to fake these?

The anthrax attacks hit Democratic leaders and the media with US high-grade anthrax just in time to get the USA PATRIOT Act passed – come on!

False-flag attacks are a normal practice of "statecraft."

The Bush mob players have committed far greater crimes than 9/11, even against Americans. Given the pay off, it's a trifle.

Everything in the big picture points at 9/11 as inside job.

So why are we wasting our time with the attempt to convince professional "debunkers" of peripherals and pet speculations? Who really needs to spend time assessing the plausibility of Mark Bingham's reported words, given all of the above?

[Klimmer]

27. I agree with you, however, both approaches are valuable.

We have all the great work and discoveries by Michael Ruppert et al., showing in a very convincing manner the means, motive, and the ability of the BCF/Neo-cons to carry out 9-11.

In addition we have the ability using physics to falsify the official 9-11 Commission Report CT hypothesis. Once falsified it must be abandoned. The professional BCF de-bunkers don't get this. They don't know science.

Both approaches, in union, are much more powerful than either approach by itself. Personally, I'm more comfortable with using science to debunk the official CT. Others are better at using means, motive, and ability to debunk the official CT. I try to understand both. We should support one another rather than work against each other. We are working toward the same goal --- justice and to get our country back from these criminals that have taken over our government and the media.

Just keep showing the professional BCF CT pushers that we aren't buying their lies, and they know it. In addition, there is always more evidence to find and to discover that continues to falsify the official CT, and we should go after every single bit of it.

[Andre II]

29. Burnett's first call

was at 9:27.
One cell phone call even lasted 11 minutes.
Check this out:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x48029

[Klimmer]

28. Let's get real science into this discussion. Here you go . . .

All pushers of the BCF official 9-11 CT hypothesis (which I find laughable), read it and weep:

Project Achilles Report Parts One, Two and Three
by A.K. Dewdney, January 23rd 2003

http://www.physics911.net/projectachilles.htm

Also read the follow up comments from many in the know at the end of the article.

[JackRiddler]

30. Dewdney's Achilles heels...

1) What about air phones? Obviously those work.

(What about satellite phones?)

2) He flew over London Ontario?! Sorry. Fly the 9/11 routes at different possible altitudes, trying out ALL cell phone providers, that will tell something. Until then...

I also notice a number of Dewdney's calls are successfully completed.

Does this mean I'm BCF? (What does that mean, by the way?) No, it doesn't even mean I believe in the authenticity of the cell phone calls (at least, not all of them). I just know I can't prove any were faked to a sufficiently high standard. There is plenty of room for doubt in making statements that the calls were faked, and therefore it's useless to me compared to being able (for example) to show that Myers lied about his whereabouts and activities... that the planes flew straight into radar gaps... that evidence like the ATC tapes was destroyed... etc.

So Dewdney's experiment is not really exaustive as science, sorry. It applies scientific method, yes, but to a different case (i.e., London Ontario as opposed to rural PA or the Hudson River valley).

(In my own "experiment," cross-country, I discovered yet again that Nextel really sucks. No connection from the moment of takeoff. But there was a brief connection over Utah or Nevada both times, as the clock realigned.)

[Andre II]

31. Jack

you'll find an exact list of every phone call, time and phone used in my above mentioned link.
Btw Bingham's airphone apparently failed after around 2-3 minutes ...

[Woody Box]

42. I disagree

It's not necessary to simulate the exact conditions on 9/11. You could also say that Dewdney did not use a big airliner, but a small plane. However, as the conditions in airliners are more unfavorable for cell calls than those in small planes (bigger speed, smaller windows), he concludes that cell phones must work even worse in airliners. This is absolutely logical.

Likewise, he emphasizes that the Ontario area is richly supplied with some 35 cellsites. Given the supply is better than in rural Pennsylvania, this means that cell calls in PA are even more impossible. This is logical, too.

[greyl]

35. Yes, sometimes they do.

Imo, all the info one needs to reach a reasonable conclusion on this issue is contained in this thread already.
The theory "cell phones never work on airplanes", only needs one instance of a cell phone working on an airplane to be proven false.

[Name removed]

37. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Klimmer]

38. Not sure why the above message was removed?

What DU posting rule did I break? I am at a loss????

But the articles, emails, etc. discussing the fact that cellphones don't work in commercial passenger planes except at low altitude and at take-off and landing speeds is again at:

http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/Resources.html

Scroll down to "Thoughts" and there are 5 good reads on how cellphones don't work --- opposing the official 9-11 Commission Report CT.

[sabbat hunter]

39. if are unsure

contact the admins

[MrSammo1]

41. There's a pilot over at

Delphi forums that has assured me that using a cell phone once the jet is in the air is impossible.

Most everyone in the 911 truth movement who has flown has tried it without success.

Cell phone use on jets on 911 is a myth. Just as the "four" passenger jets are.