Reply #24: you certainly don't

[OnTheOtherHand]

Your interpretation of this discussion is truly remarkable. Here, more than 2 1/2 years after 9/11, Ballinger and two commission staffers are discussing, inter alia, the logs of his messages, which Ballinger has provided to the staffers. So, presumably Ballinger knows that his 9:23 message to UA 175 has the time stamp at the end. In the course of the discussion, Ballinger lets loose the bombshell that the timestamp reveals the time at which the plane received the message. Apparently it occurs to no one that this revelation constitutes proof positive that UA 175 was still in the air at 9:23; no one even thinks to scrub the MFR. You and the pilots don't even seem to think that anything about this scenario is odd, or warrants any further corroboration. It's astonishing.

(By the way, specifically how could the time at which the plane received the message be logged on the ground?)

Is this interpretation necessary? Of course not. First of all, the MFR doesn't clearly indicate whether Ballinger meant that the second timestamp indicates when the plane received the message, or when the ground network received it. Second, Ballinger is a retired dispatcher, not a forensic analyst. From Ballinger's standpoint as a dispatcher, the important thing is that when he sent a message, it was "delivered... immediately," and he was "not aware of any delay." Why, then, would he know or care exactly what the timestamp in the logs meant -- and even if he did, how can we know that he was making that distinction in his comments to the staffers?

So, I mean at least two related things by "authoritative": we don't know if Ballinger had the knowledge to make the distinction, and we don't know if he actually intended to make it in that context. These issues may seem esoteric to you, but if you have ever been asked to offer an expert opinion on a scientific or technical question, they shouldn't. Hell, spooked, you're the same person who wrote "50 feet" and then got mad at me for construing that you actually, y'know, meant 50 feet. Silly me, I thought it was pretty clear that "50 feet" meant 50 feet -- and I had your words, verbatim, in context, presumably after reflection (you've had a decade to think about this, and arbitrarily long to compose and revise your post). I would characterize your approach as "selective literalism," except that your interpretation of Ballinger isn't even literal.

Call me cynical, but I suspect that if one of the staffers had asked Ballinger point-blank whether that timestamp meant that UA175 must have received the 9:23 message -- and he had said that, no, it didn't mean that -- you would discount his response. Indeed, I suspect that that is how "the official story" operates in your thinking: you tend to ignore anything that you construe as corroborating it, whereas you see no need to corroborate anything that you construe as rebutting it. At least, that is how I try to comprehend your apparent indifference about locating anyone who is unambiguously in a position to explain how those timestamps were generated. Why, we already know that, because this is how truth is established: it slips out. No need to ask people directly; in particular, no need to ask people who surely would know. :shrug: