The recordings, by nature dramatic as they unfold in real time, provide an insight into the disbelief and confusion that greeted officials as they struggled to obtain an accurate picture of what was happening.
"We have a problem here … We have a hijacked aircraft heading towards New York and we need to get … We need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there to help us out," air traffic controller Joseph Cooper, at the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Boston centre, said, according to the recordings, published by the Rutgers Law Review.
"Is this real world or exercise?" he is asked by an official from North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), at the other end of the phone.
"No, this is not an exercise, not a test," Cooper replies.
The call was made at 8.37am EST, before any planes had struck their targets.
While some of the recordings have emerged over the last decade, with some played during the 9/11 commission hearings in 2004, others are heard for the first time. Taken together, the document gives a searing aural picture of the attacks unfolding in the skies above the US on September 11. They run for over two hours, from the moment American Airlines Flight 11 dropped off the radar at 8.13am, to then vice-president Dick Cheney's order that civilian planes can be shot down at 10.32am.
At just after 8.19am, Betty Ong, a flight attendant from Flight 11, gives American Airlines agents the first indication that there has been a hijacking.
"The cockpit's not answering … Somebody's been stabbed in business class … I think there's mace, we can't breathe … I think we're getting hijacked..." she said, according to the recordings.
At 9.01am, a manager from FAA's New York centre calls the FAA Command Centre in Herndon, Virginia, to find out if they can alert the military immediately.
"Check with your NOM [operations manager]. Do you know if anyone down there has done any co-ordination to scramble fighter-type airplanes?" he asks, before continuing: "We have several situations going on here. It is escalating big time".
By that stage, one plane had already crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, and another hijacked airline was seconds away from hitting the south tower. But not everyone at the FAA was aware of it.
"Why? What's going on?" says the voice at the end of the phone.
"Just get me somebody who has the authority to get the military in the air now," the FAA manager in New York says.
At 9.02am, a radio transmission comes into the New York air traffic control radar centre.
"Hey, can you look out your window right now?" the caller says.
"Yeah, I see him," comes the response.
"Do you see that guy? Look, is he descending into the building also?"
"He's descending really quick too, yeah," he says, adding: "Forty-five hundred right now, he just dropped 800ft in like, one … one sweep."
"What kind of airplane is that? Can you guys tell?"
"I don't know. I'll read it out in a minute."
They watch as the plane, United 75, plummets before hitting the south tower.
In the background, someone shouts: "Another one just hit the building. Wow. Another one just hit it hard. Another one hit the World Trade."
The manager says: "The whole building just came apart".
Most of the audio documents were completed in 2004, although not in time for a legal review before the commission closed in August that year. They were never completed or released until now.
The dean of the Rutgers Law school, John Farmer, a lawyer for the 9/11 commission, published many of the transcripts in his 2009 book The Ground Truth. Farmer and students from the law school helped finish reviewing and transcribing the final files.
The documents, which were first reported on by the New York Times, spell out the confusion and lack of co-ordination between military and civil authorities in the aftermath of the attacks.
They reveal in detail how the taped accounts contradict those given by senior officials for up to a year after the attacks that military pilots were pursuing the hijackers. According to accounts by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, the defense department and the FAA, the pilots were on the alert for orders from President George Bush to shoot down the hijacked airliners.
One military aviation official, according to the recordings, only learned that American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, had disappeared 30 minutes beforehand, when she contacted the FAA in Washington to discuss the unfolding events.
''The story of the day, of 9/11 itself, is best told in the voices of 9/11," Miles Kara, a retired army colonel and an investigator for the 9/11 commission who tracked down the original audio files, told the New York Times.
According to the newspaper, two tapes are missing and remain restricted or classified. One is the recording from the last half-hour in the cockpit of the United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to storm the cockpit as it flew towards Washington. Some of the families of those on board requested it not to be made public.
The second, still secret, recording, according to the newspaper, is of a high-level conference call that Dick Cheney participated in.
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