This really isn't that hard to believe. The black boxes were bolted to the plane chassis and stuck around through the entirety of the fire and collapse. Personal effects like passports and clothing were subject to the intense drafts that any building fire causes and were blown around - possibly out of the plane or building, possibly away from the fire into a cooler part of the rubble. These are virtually certainly not the only paper documents they found, as another user mentioned, they found a roll of undeveloped film.

[–] Frank@hexbear.net 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

One passport was recovered in new york, the other two were recovered from the wreckage of flight 93 along with thousands of other objects.

Like people need to put this in context; Vesna Vulovic fell TEN KILOMETERS after the plane she was working on was ripped apart by a bomb. She survived and made a full recovery aside from a limp. That is weird. Finding intact documents from an airline crash is not weird. It's normal and unexceptional, but people are fixated on finding something interesting or exciting about 9/11 so they don't bother to learn that finding intact documents, clothes, bodies, is not unusual or remarkable.

[–] Aradina@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

There are literally pictures of body parts that fell to the street from the day too. Not to mention things from inside the buildings, paper, office supplies. I don't think people fully comprehend how fast the planes hit and how that scatters the contents. The stuff not bolted down just keeps going unless something stops it.

One passport surviving? If anything, I'm surprised there weren't more. The black box? It was physically attached to the thing, it isn't going to go far.