In the pre-9/11 world I don't find it surprising that the FAA did not contact NORAD for 15 minutes just because they lost contact with the aircraft and SUSPECTED a possible hijacking.

One thing is clear, on that morning everyone thought that the only role NORAD would play IF it was a hijacking would be to simply track the plane to its destination, this does not sound like a high priority call when they know where the airplane is as they have it on radar.

No one would have even entertained a thought that we would be scrambling jets trying to shoot other planes down.

You have to put yourself in the frame of mind of the people that morning prior to any attacks.

You have to realise that it actually took the second crash into the WTC for the realization to sink in that the first crash was deliberate. It was the second crash which changed everything.

Arthur

Arthur and David,
I tried doing some quick research on Nexis (although, sadly, I do have some real work to do today!) to answer that very same question, and haven't been able to get a good answer so far. I know in the Payne Stewart case it took a while to get military intervention but of course that was a private jet. Thankfully, before Sept. 11 we hadn't had any major domestic hijacking for some time.
Although it's easy to be a "Monday morning QB" after 9/11, I still find it hard to believe that NORAD wouldn't be alerted fairly early on -- like within the first 5 minutes or so -- of "a possible hijacking." Although I beleive, as you do, that few Americans suspected a hijacked jet would be crashed into a national landmark, an F-16 could at least establish visual contact with cockpit, try to prevent the plane from leaving American airspace, etc. No?

what did you spect from a country who keeps Gen. Myers commanding the military Staff.

What do you mean by "a less enlightened country"?, please.

I have just read military planes cannot shot civil planes following a law passed by the US Senate in 1973, even in case of air hijacking. What do you know about this?

The reason the intercept of Payne Stewart's Lear was so quick was b ecause airborne fighters in the area were simply diverted to his location. The initial interception was from two A-10s departing out of Eglin AFB FL. They, however, were beaten to the scene (no suprise) by F-16s on AD alert at Tyndall AFB. The Tyndall F-16s escorted Stewart's Lear until F-16s from the Oklahoma and North Dakota ANG units could take over.

MD

[QUOTE]Originally posted by MikeD:
[B]The reason the intercept of Payne Stewart's Lear was so quick was b ecause airborne fighters in the area were simply diverted to his location--------------------------------------

Which begs the question how many fighers were up on 911? You don't hear the question asked nor the figures revealed. It was CAVU on the East coast that day.

Jack

I think people who've read any of my posts on this board or the flight93crash.com board know that while I'm still an "agnostic" about a Flight 93 shootdown, I've never bought into any of the wackier theories, about Global Hawk or "no plane at the Pentagon" or Bush planned 9/11 or even that he "let 9/11 happen." That said, I'm both baffled and troubled by the information that the FAA itself is now admitting about what happened on 9/11.
According to the FAA's own press conference yesterday, it admits that its controller realized at 8:25 a.m. that AA 11 was a "possible hijacking" and that it didn't contact NORAD "for 15 minutes." 15 MINUTES!!!! If you're at work right now, take your watch off, put it next to your screen, and see how many phone calls, emails, etc., you can make in 15 minutes. If you happen to be at home with a small kid, try watching 15 minutes of "Barney" or "Blue's Clues" and see what an excruciatingly long time that is. (Mine are at the "Spongebob" age, thank God).
I understand the hijacking wasn't confirmed, but couldn't somebody pick up the phone and give NORAD a heads up, so the guys could at least suit up and get out to the runway. What's more, it took NORAD another 12 minutes after the phone call to get airborne, which seems awfully slow to me -- thank God the Russians never tried a sneak attack. So we're talking a total of 27 minutes from the time FAA realized there might be a hijacking to the time that F-16s actually took off. In a less enlightened country, the FAA supervisor who twiddled his thumbs for 15 minutes, when the lives of 1,500 or so people in the second tower could have been saved, would have been tried for treason right now.
Here's the key section of the AP story, and a link to the story in its entirety:

"Air traffic controllers didn't notice anything odd Sept. 11 until communications fell silent with Flight 11's pilot 25 minutes after the plane took off at 8 a.m.

"We considered it at that time to be a possible hijacking," air traffic manager Glenn Michael said.

The FAA notified NORAD 15 minutes later; three minutes after that, NORAD was told United Airlines Flight 175 had been hijacked.

The first two military interceptors, Air Force F-15 Eagles from Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts, scrambled airborne at 8:52 a.m., too late to do anything about the second jet heading for the Trade Center or a third heading toward the Pentagon. http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/3853484.htm

Just another idle thought, which may not be entirely irrelevant. Don't you think after the Korean 747 and the Iran Air A300 incidents in 1983 and 1988 respectively, the authorities would find it even more difficult to get their minds round the need to shoot down civilian airliners ? This is quite apart from all the other command issues/response times I have also mentioned.

A question just for the sake of knowledge, which has not been answered: I have just read military planes cannot shot civil planes following a law passed by the US Senate in 1973, EVEN in case of air hijacking. Maybe that's the reason why the pilot is said to hesitate on shoting F93.

What do you know about this? I have tried to search the Senate web but...

[ August 14, 2002 11:07 AM: Message edited 2 times, lastly by JL ]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by MikeD:
[B] ***Not necessarily only the NORAD interceptors, but any fighters for that matter.

The point is that there's many more available aircraft on a daily basis performing normal training than just NORADs alert birds------------------------------

That's my main point. How many fighters were up on training missions and loaded with war shot on 911? The Guard unit at ADW had some F-16s returning with some cannon rounds on board around the first WTC hits.

My other point, Vipers and Eagles can go much faster than the reported 10 miles a minute they have used in the media, ROFL.

Jack

I guess when you are watching "Blues Clues" 15 minutes might seem along time. After all, your point of comparison is about 1 to 4 years of life.

But when you are responsible for the safety of around a thousand lives spread across dozens of aircraft traveling at high speeds in your airspace... 15 minutes doesn't seem to last that long. Start moving up the chain to get help on one particular aircraft, the responibility only increases in the number of lives beyond just the 100-200 on one flight out of a hundred. The first task is the safety of all aircraft, then you work out the process for handling a hijacking on US soil during a time of peace.

I'd imagine the first 15 minutes were spent calling other planes to steer them clear of a possible airborne threat and also assessing whether the "possible" hijacking was what it appeared to be, and how it might impact (which it is your primary job to prevent such impacts) other aircraft in the airspace. Then maybe someone can find the time to contact NORAD and provide a reasonable assessment of what is going on.

By the way, how long after the first plane hit the WTC did it take before the media was convinced that it was not accidental but was intentional?

Uh, not until the second one struck, of course. But the media didn't have access to the same info -- like a plane's transponder being shut off -- that the FAA, and, belatedly, NORAD, had.

Ah, so if a transponder goes inactive, the first action should be for the FAA to contact NORAD (that red phone, right beside every air traffic controller from GS-14 to SES-5?) and have the plane shot down, so that the sensibility of the news media's 20/20 hindsight would not be offended because someone was be prudent about taking actions that would effect the lives of hundreds of innocent people. After all, the FAA's failure here, lead to the deaths of order magnitude greater lost than that of a single airplane. They should be held accountable for that, shouldn't they? After all, who could have missed the telling blue paw print?

Certainly out of the question would be to take a few minutes trying to communicate with the plane to determine the failure mode of the transponder. After all checking facts to assure accuracy in reporting events to others would be inappropriate when emotions call for immediate actions. The crime becomes intolerable if moments are taken to warn other aircraft of a potential danger in the air around them, and to request verification that they are also not experiencing problems and can contact other controllers via another channel in order to offload work and allow proper dedication be provided to a developing situation. May they burn in hell for carrying out their duties and not cutting corners where it might have prevented the tragic lost of lives in a manner never before seen on the face of the Earth.

Thank you for you for providing enlightenment on the untaken possibilities... I'll so go in ponder this revelation.

Again, 15 minutes watching television may seem excruciating especially when you choose programming beneath your mental capacity. However, watching a small representation of the supposed reality of the airspace around you; provided by complex systems that nominally, but not always, operate properly; all the while using this knowledge with the rights and responsibility to take action for the well-being on dozens of aircraft and close to a thousand lives, seems to make relatively fleeting...

[QUOTE]Originally posted by adoucette:


**** Flight times are calculated at 9 miles per minute or .9 Mach
-----------------------

Kinda of slow for Mach 2 plus fighters. Any bets they had the pedal to the metal and busted Mach fast?

I forget who posted it. You don't need any National Command authority to intercept aircraft. Pre 911, there were more than a few TCAS alerts on airliners from fighters running practice intercepts on them.

Jack

General Myers? Did somebody mention General Myers? That guy owes me money! (And he owes all of us an explanation.)

General Myers was acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 11th. On September 13th, he's going for a nomination hearing to be made head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is the most important day of his life because on this day that Myers, an Air Force General with thousands of hours of time flying fighter planes, is acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—it’s the only day in history that the continental United States has ever been attacked from the air.

Myers claims he is at Senator Max Cleland's office at 8:40 EDT. He sees on TV that the first plane has hit the World Trade Center. He claims on Armed Services Radio that at that point he went in and met with Cleland for an hour. Nobody called him and told him that a second plane had hit, that the air corridor had been closed between Washington and Cleveland, that a plane had been hijacked in Ohio and was flying back to the Pentagon. Then he also claims that when he walked out of Cleland's office, he was handed a portable phone and it was the head of NORAD--the North American Aerospace Defense Command--telling him the Pentagon had been hit.

Now these are unbelievable assertions. Doesn't the man have a beeper? Doesn't the man have a cell phone? Doesn't the man have a secretary who knows where he is? General Myers was, after all, acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military. Wouldn't anybody inform him that planes were being hijacked and flying into buildings? And you know what Myers said he talked to Max Cleland about? He claims he sat there and they discussed the dangers of terrorism. Now this is like a satire, isn't it?

Here is General Myers' response at his confirmation hearing. Note Senator Max Cleland's out-of-the-blue nonsequitur which gives Myers his alibi.

Senate Armed Services Committee Holds Hearing On Nomination of General Richard Myers to be Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, D.C., SEPTEMBER 13, 2001.

SENATOR LEVIN: Was the Defense Department contacted by the FAA or the FBI or any other agency after the first two hijacked aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center, prior to the time that the Pentagon was hit?

GENERAL MYERS: Sir, I don't know the answer to that question. I can get that for you, for the record...That order, to the best of my knowledge, was after the Pentagon was struck. ... I was with Senator Cleland when this happened and went back to the Pentagon. And they were evacuating, of course, the Pentagon at the time. And I went into the National Military Command Center because that's essentially my battle station when things are happening.

SENATOR LEVIN: Was the Defense Department contacted by the FAA or the FBI or any other agency after the first two hijacked aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center, prior to the time that the Pentagon was hit?

GENERAL MYERS: Sir, I don't know the answer to that question. I can get that for you, for the record.

SENATOR LEVIN: Thank you. Did the Defense Department take -- or was the Defense Department asked to take action against any specific aircraft?

GENERAL MYERS: Sir, we were . . .

SENATOR LEVIN: And did you take action against -- for instance, there have been statements that the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down. Those stories continue to exist.

GENERAL MYERS: Mr. Chairman, the armed forces did not shoot down any aircraft. When it became clear what the threat was, we did scramble fighter aircraft, AWACS, radar aircraft and tanker aircraft to begin to establish orbits in case other aircraft showed up in the FAA system that were hijacked. But we never actually had to use force.

SENATOR CLELAND: General, it's a good thing that, as I look back at that morning, that you and I were meeting. It's a good thing we were meeting here and not us meeting in the Pentagon because about the time you and I were having our visit, discussing the need to boost our conventional forces, to look at the question of terrorism and attacks on the United States, at just about that very moment, the Pentagon was being hit.

GENERAL MYERS: Yes, sir.

SENATOR BILL NELSON: ... General Myers, The second World Trade tower was hit shortly after 9:00. And the Pentagon was hit approximately 40 minutes later. That’s approximately. You would know specifically what the timeline was. The crash that occurred in Pennsylvania after the Newark westbound flight was turned around 180 degrees and started heading back to Washington was approximately an hour after the World Trade Center second explosion. You said earlier in your testimony that we had not scrambled any military aircraft until after the Pentagon was hit. And so, my question would be: why?

GENERAL MYERS: I think I had that right, that it was not until then. I'd have to go back and review the exact timelines.

SENATOR BILL NELSON: ... If we knew that there was a general threat on terrorist activity, which we did, and we suddenly have two trade towers in New York being obviously hit by terrorist activity, of commercial airliners taken off course from Boston to Los Angeles, then what happened to the response of the defense establishment once we saw the diversion of the aircraft headed west from Dulles turning around 180degrees and, likewise, in the aircraft taking off from Newark and, in flight, turning 180 degrees? That's the question. I leave it to you as to how you would like to answer it. But we would like an answer.

GENERAL MYERS: You bet. I spoke, after the second tower was hit, I spoke to the commander of NORAD, General Eberhart. And at that point, I think the decision was at that point to start launching aircraft...

{93questions' note: OK, so if he talked to Eberhart after the second tower was hit, why did he then meet with Cleland for 35 minutes to talk about "the question of terrorism and attacks on the United States"? I mean, wasn't he aware that America was currently experiencing just such an attack--the very worst such attack in its entire history? How in the world did he manage to while away the 45 minutes with Cleland such that he didn't arrive at the National Military Command Center, his admitted "battle station when things are happening," until the Pentagon was being evacuated (around 9:45 at the earliest)? Didn’t having hijacker terrorists hit the two tallest buildings in the United States with passenger jets qualify as a time "when things are happening"?}

In this case, if my memory serves me -- and I'll have to get back to you for the record -- my memory says that we had launched on the one that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania. I mean, we had gotten somebody close to it, as I recall. I'll have to check that out.

SENATOR BILL NELSON: ... Commenting from CNN on the timeline, 9:03 is the correct time that the United Airlines flight crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center; 9:43 is the time that American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. And 10:10 a.m. is the time that United Airlines flight 93crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. So that was 40 minutes between the second tower being hit and the Pentagon crash. And it is an hour ands even minutes until the crash occurred in Pennsylvania.

SENATOR LEVIN: The time that we don't have is when the Pentagon was notified, if they were, by the FAA or the FBI or any other agency, relative to any potential threat or any planes having changed direction or anything like that. And that's the same which you will give us because that's . . .

GENERAL MYERS: I can answer that. At the time of the first impact on the World Trade Center {93questions' note: around 8:40}, we stood up our crisis action team. That was done immediately. So we stood it up. And we started talking to the federal agencies. The time I do not know is when NORAD responded with fighter aircraft. I don't know that time.

SENATOR LEVIN: Or the time that I asked you for, which was whether the FAA or FBI notified you that other planes had turned direction from their path, their scheduled path, and were returning or aiming towards Washington, whether there was any notice from any of them, because that's such an obvious shortfall if there wasn't.

GENERAL MYERS: Right.

SENATOR LEVIN: And in any event, but more important, if you could get us that information.

GENERAL MYERS: It probably happened. As you remember, I was not in the Pentagon at that time, so that part of it is a little hazy. {93questions' note: This is now two days after 9/11.} After that, we started getting regular notifications through NORAD, FAA to NORAD, on other flights that we were worried about. And we knew about the one that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania. I do not know, again, whether we had fighters scrambled on it. I have to . . .

SENATOR LEVIN: If you could get us those times then. We know you don' t know them.

GENERAL MYERS: But we'll get them.

{93questions' note: Thank God the Senate quickly confirmed this knowledgeable bastion of combat-ready competence as the head of our entire US military structure!}

93,
How many times are you going to post the confirmation hearings on Meyers.

I suspect he had other things on his mind than to remember the exact times that things occurred and I would suspect that as the head of the JCS that by then they were head down planning on preventing new attacks and beginning the plan for retaliation.

Remember, the Pentagon got hit, he probably had people he knew and worked with die. He probably had been in damn near round the clock meetings since that morning and you thing because he doesn't know the exact minutes of some event or the exact time Norad was informed he is somehow not on the ball?

Please.

Arthur

Not quite.

Once again, I'm pretty sure he was doing his job as you point out, but, for some reason, he didn't want to talk about exactly what he was doing for the Congressional record.

I'm simply pointing out the ramifications of his own claims, but I certainly don't give them extraordinary credence and I'm actually more inclined to believe that Myers jumped into action that morning like every other good American who had a chance to help fight the terrorists.

93questions,

You have had 11 months and apparently nothing better to do, and you can't even get the events correct for when the transponder turned off on flight 93. Where is your credibility? Where is ability to gather the facts and present them? Screw pagers, you got a damn internet at your finger tips, and you still couldn't get the timeline correct even for the flight that you took your pen name from. Your arguments are without merit and are born from ignorance of reality. I'm glad you can copy and paste congressional testimony, and maybe even read it, but apparently it is beyond your attainment to comprehend what occurred both then and now.

[ August 20, 2002 07:21 AM: Message edited 2 times, lastly by Seven Fife ]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by adoucette:
[B]Jack,
I'm curious (never having flown a jet),
How long does it take to get up to Mach 1 or Mach 2?
Also if you were cruising into NY airspace at one of the peak arrival/departure times and with planes arriving at and departing from LaGuardia, JFK, Newark and WhitePlains would you come in above Mach 1? ------------------------------------

Well under a minute from taking off. Also depends on your configuration. Mainly lack of external tanks or bombs. Plus your fuel flow goes sky high. Rule of thumb it's 4 times the fuel flow for twice the thrust. Burner is a very loud fuel converting noise maker.

The problem with going supersonic is the boom. Which is dependent on altitude and ambient conditions. You don't read about much damage when the Shuttle arrives for landing and it's well above Mach 1.

If I had the green light to go max speed, no problemo blowing through NYC area <G> I would double check that my recording gear is working!!

Jack

Fighter pilot scrambled on Sept. 11 recounts experience
United Press International
Published 3:26 p.m. PDT Wednesday, August 21, 2002

HYANNIS, Mass., Aug. 21 (UPI) - One of the two military jet pilots scrambled from Cape Cod in Massachusetts after air controllers suspected a flight out of Boston had been hijacked thought he was witnessing the start of World War III when he saw the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City collapse.

While the two F-15s arrived too late to prevent the hijackers from crashing two passenger jet airliners into the towers, the fighter pilots couldn't have tried to shoot them down, anyway. They didn't have presidential permission to fire on a civilian passenger airplane, the pilot said.

"We were 70 miles out" - about eight minutes -when the second plane crashed into a tower, said one pilot identified only as Nasty. He spoke publicly about Sept. 11 for the first time in Wednesday's Cape Cod Times.



"All we saw was Lower Manhattan covered in dust and debris," said Nasty, 35, who follows protocol by using his call name rather than his real name in the media.

"I thought it was the start of World War III," he said.

Nasty said he and the other pilot, Duff, after a supersonic chase from Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod to New York City, were frustrated they couldn't have done more.

"We did everything we could do to get there in time," Nasty said.

However, by the time the fighters arrived over New York, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 - both hijacked after taking off from Boston's Logan International Airport - had already crashed into the towers.

Even if the military jets had arrived in time, Nasty said there was nothing they really could have done because the only one who could give orders to shoot down a civilian passenger jet was the president, and by the time he learned about the attacks the two planes had already crashed.

"If we had intercepted American 11, we probably would have watched it crash," he says. "We didn't have the authority to (shoot it down). We didn't suspect they would use kamikaze tactics that morning," Nasty said.

"We weren't ready for that type of an attack," Nasty said, "to quickly shoot down one of our own airplanes."

Jack adds, note the supersonic part. They had the pedal to the metal and a helluva of a lot faster than 10 miles a minute.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by adoucette:
Based on what evidence can one make the claim that they blew up Flight 93????

Considering the reports of the planes flight path during the last minutes, flying at low level, twisting and turning and well over Vne, the putting it in the ground by accident (or intentionally) seems quite reasonable.

UA 175 was twisting and turning too at speeds that were probably comparable to 93's. Yet it did not break up or ditch into the ground, rather it went smack dab into its intended target. All I am saying is that there is as much evidence for a bomb as there is for the "heroic passengers" putting the plane into a dive.

Assuming bomb residue / components were found why would the FBI surpress that as that would be valuable information as to our security needs? Makes no sense at all.

Maybe the bomb components haven't been found because they landed many miles away after being lofted by the fireball? images/smiles/icon_wink.gif

Only Atta and an associate named Alomari boarded via Portland, the rest boarded locally.

I know this is off topic, but I am wondering WHY these two dudes would go to Portland when all the others boarded at BOS?

BTW...Alomari was not the guy's name, that was a stolen identity:
http://www.mujahideen.fsnet.co.uk/wtc/wtc-hijackers.htm

Originally posted by Vostok1:
quote: I know this is off topic, but I am wondering WHY these two dudes would go to Portland when all the others boarded at BOS

I imagine they were trying to spread the risk around. In case airport security was an issue in BOS, they were hoping the Portland team would get through to maximize their chance of success.

Alternatively, they may have been hoping to avoid booking the same originating flights, in case that would have attracted some unwarranted attention.

What I wonder is why they only did this with AA 11? Why didn't they do the same with UA 175? Or with AA 77, why didn't somone catch an early morning flight from a smaller city to Dulles?

I've spent some time thinking about this as opposed to simply reacting to wild speculations and outlandish interpretations of innocuous statements.

However, one thing finally occured to me, and it bothered me because it took so long to finally sink in.

Re: Conspiracy theories related to Otis Jets, Pentagon Jets etc, etc ad nauseum.

What is the BEST THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED ON 9/11?

From reading all the links the best I can figure out is that at 8:25 the FAA became reasonably certain that they had a hijacking despite the fact that the hijacking transponder code was not set.

Had they immediately notified NEADS at 8:25 and NEADS had immediately ordered the OTIS jets to scramble, the jets could have gotten airborne at 8:37.

At an AVERAGE speed of 1,000 mph (which means a much faster top speed) it would have taken 10.5 minutes to get the 175 air miles to Manhatten. They would have been 1.5 minutes too late.

EVEN IF THEY HAD PERMISSION TO FIRE AND SOME WAY OF IDENTIFING THE AA-11 AIRCRAFT, they would have had to fire missiles that traveled at 2,000 mph from a distance of over 20 miles.

We don't have targeting systems or weapons that could pick that specific jet out of the traffic around JFK, Newark and LaGuaria.

So there is actually NO CONCEIVABLE WAY we could have prevented the first tower from being hit (and eventually collapsing)

Now, had the FAA/Military reacted with incredible foresight, skill and the 20/20 hindsight to know exactly which of the 3,400 aircraft in the sky that morning were the real threats, it is possible they could have shot the other three down. (assuming they didn't wait for presidental permission of course).

So again I say, the best that could have happened that morning is one plane into the WTC and three commercial aircraft shot down. The loss of lives would have been around 1/2 the total figure, the economic impact would have been about the same. The military response WOULD NOT BE DIFFERENT AT ALL. It still would have evoked the exact same response, so all of this conspiracy about "could we have shot down 175" or the pentagon aircraft, is totally meaningless. The US response would have been the same even if there had been but one plane that morning.

Arthur

Obviously, a few people have watched to many fictional movies and believed the "realistic" video games played in "beginner mode" to be knowledgeable about the real world.

Some things that might help:

There is not an escape pod on Air Force One. Both the USAF and the Director and Producers of the movie acknowledged this one as a plot device.

There is not an F-117 capable of carrying more than one person, and certainly not one that can mate to a 747 and transfer people on board to stop terrorist.

Military pilots are not allowed to buzz towers, General's daughters, or commercial aircraft.

There is no such thing as a red phone hotline between any given US civilian installation and NORAD/NEADS.

The FAA has no rights to authorize military jets to scramble, intercept, and especially attack a civilian airliner.

Commercial aircraft do not carry IFF transmitters, thus do not show up as red, blue, or yellow on the pilot's radar MFD. In most F-15's and F-16's, everything is green anyway.

Beyond visual range (BVR) attacks were not allowed during Desert Storm in an actual war time, combat theater. They certainly would not be allowed during a time of peace, over US airspace, and utilized against a civilian target that is one amongst many others in the nearby airspace controlled by three major airports and only suspected of being hijacked.

During the cold war, aircraft and crew sitting 24/7 alert status had requirements to be airborne in 5 minutes to intercept aircraft off the coast, typically outside commercial air routes, that had been tracked for minutes following a vector bringing them into US airspace, and once on intercept arrival had all the appearances of being a Russian built Bear bomber or other military aircraft. If along the Southern border, they typically were small civilian prop planes smuggling drugs. After the cold war, this process was discontinued.

There is no autoland button. Missile do not lock on to the bad guy civilian airliner automatically, especially the heat seeking kind.

Missiles do not vaporize an aircraft such that no debris lands anywhere.

NECAP/Looking Glass flights ended with the 24/7 alert aircraft.

Imagine for a moment, a typically over-stressed air traffic controller had the power to declare an aircraft hijacked and without any review of his/her findings, the military was called in and took immediate action. Weeks later, the media put on its 20/20 delayed vision goggles, and parsed the whole situation...

One dose of reality: If you were the hapless controller having to handle a situation in which 19 hijackers gave you 45 minutes to do whatever to save as many lives as possible in a scenario that had never occurred before, and 3,000 people die because of it; the 20 hijacker shouldn't be given death, but you should be tried for treason and hung within less than a year according to a self-professed member of the media and others that have chosen you to shoulder the burden of grief they bare.

Ignorance must really be bliss...

This just in...
Fighter Jet Escorts Plane to Md. (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&ncid=716&e=1&u=/ap/20020827/ap_on_re_us/escorted_landing_3)

"There was a miscommunication between the pilot and the ground," Brown said.

An FBI spokesman in Baltimore, Barry Maddox, confirmed that an emergency code was mistakenly entered into the plane's radar transponder.

"It seemed to indicate a problem when it was not a problem," Maddox said. "They radioed back and said it was a mistake and the pilot was ordered to land at Baltimore."

This is during the post 9/11 era. I'm curious to see the public response to this action. One thing is for sure, we probably won't have to try the controller for treason. images/smiles/icon_rolleyes.gif

here are some fighters for NORAD truth who just try to implement 08:25 as the time for reasonable doubt of a hijacling and who try to argue about 15 minutes of delay as normal in pre911-times.

1) we are NOT talking about signs of hijacing.Wearetalking about reasonable causes to inform Noradto scramble interceptors.It might be technical problems, disease of the pilots - we do not know in pre911-times.

2) first signa arereported for 08:14 (transponder off and no radio). The change of direction at 08.24 is irrelevant, it is just another sign.

3) Only the first two signs are enough to cause to act according to the regulations, which say "immediately" call NORAD. It is the norad decision if and how to scramble, not of the flight controller.

4) So what we can see here is a nice deception: to blame a little bit the FAA, to elongate the timeline and to fit the fiction into reality

5) all in all it is to "explain" the time delay between 08:14 and the alleged 8:52(which we discussed in the other thread about UA93). More than half an hour. At least. In fact they must explain more than one hour untill the Pentagoncrash.

6) we were asked what could have happened best(which would have been STANDARD)That is:
alert in NORAD at 08:15, (immediately,standard)
scrambling at at least 08:30 (immediately,standard)
interception at 08:40, (immediately,standard)
call to the president in Sarasota (immediately,standard)
reaction in time before 08:45.(immediately,standard)

They try to tell us that all this standard was not possible and that the obstacles reach so far as to AA77. LOL.

no limo:

nobody accuses the government or pilots or the FAA or anybody not to have been EYTRAORDINARYLY QUICK, specially skilled, not having advanced knowledge, not to be Superman, not to have intuitions.

I am talking about
the STANDARD to call NORAD immediately,
the STANDARD to scramble in at least 15 minutes,
the standard to fly OTIS-Manhattan in 10-12 minutes,
the standard of intercept routines even without weapons,
the logic to send two allegedly late-coming F-15 at least not somewhere into the open but to send them to intercept at least AA77.

Why did they not meet the normal procedures? Especially since we know that allegedly nobody knew of these flights to be suicide missions, so everybody could have just calmly followed the regulations. No extras required.

We are wondering about the "miracles", about no investigation, about no material evidence, but open lies.
This government of innocence is able to immediately point to the "Islamists". So who must prove? Who makes allegations?

We ASK - and you dont provide answers, but only explanations why asking is wrong. We would not ask when the standards were met and when material evidence were in the open.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Seven Fife:
[If you really prefer to wait for an attack rather then prevent them, then I'd recommend forgetting NORAD and intercept missions, and ringing large cities with Baghdad type anti-air defense systems--------------------

ROFL we use to have the air defenses with the Nike/Ajax missile bases. Think I read at o ne time we had 300 bases around the country. Downside to them was the atomic warheads they used

I toured one while they were operating. My old man was in them for a bit and he helped w rite the study to shut them down Am pretty sure by early 70s they were all shut down.

BTW, just heard another intercept of a little bird over busting the DC P area.

Jack

Oh I am so sorry Arthur.

You are so right about standards which you know so good. Except that you always take those quotes which you like and not the ones which are contradictory. The word "IMMEDIATELY" was not a quote, otherwise I would not have been able to use it for several very different issues where all sources use different words for the same meaning, and I would have putit in " "..

Now let us take our topic about telling NORAD. You need a lot of sentences to explain facts which I agree with and said it clearly in this forum. It is NOT the decision of the FAA to shoot down aircrafts and so on. You must not teach me basic points, and for sure I never said that. So what you are doing is producing fog to install yourself as the "expert" and me as somebody who is not able to comprehend basics-

So back to "IMMEDIATELY"
The phrase I relied on does not contain "immediately" . Only "most expeditious".

Ø http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/cjcsd/cjcsi/3610_01a.pdf

"In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC will be notified by the most expeditious
means by the FAA."

There is one point open: "event of a hijacking". You like to trample on it to broaden this issue. I do understand that. The hijackers did not confirm "it is a hijacking", so it is not a confirmed hijacking. LOL
But we do not NEED that confirmation, although the two signs were enough. Even when it is not a hijacking and only a technical problem it is cause enough to call for interceptors. No radio: that is crucial! At least when the heavies veered of course there is the need to react. But the controllers allegedly did not even do that in time. How can we explain that the local controllers acted differently? Duffy on OTIS received his personal call from Logan. The Pentagon received their warning from Dulles.
So miraculously the local controllers knew what the approach of a Boeing without transponder, radio and flight route means - and those faa controllers not?


And here now a story about interception.

'The Associated Press State & Local Wire'
13 September 2001, Thursday, BC cycle,
"Small private plane ordered to land in vicinity of Bush ranch"

CRAWFORD, Texas--A small private plane flying
unauthorized in the vicinity of President Bush's ranch near
Crawford was ordered by the military to land Thursday, a
sheriff's deputy said.

Also Thursday, military jets forced a small plane down in
Wood County.

In Crawford, the 71-year-old pilot and his son were detained
for routine questioning by the U.S. Secret Service, said Chief
Deputy Randy Plemons of the McLennan County Sheriff's
Department. The incident, which occurred shortly before 10
a.m., may have been a misunderstanding, Plemons said.

"I can't even confirm if he was even close to the ranch,"
Plemons said. From what investigators have conveyed,
Plemons said, the pilot went up for a "joy ride" in his small
Cessna.

"Obviously, bad timing," he said.

The Federal Aviation Administration declared that the plane
was unauthorized and ordered its occupants detained,
Plemons said. At that point military officials, flying in two jets
beside the plane, got on the pilot's radio frequency and
ordered the Cessna to land.

"At this point we don't have any information that we can
release on that." said Staff Sgt. Ruth Lewis with the 301st
Fighter Wing public affairs office.

The plane landed on a private landing strip near State
Highway 6, about eight miles from the Bush ranch near
Crawford.

The name of the pilot and his son were not immediately being
released. It was unclear whether any charges would be filed.

The sheriff's department began receiving 911 emergency calls
immediately about the plane because residents believed no
planes were supposed to be flying.

"We're just trying to ease the fears of people here," Plemons
said.

Crawford Mayor Robert Campbell said the town of 705 is
beginning to return to its normal routine after terrorist attacks
on Washington and New York City. There have been no
indications of threats against Crawford, even though it's the
site of Bush's ranch, he said.

"Basically, things are quiet. Naturally, we're keeping our eyes
and ears open like everybody else," Campbell said. He added
that local officials are keeping a more visible police presence in
town.

School in Crawford had been called off Tuesday, but by
Wednesday children returned to class.

In Wood County, Sheriff's senior Dispatcher Rodney Mize
said a private plane was forced down by two military pilots in
A-10 Warthog jets about 11:30 a.m. The jets flew one above
and one below until the private plane's pilot landed at Wisener
Field near Mineola.

"I can tell you it sure spooked a lot of people this morning.
Everyone is on edge right now and this guy was doing some
afternoon flying," Mize said in a story in Friday's Tyler Morning
Telegraph.

Tyler Pounds Field Airport Air Traffic Controller Jerry Head
said the skies remain closed to general aviation until further
notice.

Mize said the pilot was not fined or charged with any crime.


I know it is not pre911. I hope I must not look for extracts even possted in here which show interception doesNOT mean to stay 5 miles behind.

And forget about the hate of the USA. I write in English, the music I hear is English, I was used to listen AFN every day for years. I like popcorn, Hollywood movies and donuts. Must I kiss Bushs ass to show how "not-Antiamerican" I am?

I talked this weekend to a ret. USAF Colonel that lives a few miles away from the Ranch at Crawford. He says, when ever his neighbor is present, there are usually military helicopters operating within the local airspace. It is quite possible that this intercept was initiated by the military or via the local sheriff's department directly to the military, and not at all by the FAA.

Unfortunately, I didn't discuss this particular issue with my friend.

BTW, Rosinante, if your point is to suggest more efficient means and policies exist for intercept, I'm sure most of us would agree to one extent or another. However, the people that acted upon the policies in place on 9/11 did their job at the best of their abilities, and in a few areas, exceeded some expectations. It is wrong to hold them accountable for failures of a system that was unappropriate for the attack carried out.

Warthog's flying intercepts. There's a mission change for us. hehe

MD

Does anyone else find it Ironic that Meyssan is using the terrorists inadvertant voice transmissions to establish when the FAA realised it was a hijack, when according to Meyssan, those terrorists did not exist?

I'm gonna need two popcorn machines at this rate.

You guys are going on and on here about the Otis jets, but regarding Flight 77 the question would seem to be why weren't the LANGLEY jets scrambled sometime between 8:40 and 9:02? That's not a conspiracy allegation, but just in hindsight how dumb was it not to have fighters over DC by 9:38 when ol' No. 77 chugged into town?

[ September 04, 2002 08:14 PM: Message edited 1 time, lastly by iamareporter ]

I certainly agree that it's easy to be a Monday morning QB when we really have no idea about the stresses the FAA controllers were under on 9/11. But my point about the Langley F-16s is that I'm surprised (admittedly, again, with the benefit of hindsight) that they weren't sent to patrol DC "on spec," in a holding pattern rather than waiting until a confirmed report of a hijacking at 9:24, some 22 minutes after the second tower was struck and we knew there was some kind of attack underway.
Also, was there an "inland" NORAD base between the Eastern Seaboard and the central Midwest, or were the pre-9/11 bases only on the coasts?

1st Air Force, comprised of ANG units, was made responsible for continental defense in 1997. Here's a list of their units:

102nd FW — Otis ANG Base, MA
119th FW — Hector Field, Fargo, ND
120th FW — Great Falls IAP, MT
125th FW — Jacksonville IAP, FL
142nd FW — Portland ANGB
144th FW — Fresno ANG Base, CA
147th FW — Ellington Field, TX
148th FW — Duluth IAP, MN
158th FW — Burlington IAP, VT

The 1st Fighter Wing based at Langley AFB, is part of the 9th Air Force, which on 9/11, was not part of the NORAD alert air defense. Therefore, those aircraft were not prepared for an air intercept mission, and the time to retask them was likely greater than that of calling more aircraft from Otis or even Burlington.

I do recall it was Ellington that provided fighter escort for Air Force 1 between Florida and Barksdale AFB (home of 8th Air Force).

Arthur and Mike,

I made several searches to get that info. One thing seems certain, on 9/11, the ANG was tasked for ADF. Andrews AFB was not, and only by luck would they have had aircraft prepared for such a mission that day. I also ran across the 1994 GAO report that called for the distribution of the peace dividend...

Of the bases you listed, Leland, only 4 of them are "dedicated" to the Air Defense mission. The rest (F-16 units) were at one time dedicated to ADF, but have since converted to a "general purpose" mission (ie- dropping bombs), due to the post-cold war drawdown. These GP squadrons still maintain an alert det, but not all of the rest of their fighters sit armed/ready on the ramp dedicated to ADF.

Here's a further breakdown for those interested:

Dedicated ADF:

102 FW, Otis: F-15A/B
119 FW, Hector: F-16A/ADF
144 FW, Fresno: F-16A/ADF
148 FW, Duluth: F-16A/ADF
125 FW, Jacksonville, F-15A/B

General Purpose (former ADF):

120 FW, Great Falls: F-16C/D
142 FW, Portland: F-15A/B (air-air only)
147 FW, Ellington: F-16C/D
158 FW, Burlington: F-16C/D

MD

So, did anyone watch the Fox News Magazine "Pulse" lastnight? It detailed exactly the actions NORAD took that morning including the personnel on duty, what buttons they pushed, and people they talked too. You could almost do a time and motion study from it. It showed what most of us knew already, and what a few others wouldn't believe no matter how many times it was explained to them, even though it did answer their questions.

Originally posted by 93Questions:

quote:

Norad's report lists two F/16s, provide data source for 3 planes.

<http://europe.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.hijack.warning/>
quote:


==> Well this report came out of europe CNN two days before Norad listed 2 F/16s. Who's right? All the other reports I can recall reading have said 2 as well.



This is an FAA issue, not a Norad issue. I've seen little published on what went on with the controllers for this flight, but what I have seen is that they "suspected" a hijacking at 9:09. According to the other reports I've read they at one time had over a dozen "suspects" however. None the less the fact seems to be that NORAD was not made aware until 9:24.


This is the explanation, not the fact.


==> Yeah, but do you have any better (more damning data?)


quote:

Apparently these were available but were not part of the Norad fighters.


Right. And how many dozens of other fighters fit this same definition that day?


I don't know, why not do some research and get back to us?


About the fighters approaching DC slowly--the official timeline says they took off at 9:35 and made it to DC at 9:49. That's 130 miles in 14 minutes or 557 mph. Like I said, why did these fighters approach DC so slowly?


==> Actually the same article you quote above has this:

F-16 fighter jets arrive over Washington, D.C. to perform Combat Air Patrol (CAP) over city. (The fighters broke the sound barrier and traveled supersonic at 720 knots to Washington, making the approximately 130 miles in 14 minutes.) Of course the 130 miles in 14 minutes doesn't jive with the 720 kts, but if you look at the report quite a few numbers are off.


You can't possibly seriously believe that the best defense against a slow flying bomb zigzagging through Pennsylvania is to circle DC waiting for it. Not even you could believe something so absurd. Here we have a big, slow passenger plane whose only danger is to a completely unknown target. And so the best way to combat this threat is to let it hit whatever target it pleases as long as it doesn't fly right by you? Please!


==> Yeah that is exactly what I would do, however it is not my job so I defer to those whose it is. What we do know is that the planes had to get intercept data from the FAA and the FAA wasn't able to track the jet very well. At the distance it was and its height it would not likely be on the fighters radar either, like I said, best to stay put (remember Cheney was at the WH and the SS said to protect it at all costs), because if you leave and fly out 150 miles how do you get back in time if another jet pops up out of the trees?



The only way Bob Woodward's account is not clear is if you first translate it into Chinese and then translate it back into English using babelfish. Any unbiased reader who isn't trying to play sophists' tricks comes away from the article with the obvious understanding that Cheney ordered Flight 93 to be intercepted 3 times.


Total BS, the range of the plane in the discussion gets to less than 60 miles, while at this time U93 was more like 150 miles away. The only linkage between U93 and that discussion is that they heard of U93's crash just shortly after the last exchange. However it took the military 2 hours to confirm that they did not shoot it down. If U93 had been the plane the fighter was engaging with it is more likely that they would have had immediate confirmation.



quote:

What Vermont fighters?


158th FW — Burlington IAP, VT should have had two alert, ready fighters.
quote:

See Mike's earlier response, one needs not only gassed and armed aircraft but also suited up and ready pilots.


==> Again, do you do no research? See Mike's next response:
Early in 1998, it was announced that the 158th FW would return to the general purpose mission and the Detachment at Charleston AFB was deactivated on July 15, 1998. The unit had maintained four F-16s there, two of which were on 24 hour-a-day status 7 days a week. The change of mission officially took place on 1 October 1998 and training for pilots without experience in bombing began at Tucson, AZ with the 162nd FW.



And how many scores of fighter pilots would you expect to be working on the east coast on any given weekday morning?


==> I'll leave this for you to find out.

Arthur

93Q, you completely ignore the fact that they were dealing with MANY possible 'targets' at the time and until the majority of the aircraft were grounded, EVERY SINGLE AIRBORNE AIRCRAFT was a potential weapon. Are you seriously suggesting us that in an unknown threat environment, they are going to commit VERY LIMITED resources to just one target?

Think of american football, is every defencive player dedicated to taking out the QB while he has the ball?

Absurd? Absurd is discussing this with someone who fabricates evidence and wouldn't see reason if we surrounded you with it, as you so perfectly demonstrate. You are a waste of a lot of peoples time.

[ September 06, 2002 08:35 PM: Message edited 2 times, lastly by Tony_M ]

And why don't you admit that you use false and misleading data? Or that if you were in charge of tactical strategy for a football team, you'd have the highest amount of sacks, with the highest score against and no wins?

You are literally unbelievable.

Anyway, how come these pieces have suddenly become aluminium? Show me the evidence, or is this another one of your 'inventions'

Ok, 93, I've looked and the only place I can find 3 fighters is in that original CNN story (or exact copies of it), The official story is still 2 as far as I can tell.

Now, as Mike says, another possibility is they got another pilot for the standby bird and it took off soon after the first two. Don't know though.

I did find this:

on Sept. 11, Norad's radars were spread around the periphery of the U.S., looking outward for potential invaders. Inside U.S. borders, very few radars were feeding NEADS scopes.

In essence, technicians were half-blind, trying to separate hijacked airliners from thousands of skin-paint returns. At the time, more than 4,000 aircraft were airborne over the nation, most in the northeast sector, which monitors half a million square miles of airspace.

"We were trying to determine which [radar return] was him. But we couldn't get what we needed just from our scopes," said MSgt. Maureen Dooley, a noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC) of NEADS' identification technicians. She and other troops were constantly on the phone with the FAA, airlines and others, looking for clues. "If we could get good last-known-positions and tail numbers, that would help the fighters pick out the right aircraft."

"The biggest task was maintaining track continuity," echoed Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Lamarche, NCOIC of the air surveillance section. Later, his team thought they had spotted a fifth hijacked aircraft. "This fifth guy made an abrupt turn toward a major city--but it was OK. He was told to land there. It sure had our hearts going and adrenaline pumping. We didn't know what he was doing."

Marr capsulized the tense moments: "The NEADS battle managers get the last known location, estimate [Flight AA11's] speed and find a green dot that's not identified. Almost as soon as it's discovered, it disappears. It's 8:46 a.m. A shocked airman rushes from the computer maintenance room saying, 'CNN is reporting that the World Trade Center has been hit by an airliner.' There are no other missing aircraft. As we watch the TV, another airliner shows up on the screen, aimed for the second tower [9:02 a.m.]. The shocking reality becomes apparent. This is no longer 'an accident.' New York City is under attack."

==> So directing fighters to targets, hell identifing targets was a major challenge. Our systems on the jets are designed for a battlefield where our IFF system identifies friends and everything else is foe. This was useless this day.

Calls from fighter units also started pouring into Norad and sector operations centers, asking, "What can we do to help?" At Syracuse, N.Y., an ANG commander told Marr, "Give me 10 min. and I can give you hot guns. Give me 30 min. and I'll have heat-seeker [missiles]. Give me an hour and I can give you slammers [Amraams]."

==> This gives you an idea of how long it takes to arm an aircraft, 30 minutes for missiles, but an hour for the long range weapons, so that pretty much blows the shoot it down from 40,000 ft angle huh?

Marr replied, "I want it all." NEADS controllers put F-16s at Langley AFB, Va., on battle-stations alert at 9:09 a.m., prepared to back up the F-15s over New York. But the FAA command center then reported 11 aircraft either not in communication with FAA facilities, or flying unexpected routes. At 9:24, the Langley-based alert F-16s were scrambled and airborne in 6 min., headed for Washington.
By 9:26 a.m., the FAA command center stopped all departures nationwide. At 9:41, American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, elevating tension levels even further. NEADS' Sr. Airman Stacia Rountree, an identification technician, said, "We had three aircraft down and the possibility of others hijacked. We had to think outside the box," making up procedures on the fly. Before the day ended, 21 aircraft across the U.S. had been handled as "tracks of interest."
"We didn't know how many more there were. . . . Are there five? Six? The only way we could tell was to implement Scatana--sanitize the airspace. Get everybody down," said Lt. Col. William E. Glover, Jr., chief of Norad's air defense operations.
Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, Norad commander-in-chief, was in the Cheyenne Mountain battle center by then. He and his staff suggested, via an open command link, implementing a limited version of Scatana--a federal plan designed to take emergency control of all domestic air traffic and navigation aids. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta immediately concurred and gave the order to get all aircraft on the ground as soon as possible. That action probably saved many lives, but without unnecessary, paralyzing restrictions of a full Scatana order.
Mineta's decision--and the military recommendation that triggered it--may have been prompted by a few airline pilots reporting terrorists on the radio, talking about other hijacked aircraft. American Flight 77 had hit the Pentagon, and United Flight 93 was being tracked, heading for Chicago or Cleveland, then Washington, prompting the F-16s' scramble.
"We had all of our armed fighters in the air, but needed more," Marr said. Every unit in the northeastern U.S. was loading F-16s, F-15s and A-10s with any armament available, then being directed to combat air patrols (CAPs) over major cities. Soon, Navy F/A-18s, F-14s and E-2Cs--some from two carriers steaming off the East Coast--were flying CAP and surveillance missions over major cities. Ultimately, Navy P-3s and USAF/ ANG C-130s would be pressed into service, using their normal radars to search for intruders.
At Norad, Glover phoned Arnold, telling him Vice President Cheney had given the authorization to shoot down any threatening aircraft in order to save lives on the ground. "We created a free-fire zone over the nation's capital," Arnold said. "Anyone airborne who did not immediately turn away from the center of town, or who did not land, could be shot down."
When someone--possibly President Bush--ordered the military to a Force Protection Condition Delta wartime posture, Norad commanders ordered massive steel doors be closed, "shutting down Cheyenne Mountain for real," the first time in its 43-year history, an officer said. The FBI had warned that a flight originating in San Diego might be hijacked and headed for a target in Colorado. Another rumor referred to a Ryder rental truck full of explosives and driven by "Arab-looking men" targeting the mountain.
"It didn't make sense, but those phone calls were happening," Glover said. Every rumor was treated as a potential threat.
OVER NEW YORK, Duffy and Nash requested that a Maine-based ANG KC-135 tanker--assigned to support 102 FW training missions that morning--be positioned at 20,000 ft. above Kennedy airport. "Then, we worked on intercepting and visually identifying nearly everything that was in the air for the next five hours," Duffy said.
"I treated this as a combat hop from the moment I saw the towers burning, and that made it easier to deal with . . . actions we might have to take," he added.
Duffy estimated the F-15s intercepted and escorted about 100 aircraft, including emergency, military and news helicopters, plus dozens of private pilots who were unaware of the attacks. Some had seen the smoke over New York and decided to investigate. Nash said the F-15s flew "low-and-slow" to intercept helicopters flying at 500 ft.

Arthur

93Q, it was a tactical decision based on what they knew and didn't know at the time, yet even with hindsight, you either lack the knowledge to understand it or chose to ignore it.

And I really care that a teller of untruths doesn't believe me.

I'd go with tungsten, wonder if you can guess why?

Well, that's me for tonight, thanks for the company 93Q.

93statements,

So what happened to the rest of the population of Washington DC? You keep talking about multiple targets, but within Washington DC, the only target you reference is the White House. There are three branches of government in the very near vicinity, and if you can guard one from the air, you can easily guard the rest as well. But if you fly out to engage one threat, you leave nothing behind to protect against new threats. I guess you are also forgetting, that although only 4 planes were hijacked, there were still other commercial airliners flying at the time. Don't start giving us "the FAA ordered to them to land at X:XX time so they were no longer an issue" as if landing a plane is instantenous.

I'm with Tony, don't coach football.

3) Slim chance that a fighter wasn't on Flight 77's ass without severe incompetence or else complicity (72 minutes after Flight 11 was a confirmed hijack, 34 minutes after Flight 175 hit the second WTC).

4) No possible way that a fighter wasn't on Flight 93's ass without ridiculously laughable incompetence or else complicity (99 minutes after Flight 11 was a confirmed hijack, 63 minutes after Flight 175 hit the second WTC).

I think this analysis is 100% objective, and I find the arguments of the apologists' for the military's reported (but not necessarily actual) response absurdly strained. .

93Q,

The above views create a dilemma for yourself:

Choice one: F93 was shot down. It follows from this that F77's not being shot down was not the result of complicity. (Why would interceptors waste their time with a plane over 100 miles from DC, but allow F77 to strike Pentagon?) It follows that F77 can only be explained by the kind of ridiculous, absurd incompetence that has been your main theme in this thread.

Choice two: F77 not being taken down was not the result of severe incompetence, but of complicity. It follows that F93 would not have been shot down, for the same reason mentioned above. Yet that would undermine your massive efforts over the last several months in establishing that F93 only makes sense as a shoot down.

May I ask which of the above you would choose, since one of them follows of necessity from your analysis?

A more general point about "laughable" incompetence: I agree with you to an extent that our responses did seem inexplicably slow. But, as is usually the case, you turn legitimate questions into seeming absolute refutations; make plausible assumptions as if there could be no other plausible interpretations. We saw that crystal clear mentality at work with your absolute assessment about the lack of seismic evidence. In due course it became apparent to everyone that the facts spoke to something a little bit less than absolute. It is this spirit of cockiness that runs through your themes over and over again.

You make assumptions about the response times in 911 that do not take account of the fact that governments are known for their lack of competence, or readiness when caught totally off guard. It is not precisely analogous, but still interesting to recall the response of the Soviets to KAL 007 on Sep 1, 1983. Here we have a plane about to overfly one of the most sensitive areas of Soviet defense, a defense belonging to one of the most paranoid nations on earth. Yet despite this, they were caught completely off guard. "Great confusion" quickly turned to "panic." By the time inetrceptors were scrambled the plane had already flown some 50 miles over Soviet territory. The initial inerceptors flew in the wrong direction, nor did they carry weapons sufficient to shoot F007 down. All in all, F007 flew for some 36 minutes over the S.U., covering 246 nautical miles, and not once did the Soviets successfully intercerpt it. By the time they caught up with it, it had escaped back into international air space. The Soviets never even figured out that it was a civilan jet. Again, of course not analogous to 911 for obvious reasons ( we know, it was dark, there was no plane hitting a building before hand, etc.), but I could easily see this same "absolutley absurd" mentailty at work in regard to F007, especially when you consider the Soviet's heightened state of military paranoia in the age of the "evil empire" in a nation already obsessed with looking out for any sign of military intrusion. Yet the fact is KAL 007 got away. The general point is simply to illustrate how even supossedly very prepared governments can be thrown into panic and confusion when the unexpected happens.


From the time F93 was a confirmed hijack, there where about 41 minutes to act. The plane was still over 120 miles from DC when it crashed. Call its progress "zigzag," but the fact is that it filed flight plans for DC, and it's pretty obvious it was on a heading in precisely that direction. It would have overflown the Pittsburgh area, with its nearby nuclear stations only minutes later. By the time it becomes plausible to assume an intercept, DC would have become the obvious intended destination. Three mile Island is almost exactly 120 miles from the crash site, and the plane did not appear headed in that direction. You underestimate the undoubted great hesitation in the unprecedented act of shooting down an airliner that must have caused extreme caution throughout F93's final moments. Given that, it is hardly clear that the plane would have been shot down earlier. Perhaps the interceptors were within moments of shooting it.

Yes, it's easy to say in retrospect it was incompetence on a massive scale, and therefore absurd. But as KAL007 shows, even super-prepared, paranoid, governments can screw up when sudden crisis strikes. This point seems even more relevant when one considers the greater reluctance of a democratic nation to consider shooting down one of its one planes, and the less prepared and paranoid state of the US military in 2001.

[ September 07, 2002 07:54 PM: Message edited 2 times, lastly by limo driver ]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Seven Fife:
Don't start giving us "the FAA ordered to them to land at X:XX time so they were no longer an issue" as if landing a plane is instantenous.

------------------------

A little sidebar to the above. If your VFR and cruising around you aren't under any FAA control. My local Unicom came up on freq and requested all aircraft to land ASAP. Unicom has no authority. Little birds don't have the guard freq option that military aircraft have.

I have since 911 monitored guard on my other radio <G>

Weather permitting were flying form on 911 <G>

Jack

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Seven Fife:


My father use to be a wizzo in the F-4s flying intercepts for the 147th out of Ellington. I realize technology advanced greatly, but he told me it was very difficult for their on-board radar to track light aviation. He told a story of a crew investigated for causing an accident. They couldn't find a plane on radar, and ended up passing right next to it at highspeed. Reportedly, the pilot had a heartattack (autopsy report) when the F-4 zoomed him and crashed. -------------------------

Yeah, fighters are built to handle high speed targets and hate to get slow. The Navy in the 90s was doing DCM between Tomcats and choppers. Choppers stayed low and slow and the Tomcats seldom could find them.

I use to cruise real close to the Mexican border during 78-81 for kicks <G> Turned off my IFF also <G> Never was intercepted and no calls on Guard. It was boring flying there so I would cancel IFR and dive for the deck.

Not sure my LongEZ is easily picked up by radar either

Jack

ROFLMAO, like I'm gonna learn critical thinking from 93delusions. PpPpPpffffHhhhhaaHaaaaHaHahahah.

No, I think I'll just remain ignorant and closed to any other view on the planet but mine, just to spite you. smilewink.gif Thanks for the offer though laff.gif laff.gif laff.gif

93,
Do you not realize that USAF jets have a way to authenticate the source of their radio calls? While they can broadcast in the open they also have the ability to use encrypted secure communications.
Arthur

93,
U93 was not on radar, it was last tracked heading towards Johnstown, the controllers at Johnstown WENT OUTSIDE TO SEE IF THEY COULD SPOT IT VISUALLY.

Sure you could send Jets out to it, but if it got past you what then?

You keep talking about NPPs, but Tony already showed you the test they ran firing an F4 into the same thickness reinforced concrete that the containment structure is made from and hardly damaging it. Clearly a 757 would be worse, but the thinking that morning would be that were not likely targets.

As to this being the only confirmed hijack, true, but their were many others which were unconfirmed as NOT Hijacked. One could not put all ones eggs in one basket.

By the way I posted a new report that said only two jets took off from Langley and it mentions the pilots by name. I suspect what Mike said was true, they got another pilot to take up the reserve bird but he most likely took off after the first two (being as he wouldn't have been on alert). That seems to be the only explanation which makes both sets of numbers correct, problem is we don't know the takeoff time for the third bird.

Here are other excerpts about that morning:

But the FAA command center then reported 11 aircraft either not in communication with FAA facilities, or flying unexpected routes. At 9:24, the Langley-based alert F-16s were scrambled and airborne in 6 min., headed for Washington.

By 9:26 a.m., the FAA command center stopped all departures nationwide. (So look how long the FAA continued to allow FAA controllers to allow more aircraft to take to the sky and of course these kept the controllers busy, when the order came to land them all, this again took up the controllers time.)

Before the day ended, 21 aircraft across the U.S. had been handled as "tracks of interest."

===> So only 1 turned out to be hijacked but again, the other were just as serious suspects.

At Norad, Glover phoned Arnold, telling him Vice President Cheney had given the authorization to shoot down any threatening aircraft in order to save lives on the ground. "We created a free-fire zone over the nation's capital," Arnold said. "Anyone airborne who did not immediately turn away from the center of town, or who did not land, could be shot down."

==> This is the decision you think is stupid and illogical, but none the less it appears to be what was done. Since you are so much smarter than the existing military you should consider joining their ranks as your swift ascent is almost assured, you'll be General 93 in no time flat.


Duffy estimated the F-15s intercepted and escorted about 100 aircraft, including emergency, military and news helicopters, plus dozens of private pilots who were unaware of the attacks.

==> Does this give you any idea about how busy these guys were. They were up for about 5 hours. So that is one aircraft about every 3 minutes.

Arthur

I'm still with you, Tony. However, I do hope 93statements is calling his Congressional delegates and demanding more money for the military. EMP missiles, supercruise for all alert aircraft, and enough alert aircraft to guard every part of the US, not just the borders. Then he can be made the CinC and protect us all. Well not all of us, because I would evacuate before the first star got pinned on him. I hope England doesn't have people like him.

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by adoucette:
==> Really, according to Woodward, Cheney ordered a fighter to engage a suspect aircraft less then 60 miles out right around 10:00am, so that couldn't have been U93.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Out from what? Are you really trying to suggest the Woodward was talking about a completely unreported additional suspected hijack that was only 7 minutes from DC before it was intercepted by a fighter?

==> Yes, that is EXACTLY what Woodward's report suggests.

Pray tell, what magical mystery flight was this?

==> Don't know.

Why was it considered a hijack?

==> Because it was heading towards the capitol and may not have been communicating with ATC.


How is it that it somehow managed to be spared just in the nick of time despite Cheney's emphatic orders?

==> Because Cheney's orders were to engage. Engage means follow the new Rules of Engagement that Bush had agreed to that morning which included FLYING IN FRONT OF THE JET and TRYING TO COMMUNICATE WITH IT and to only shoot it down IF IT DIDN'T TURN AWAY.

Bush then talked to Rumsfeld to clarify the procedures military pilots should follow in trying to force an unresponsive plane to the ground before opening fire on it. First, pilots would seek to make radio contact with the other plane and tell the pilot to land at a specific location. If that failed, the pilots were to use visual signals. These included having the fighters fly in front of the other plane. If the plane continued heading toward what was seen as a significant target with apparently hostile intent, the U.S. pilot would have the authority to shoot it down.


This also happened to the plane that was carrying Ashcroft

David Clemmer, a Vietnam combat veteran who received a warning as he flew the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, John Ashcroft, back to Washington from an aborted speaking engagement in the Midwest. Land your plane immediately, Clemmer was instructed by an air-traffic controller, or risk getting shot down by the U.S. Air Force. Clemmer turned to an FBI agent assigned to guard Ashcroft and said, “Well, Larry, we’re in deep kimchi here, and basically, all the rules you and I know are out the window.” The pilot notified air-traffic controllers that he was carrying the attorney general—but was worried that the message wouldn’t get through to military commanders controlling the airspace around Washington. “Thinking out of the box,” as Clemmer put it, he asked for—and got—a fighter escort into Washington. His plane, guarded by an F-16, was one of the last to land on the East Coast that day.


I mean, this would be the biggest and most dramatic unreported story of the day, and, I might add, far scarier than shooting down Flight 93.

===> No, apparently it happened quite a few times that day, the closest call was a flight coming in over Alaska where the pilot misunderstanding the communication set his transponder to the hijack code. It almost got shot down.


In addition, why did everyone--from Cheney to Bush to the military who somehow needed two hours to "confirm they hadn't shot down Flight 93"--assume it was Flight 93?

Here's the piece:

"There is a plane 80 miles out," he said. "There is a fighter in the area. Should we engage?"

"Yes," Cheney replied without hesitation.

Around the vice president, Rice, deputy White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, tensed as the military aide repeated the question, this time with even more urgency. The plane was now 60 miles out. "Should we engage?" Cheney was asked.

"Yes," he replied again.

As the plane came closer, the aide repeated the question. Does the order still stand?

"Of course it does," Cheney snapped.

The vice president said later that it had seemed "painful, but nonetheless clear-cut. And I didn't agonize over it."

It was, "obviously, a very significant action," Cheney said in an interview. "You're asking American pilots to fire on a commercial airliner full of civilians. On the other hand, you had directly in front of me what had happened to the World Trade Center, and a clear understanding that once the plane was hijacked, it was a weapon."

Within minutes, there was a report that a plane had crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania-what turned out to be United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 that had been hijacked after leaving Newark International Airport. Many of those in the PEOC feared that Cheney's order had brought down a civilian aircraft. Rice demanded that someone check with the Pentagon.



Now Woodward earns his living though words.

If he had meant: There was a report that THE plane had crashed in ....

I think that is what he would have wrote, not A plane.

He DOES NOT link the two as being the SAME plane.

Finally there is nothing in the article that indicates that they ASSUMED the order was for U93, they were WORRIED that it MIGHT have been the plane.

Arthur

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So maybe you think the guys who contol the jets will send them out hunting, but if it happens again, I'd bet they would do the exact same thing, protect the seat of government, its who they work for after all.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Silly me, I thought they, as well as the entire US government, worked for the American people--thousands of whose lives and livelihoods they would have been criminally negligent in unnecessarily risking had they actually acted in such an utterly reckless and blatantly idiotic manner.

==> Yeah and that's why the President, Cabinet, Congress, Military leaders have an underground bunker and Cheyenne Mt in case of Nuclear Attack.

You get your Cheyenne pass in the mail?

Arthur

[ September 09, 2002 06:43 PM: Message edited 1 time, lastly by adoucette ]

I have a hard time believing that a SS agent would actually begin giving tactics instructions to USAF jets. For one, the SS would have to know the frequencies the jets are using, and for two, this goes against every chain of command tenent there is.

I'd like to see the USAF pilot that would follow such orders from one claiming to be with the SS.

Sure it's not a typo in the story?

MD

93Q,
Let me ask you again. I assume you are reasonably convinced F93 was shot down. Doesn't that speak against complicity in allowing F77 to hit Pentagon? If so, then we have to be prepared to admit that this kind of "severe incompetence" is real. Agreed? If we agree on that, all the more reason to question that "F93 had to have been shot down." I think the Bush admin. was caught way off guard, totally unprepared, and chaos reigned, heistancy and incredulity ruled, creating confusion and delays, as it did with the Soviets over KAL 007 in 1983. Here again is the CIA link http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/221879.html
for another example of the head-in-the-sand approach our government takes with regard to terrorism. To me, the analysis in that link fits hand and hand with our reactions on Sep 11th: a government woefully unprepared psychologically to get it together and act as quickly and desively as it otherwise might have.
To repeat, if F93 was shot down, the credibility of US government complicity is destroyed. So your choice is: F93 was not shot down, thereby undermining your whole theory about it; or F93 was shot down, which implies military incompetence as the necessary explanation for F77. Complicity is ruled out.

Agreed, Limo. I think the government isn't giving us the whole story about Flight 93, but Flight 77 is a story of incompetance, not complicity.

Tell you what 93delusions, I talked to people within the FAA and USAF about these issues and that's how I draw my conclusion on reality. I recommend face to face in your case as well, since MikeD is currently serving and EZJack is prior service, and you have not believed them yet, and you can't look them in the eye anyway. See what these people have to say about being complicit or "criminally neglegent". I'll even help you out, these people usually have a local establishment they may frequent in large numbers, find one of those places, so you will have a chance to talk to many of them at once.

When you do this, I suggest you consider tone. One method will allow you to really get a chance to listen to another perspective, and some questions might get answered. But other methods might get you no where. If you choose tact one, I'm speculating here, but you'll likely be more shocked than you are now, and your view of who is complicit or "criminally neglegent" will change dramatically.

Another thing, on a clear stretch of road (for the sake of others), try driving about 100 mph or whatever controllable top speed you can manage, may not be drag limited. Then pick up your cellphone and call a couple of people, conference call if you can and will, and ask them directions. Now while doing this, open up your glove compartment and find your liability insurance card, make sure to grab it and only it, and make sure it is the valid one. For duration, try and do this for about 5 minutes.

Not that I told 93D to do anything I have not done, although foolishly in some cases, maybe suggesting something a bit illegal and dangerous is a bit rough. I think somewhere he needs to learn what it is like to have responsibility and then to handle the stress that comes with it.

I wonder is he up to the task of flying an aircraft at the edge of its performance envelope, handling the communications involved in coordinating a successful flight much less developing a strategy for dealing with a deadly situation, and then picking out amongst an array of blips the one that has innocent lives onboard yet still threatens more still. And after having done all this what he would think about being held responsible for the lives of thousands of people he didn't know, and then being blammed for risking the lives of millions more, including those he may know. And then to make sure the scenario is completely accurate, if he then would appreciate being called a liar after explaining in candor about his knowledge of the events as he knew them.

For the others who think our military was deficient on 9/11, I don't disagree. But for those who think it was capable of more with the resources present that day or that by suggesting such now will improve the current situation; they have no idea what is like to devote your life to serve others and then have them call you a traitor. Unfortunately, this past year was not the first time it has happened, and pretty much for that reason, it is getting harder and harder to find people willing to put up with it.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Seven Fife:
[I wonder is he up to the task of flying an aircraft at the edge of its performance envelope, handling the communications involved in coordinating a successful flight much less developing a strategy for dealing with a deadly situation, and then picking out amongst an array of blips the one that has innocent lives onboard yet still threatens more still------------------

Nice post Leland:

Tis why I use bullets and short replies. Am in the seat and working in 4D. Until your down in the weeds, sweating tight formation, add in geography. Folks don't know a mere nanosecond and your toast. Not that I would had thought that by ramming my bird was an option on 911.

I still have questions on 911. Will fly in AM tomorrow too <G>

Jack

Good post leland, and informative article EZ.

Just wanted to clarify that "severe incompetence" is 93 answers' phrase, and not mine. I agree with Leland here. The men and women who went out that morning to defend us are not the subject of my criticism. It was the pre-existing lack of preparedness that made things difficult. The article above taalks about the lack of coordination between Norad and the SS, and the general confusion that existed. This is what 93Answers poo-poos. I tend to favor the above article and the opinion of military pilots over know-it-all theorists who have never been in the hot seat. In any case, insistence that F93 was shot down rules out complicity. So it makes no sense to keep saying "ridiculous, absurdly strained" incompetence.

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by adoucette:
U93 was not on radar, it was last tracked heading towards Johnstown, the controllers at Johnstown WENT OUTSIDE TO SEE IF THEY COULD SPOT IT VISUALLY.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Let me be perfectly clear here. You are now postulating total bs and there's no way in the world that you aren't painfully aware of that fact.

1) Johnstown went out to see if they could spot it visually BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE RADAR!

2) Flight 93 was on radar. United Airlines' officials reported following it on radar for its entire journey. The Nassau FAA employee followed both Flight 93 and a fighter on radar. Dozens of Congressmen and the mayors of Pittsburgh and Cleveland knew exactly where the plane was. They were setting up crisis teams in real time as the plane neared and then luckily flew by their cities. The CIA (or someone) was evacuating every ATC tower along Flight 93's path, using bomb scares and other ridiculous tactics so that the fewest folks possible would see Flight 93 (and whatever else) on radar.

==> So now the CIA is part of the conspiracy?
It might be a shorter list if you just told us who wasn't in on the fix.
Being on FAA radar doesn't get it to NEADS radar nor does it get it to the radar on the jets. The plane was flying at low altitude (3,000 ft AGL) in mountainous terrain so there is no way the Jets over DC had it on their scopes, not to mention their scopes would have lots of dots on them with none of them saying "Hey, look at me, I'm flight 93", we already know there were three other planes within 30 miles of 93 at the end, so how are they to go after the correct blip?
How many other planes were in the vicinity?


3) Your best efforts at flippant duplicity cannot change the fact that it just isn't that hard to find a 757 on radar.

==> No, but it is impossible to tell a 757 from a lear jet on a fighters radar and it IS hard to pick up an object at a distance if it is at low altitude (world curves you know) and if you are above it you get ground clutter.

Moreover, Willow Grove was just a few miles down the road, so if the fighter really needed help finding as big a target as any he'd ever trained against, they could have gotten a P-3C in the air to help him.

==> Assuming there was a crew for it and it wasn't in the maint shack etc etc.

Or an E-2C from Norfolk, VA.

==> Well E-2Cs are carrier based so don't know how many were in port that morning and of course fueled and with a crew available and then there is the 300 mph speed which would make getting to the Penn area take awhile.


Or they could have turned around the Over the Horizon radar at Norfolk.

==> I'm sure that's a piece of cake! Why don't you tell us exactly how you "turn this around"


Or they could have pointed the Pave Paws at Cape Cod in that direction in order to find the "missing" plane. Or they could have used any of dozens of training recon planes from NAS Patuxent River, MD. Or they could have used the United States Strategic Command's (USSTRATCOM) Airborne Command Post, aka the "Looking Glass" E-6B.


==> and where is that based?


4) However, any decent pilot could have made an easy kill without all this help. And I'm sure any radar station that the CIA wasn't busy evacuating was picking up Flight 93 just fine because, believe it or not, 757's don't yet have Romulan cloaking devices.

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by adoucette:
Sure you could send Jets out to it, but if it got past you what then?
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OH MY GOD, WE JUST SENT THREE F-16's FIGHTERS OUT INTERCEPT A 757, BUT THE 757 FLEW CIRCLES AROUND THEM AND LEFT THEM IN THE DUST!!!

You know, Arthur, you are utterly trashing your "thoughtful, well-reasoned" veneer by spouting such rampant idiocy.

==> Yeah, 93delusions, you got that right.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by adoucette:
You keep talking about NPPs, but Tony already showed you the test they ran firing an F4 into the same thickness reinforced concrete that the containment structure is made from and hardly damaging it. Clearly a 757 would be worse, but the thinking that morning would be that were not likely targets.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Can you possibly lampoon yourself any more?

So we are supposed to buckle in fear about the potential of a "dirty bomb," but since Tony assures us some nuclear power plant passed his Firestone test, it's somehow no big deal if a 757 plows right into one???

And please explain why we are holding Padilla for thinking about making a dirty bomb at some distant point in the future if "the thinking that morning would be that they were not likely targets." I mean, do murderous terrorists only like to scare us with radiation poisoning in small doses? But NPP's are perfectly protected against the kind of plane crash you contend ballistically ejected metal for well over a mile, right? I mean, Chernobyl proved just how full-proof these things are, right?

===> What proof do you have that a jet would breech a containment vessel? Tony at least showed a test of a 50,000 lb vehicle impacting into a simulated wall at 600 mph without significant damage. Right or wrong, the thought at the time is they were not likely targets.

PS the Chernobyl type graphite reactor DID NOT have a containment vessel which is why the radiation escaped.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by adoucette:
As to this being the only confirmed hijack, true, but their were many others which were unconfirmed as NOT Hijacked. One could not put all ones eggs in one basket.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dammit, you are simply lying through your teeth a little more with each sentence of your post. We supposedly had two fighters covering all of NYC and three covering DC. So how the hell is it "putting all one's eggs in one basket" to send JUST ONE of these three fighters out to intercept THE ONLY 100% CONFIRMED HIJACK???

And if we only had five total fighters available a hour after the second WTC was hit, it's simply because that's all the fighters we wanted available.

===> Well as the previous post showed we had more than 5 fighters, but many were unarmed. Why, because we were at a very low state of alert. We could not tell which of the aircraft that were up were hijacked or not so many were potential hijacks (or could get hijacked at any time) just like the others were.


NAS Oceana has 125 Tomcats and 152 Hornets, over 10,000 military employees, and an annual operating budget of nearly half a billion. They also have 5,500 take offs each and every month--an average of one every four minutes.

==>Your math sucks, that would be every eight minutes, but your reasoning sucks as well, those takeoffs and landings are not different aircraft. Oceana is a major training base, one hell of a lot of those takeoffs and landings are touch in goes and pilots learning to do carrier type landings. None of these planes (in training) are armed and most couldn't get armed in some short period of time.


Now multiply this by 10 or 20 other nearby air bases and add in the fact that it took Toledo--which was NOT an alert NORAD pad--just 16 minutes to get an armed fighter in the air. So please tell me again how sending a single fighter out to intercept Flight 93--otherwise known as doing your damn job without being criminally negligent--in order to protect thousands of American lives "is putting all one's eggs in one basket."

==> Back to using the term "criminally negligent" for not shooting down U93 when no one died except on U93? You make no sense at all.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by adoucette:
===> So only 1 turned out to be hijacked but again, the other were just as serious suspects.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


ONE AND ONLY ONE flight was an ABSOLUTELY CONFIRMED HIJACK. THERE WAS NO F****** DOUBT ABOUT IT! So how the hell could any suspects be "just as serious"? By definition, they cannot.

===> Yes they could since obviously any plane was potentially subject to hijacking that morning.


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by adoucette:
==> Does this give you any idea about how busy these guys were. They were up for about 5 hours. So that is one aircraft about every 3 minutes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Wow! Almost the same number of planes as take off from a single nearby Naval Air Station on an average day. Gee, maybe they should have sent a few more fighters out there to help poor Duff, ya think?

MikeD,

Two simple questions.

1) How hard is it to locate a 757 on radar?

2) Was Flight 93 too difficult a target for a typical USAF fighter pilot?

Here's Ms. Taylor of Cleveland ATC:

BROKAW: You're keeping your eye on Flight 93 at this point?

Ms. TAYLOR: Yeah. And then the transponder came back on. We got two hits off the transponder. That's something we've always wanted to know. Why did the transponder come back on? Because the hijackers had shut it off so that they couldn't be tracked, even though we were still tracking them. Now we were getting an altitude readout on the airplane. I can't remember the precise numbers, but it was around 6400 feet, and then around 5900 or 5800 feet. And we're thinking, 'Oh, you know, maybe something's happened, maybe this isn't what we think it is.'


Well, how in the world were they tracking Flight 93 even though it had its transponder off? Any wild guesses here, MikeD?

[ September 17, 2002 04:30 AM: Message edited 1 time, lastly by 93questions ]

Mike is out serving his country. He answered your questions though in the previous post. I'll quote his answer to you again:

quote Even though modern fighters have a look-down shoot-down capability, the crews in this situation would've been somewhat hard pressed to separate the wheat from the chaff on their scopes. Even if they could slew them in the general direction 93 was coming from, there are numerous azimuth/elevation problems to contend with. And though I can't discuss specific numbers associated with the F-16 AN/APG-68(V7) or the F-15 AN/APG-70(v) air-air radars, I can say there are limitations to even their most advanced capabilities.

Additional information:
The Day the FAA Stopped the World - Time Online 9-14-01 (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,174912,00.html)

While confusing and conflicting information continued to pour into the FAA op center, news came that Canada had apparently shut down its own system. At 10:42, worse news: there was another crash — this of flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field. Confusion reached such a high level that the FAA admitted to the White House officials who wanted to bring the President back to Washington that the agency could not account for seven planes. In fact, four of those planes turned out to be the downed ones — but that would take a while to sort out. Even more worrying was that it took the FAA another hour and a half to account for three other aircraft.

Meanwhile, domestic flights were getting down — fast. Southwest Airlines planes descended on Denver, an airport the airline doesn't even fly to. JetBlue Airways, based at New York's John F Kennedy Airport, ended up with a plane at tiny Stewart Airport in upstate New York. United Parcel Service, which had 25 planes in the sky, had safely landed each of their aircraft at one of the company's eight hub airports. International flights, which were clearly getting low on fuel, apparently started dialing their transponders to indicate to Canadian controllers that there were emergencies on board. Some apparently even dialed in the 'hijack' code, and for a few frantic minutes the airspace near Alaska was peppered with "hijacked" planes. The FAA immediately called NavCanda and asked what was happening. The Canadians opened the system back up, but implemented rigid security procedures including keeping passengers on aircraft for hours.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Seven Fife:


To go on the hypothetical, the transponder is off and Cleveland still can track it... well the transponder is just an aid. It provides data such as altitude that would take a lot of time and processor for the radar operator to determine on their own. -----------------

Minor point, not sure ATC radar can primary paint a target with altitude. We need some ATC current types here to help us. No doubt any fire control radar could give you altitude.

Little spare time. One trick when your NORDO and can't transmit. You can ident on your transponder as a reply. Not sure that's in the SOP yet.

Another problem, if your low, ATC can't paint you at all. Mountains get in the way. Happens out West too often.

We are on the same wave length Leland. I can recall in 81, with my transponder on, Center couldn't see me on radar at 10,000' 120 miles off the East Coast.

Moving OTH radar might take a while <G>

Jack

For reasons obvious to you and me, Jack, finding specifications on any American radar is tough. I agree that height-finding is a rare capability, mostly useful for finding weather ceilings and ranging AAA.

I did read about terrain issues regarding PAVE PAWS on FAS. Planes in 700' AGL pattern won't clutter that system...

On that day in 81, how was the humidity?

LOL Arthur

And half of those blue dots were F-16s!

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