Nonsense. As Mr. Miskatonic said above, the Payne Stewart story is a myth - it took 76 minutes to intercept the plane. See the link he provided. I’m not sure which United flight of several days ago you are referring to, but you obviously can’t compare pre-9/11 to post 9/11 responses. Please provide examples of some of the many, many more cases which you have researched on the internet.
Really? You don’t find that at least equally plausible as “deliberate misdirection”? Think critically for a moment here, which is more likely:
[ul]
[li]One insider leaked information to the terrorists about the scheduled drills on 9/11[/li][li]Several insiders knew about the terrorist attacks, and planned military drills on 9/11 accordingly to misdirect.[/li][/ul]
One of the above items requires a complicated plot within the military and extraneous planning which isn’t necessary to the success of the terrorist operation, and the other requires one person to provide terrorists with a piece of information.
Of course, it’s perfectly likely that the events just happened on the same day without any coordination. But I suppose for the conspiracy minded, there’s no such thing as chance, unless it doesn’t support the theory.
xtisme , I’ll agree that fighters are not on a hair trigger like during the cold war. My understanding is that they could be ready in 15 minutes to intercept, with no firepower, and they can fly at close to 1500 MPH. I’ll put a link up later that shows all the bases on the east coast that could do this. They could have easily gotten to those planes, but they did not.
I’ll say it again. I am not talking about shooting down anything. I am talking about going up there and taking a look, which they are supposed to do and in fact had done hundreds of times before 9/11.
Nobody can explain why the did not follow their own procedures.
Really Not All That Bright , it really does not matter that the hijackers maintained radio silence, which is grounds for interception on its own. Ground based radar knew where the planes were, and all interceptors have their own radar.
What needs to be mentioned again, is that even if fighters were able to intercept the jets, distinguish them without their IFF active and get into a firing position. They wouldn’t have shot. Remember that up until that time, hijacked planes went to Cuba, not flown into buildings. There was no reason to think that the hijacked planes would be used as weapons at that time.
But you are wrong. They DID put planes up to take a look. They had a plane in the New York city vicinity when the second plane hit the WTC. The problem is, the hijackers (who knew a lot more about our air traffic control system than you seem to, despite this having happened years ago) had turned off their transponders…this is the thing that allows the air traffic controllers to figure out where the planes are. Said ATC were unsure where exactly the planes were, so they couldn’t vector in the fighters to more than a general area.
I don’t know where you are getting the impression that, prior to 9/11 the military routinely sent interceptors up to find air craft that had their transponders deliberately turned off. Do you have a cite for this incredible assertion on your part? Or am I misunderstanding what you are asserting here? What do you claim the military was doing ‘hundreds of times before 9/11’?
No, they didn’t. Again, you are wrong here. You should seriously do some research both on how our air traffic control system works, and on what the people in ATC actually knew on 9/11…and, more importantly, didn’t know.
-XT
The fighters were scrambled from much further away then would have been the case on 9/11, for one thing.
Second, his plane was on a straight and steady course, not changing course to the most densely populated area in the country. His plane was on its intended course, it was intercepted due to radio silence.
All the 9/11 planes were supposed to be going west.
Nonsense. Did you look at that Payne Stewart link? You have yet to provide evidence of this ever happening. Please also look at this article, as well as the rest of the articles linked to here.
No, you’re wrong. It’s a common mistake. You’re thinking about the transponder. It shows information about the plane. ATC normally works based off of the transponder information, which was shut down in this case, but does not matter.
An aircraft can still be picked up on ground based radar, even if the transponder is shut down, which of course is gounds for interception.
Bottom line is ATC, in normal operations uses the transponder. If the transponder is inop, aircraft can be tracked using radar.
Evidence as to what? Your platform is his plane was not intercepted?
No…I’m not. The ATC uses transponder codes to track commercial airliners. They don’t user ground based radar to track air planes and haven’t for quite a while. Shutting down the transponder rendered the air traffic controllers monitoring those planes unable to find or track them, especially when, having shut down the transponders the hijackers changed course.
An air craft can be picked up by ground based radar, but the air traffic control doesn’t USE ground based radar to track commercial airliners. The military could, in theory, have found the planes (eventually) using ground based radar, but it would have taken time. There aren’t just 2 or 3 planes up in the sky over the US at any given time, but thousands of planes.
The bottom line is no one knew where the first two planes were until they abruptly showed back up…crashing into the WTC. No one knew what happened to the plane that hit the Pentagon either…not until it HIT the Pentagon.
You know what? Let’s see a cite then. Show me that this was standard procedure prior to 9/11, and also show me where the ACT (or the military) were tracking these planes prior to them hitting the WTC (1 or 2) or the Pentagon.
-XT
Evidence that his plane was intercepted any more expeditiously than the hijacked planes on 9/11.
No, if the hijackers had known about the military exercises that day, they likely would have picked a different day. From the transcripts, it’s quite obvious that any questions about whether this was an exercise or was real were answered quickly and put to rest. The fact that the exercise was set for that day assured that the best people were in their positions to handle whatever happened.
Hundreds of times before? The Payne Stewart incident was the only instance of an intercept of a plane over US soil in the previous ten years. And even then, it took an hour and 20 minutes, by a jet that happened to be in the air already on a training mission.
Actually, flight 175, the second one to hit the towers, did not have its transponder turned off, but set to a different code. This means that the controllers wouldn’t have known which plane it was, other than to notice that 175’s transponder code is missing, but at the time the controllers were also trying to find flight 11 so it was pretty confusing.
:smack: I had forgotten that. Thanks for the correction. Been a while since I was in one of these 9/11 CT threads, so had forgotten some of the details.
-XT
My understanding is that the radar with transponder info is called “secondary” radar, and the plain radar without the codes is the “primary” radar. Controllers use secondary because it’s so much more useful to them, but I think they do have the availability of primary radar.
The trouble with primary radar is that, with hundreds of planes in the air, you see just a sea of hundreds of blips and it’s really difficult and time-consuming to compare this with your secondary radar to figure out which blip is the one you don’t have a transponder for.
I know ATC does not use radar at that distance, and I agree that ATC was blind when the transponders were turned off. I agreed with you.
I can’t give you a cite that the millitary was tracking the planes once ATC knew the transponders were turned off, and before they hit the WTC.
That is my whole point. NORAD could have tracked the planes, but did not. I will cite that. I’m not blaming ATC for the failures that day.
It does not really matter how many planes were in the air. Only four planes deivated from their IFR plan, and had their transponders turned off. You go after them.
Yes, that’s pretty much my take on it as well.
Which is why they rely almost completely on the transponder codes.
-XT
Here’s one.
That’s after 9/11. Do you have any before then?
The FAA procedure at the time for a domestic hijacking was to notify the FBI, not the military. On the morning of 9/11, the military (NORAD) was notified, but not in time.
For flight 11, the North East Defense Sector (NEADS) was notified at 8:37, and it crashed at 8:46.
For flight 175, NEADS was notified at 9:03, and it crashed at 9:03.
For flight 77, NEADS was notified at 9:35 and it crashed at 9:37.
For flight 93, NEADS was notified at 10:07, when it had already crashed at 10:03 (but they had not yet figured that out).
I know it’s from 2002, and at first read looks like it makes me wrong. The big difference is they knew about the 9/11 planes for quite awhile.
There are procedures, in place before 9/11, that were not followed.