Nobody, I feel 100% confident in saying, has a lower opinion of Bush, Rove & Co. than I do, but even I balk at the suggestion that someone in the administration ordered the Air Force to “stand down” while the 9/11 hijackings were underway so the resulting tragedy could be exploited by the far right to destroy our freedoms, invade whoever they want to, etc., etc.
But that leaves the question: why the hell weren’t jets scrambled to at least observe what was going on up there? And why hasn’t anybody been reprimanded for what (if it wasn’t the result of some dark conspiracy) has to have been the worst dereliction of duty in US history? As many web sites have pointed out, when a pro golfer’s plane lost cabin pressure in '99, thereby losing contact with the ground because everybody on board was dead or unconscious, a jet was dispatched in about five minutes to check it out.
The only possible innocent explanation I can think of is maybe, pre-9/11, there’d been a standard operating procedure for hijackings that precluded sending fighters up when big commercial aircraft were involved. Perhaps the brass decided looking out the window and seeing a warplane off the wingtip would be bad for the hijacker’s emotional stability, and therefore bad for the passengers’ chances for survival. Or something.
Anyway, there were a ton of hijackings back in the late sixties and early seventies, usually involving some radical who thought he’d be better off in Cuba. Does anyone remember enough about them to either validate or sink my theory?
it isnt that they were not dispatched at all. The problm is that there was a huge delay compared with the 65 previous events that year in which scrambles were ordered. Of those 65 scrambles, only twice did such intercept take more than 1/2 an hour and they were intercepted within 40 minutes of the firt notice of something wrong.
On 9-11 40 minutes and more apparently went by before ANY planes were even called to be scrambled, and then they were they were scrambled from bases that were no where near New York or DC. The first planes over New York flew all the way from florida!
Considering our trillion dollar early warning systems and years of procedure, somehow we were unable to get any kind of fighter over station in less than 90 minutes, it seems at the very least odd, and at the worst criminally negligent, or criminally staged.
Leaving politics aside, the standard protocol for dealing with hijackers was to NOT interfere. Pre-9/11, most hijackers either wanted to go someplace they couldn’t otherwise get to (e.g., Cuba) or wanted a ransom or some sort of exchange (passengers for political prisoners.) Both types of hijackers had a strong incentive to keep the crew and passengers alive, at least until the plane was safely on the ground. They certainly weren’t looking to fly the plane into buildings.
Secondly, the conspiracy theory supposes the U.S. had fighter/interceptors, already armed with the right types of weapons and crews already to fly, within close range of the hijacked planes. The Air Force won’t say where they park their fighters, but as I recall, there were two fighters chasing the fourth plane, but they couldn’t reach it before it crashed in Pennsylvania.
I’m sure someone will come along with a better answer.
When it was realised that something was amiss with various flights, there was no reason to expect anything other than, at worst, a ‘typical’ hijacking.
Normally, a hijacking does not involve suicidal hijackers. It’s in their interests to see the plane down safely, wherever that may be.
No doubt great efforts were being made to communicate with the hijackers, through well-rehearsed protocols.
A fighter catching up with the plane would provide no information that could not be gleaned from ground radar.
an intercept is/was standard procedure for a suspected hijacking, or for that matter any other reason that prevents communication, alters flightplan or interferes with proper identification.
As I pointed out 65 intercepts were done previous to 9-11 in 2001. There was no question about what was supposed to happen. The question is, why didn’t it happen that way?
This has been covered extensively on this message board, and more than once. Search in Great Debates. If you can’t figure out which combination of words like “airplane” “hijack” and so forth to search on use my username - I’ve participated in most of those threads. I’d link but I have limited time this morning to futz around with the coding.
I’ll try to be brief:
There were jets scrambled.
Just because the attack was successful does not mean someone on are side failed or screwed up on Sept 11, 2001. In a situation like that, it is possible to do everything right and still have a bad outcome. Why? Because no defense is perfect.
As I pointed out in one of the innumerable threads already on the SDMB on this topic, in that particular case a jet was NOT scrambled immediately. Nor is that the automatic reaction when a plane loses contact - it is not unheard of for air traffic control to ask another civilian plane in the vicinity to check things out rather than scramble the air force. The thing is, at least some models of Lear jets can fly faster and higher than almost any other civilian plane, so in that case a fighter made sense, since you needed an aircraft that could catch a Lear.
It’s already been mentioned that pre-9/11 hijackers usually sought something other than death - cooperation/negotiation frequently kept the maximum number of people on board alive. So SOP was to ask the Bad Guys what they wanted and keep them talking. Fighters were usually not required to accomplish this, and thus were an option, not a mandate, in these situations.
No, it’s not. Where did you get that?
Right now intercepts may have been made SOP for hijacking, but not necessarially before 9/11, and not for the other reasons even today. Airplanes have radio failures every day - there’s a whole list of procedures for re-establishing communication or dealing with the situation before you call in the Air force. “Alter flightplan”? Perfectly legal. If you’re flying under visual flight rules you can alter it all you want without talking to anyone and, as long as you stay out of restricted airspace, no one will care - or likely even notice. Instrument flights - there are standard procedures for making changes, no big deal.
I’ve lost my radio on more than one occassion - the most exciting thing that ever happened were lightgun signals from the control tower, no daring young pilots in F-16’s required. I doubt I’ve ever flown on a flightplan without making some alterations required by circumstances. I’ve had transponder problems as well - one of those “proper identification” things - and the result is usually air traffic calling me on the radio and saying “hey - are you having transponder trouble?” It takes communication failure AND suspicious behavior to trigger an alarm because, in reality, radios and transponders go wonky every day over North America.
Because what you think “was supposed to happen” and the actual reality of the situations are two different things.
As I said - this has been covered extensively in other threads. None of the points raised here is new, and all have been answered.
No, Massachussetts. They may have been a Florida Air National Guard unit (the Air Guard was in charge of most home airspace defense) but since the State Air Guards are units of the USAF, they can be deployed interstate.
The missing-learjet intercept was at first a vectoring of an already in-air jet. This bears repeating: on Sept. 11 2001 the air defense posture of the USA was NOT one of fully-armed fighters at standby for immediate scrambling covering every single major city.
Sorry for bringing up a topic that’s already been covered so extensively. Typical bonehead newbie error; I just did a quick scan of recent pages to see if anybody had brought it up — actually doing a search never entered my curly little head.