I wish I could find a cite for this, but right now, just can’t remember where i heard/read it. (anyone else in info overload?)
There was mention somewhere of Fighter patrols over the country that have been up since the attacks began. Part of the antiterrorism expenditures of the $20B that GWB has requested is said to be for maintaining this air patrol.
There’s been speculation on these boards about preventing future attacks with remote control of airliners, sealed cockpit doors, etc. Now, having a well armed “escort” a 10 minute scramble away seems like a nice solution. Any aircraft off its flight plan could be quickly intercepted. I believe there have been a couple small errant planes flying before the ban was lifted who suddenly found heavily armed company.
so, finally, onto the GQ:
what sort of fighter presence would be required (numbers, type) to swiftly intercept any plane in our airspace, and escort, say the 4 simultaneous hijacked planes to landings? (or destroy them if they prove uncooperative)
what would be the ongoing operational cost? does it begin to approach the total operational cost of all the passenger airliners themselves?
be nice to me, it’s my first OP. : )
My understanding of the purpose of the air patrol was that it was to intercept possible inter-continental missiles and other fighter planes, since nobody was really sure whether this was an isolated terrorist incident, or a real war, with more “incoming” than just a few jet bombs.
Now that evidently they’re rounding up the Bad Guys, I don’t suppose the air cover will continue.
From a purely logistical standpoint, I doubt whether fighter planes would even be able to deal with 4 simultaneous hijacked planes.
First, there’s the time delay. It would inevitably take time for folks on the ground to realize that four jets had been hijacked, and that the hijackers weren’t just after a million dollars and a free plane ride to Libya. And in that time frame, the hijackers would have a nice big window of opportunity to drop out of the sky on whatever they wanted.
Second, as soon as the hijackers realized they had bogies on their tail, seeing as how they’re suicide bombers anyway, I would assume they would just shrug and drive the plane into the ground.
Third, how would a fighter plane force a hijacked jet full of civilians to land, anyway? Threaten to shoot it? What if it’s not really hijacked? There was an incident in White Horse, in the Yukon, this week, where a diverted Korean airliner accidentally hit the “We’ve been hijacked!” button instead of the “We’re low on fuel!” button, and got themselves a fighter escort for a while. What if the Canadian Air Force had shot them down, assuming they were Jet Bomb #5?
Fourth, why couldn’t the hijackers just lie? “This is Flight 123, we’re having engine trouble, we need to make an emergency landing in Chicago,” and instead of landing at O’Hare, they take out the Sears Tower.
i still haven’t found the cite, but I’m sure there was news mention of a proposal to continue the patrols.
also, there were fighters scrambled after the 1st or 2nd attack. They just didn’t get to the later planes in time. It’s not clear if they had orders to destroy the airliners. Agreed, that is quite a risky order. I can only imagine the gravity of the decision for the US to down its own civilian jet liners. As horrific as that sounds, it doesn’t compare to the bombing we’ve seen.
You question whether fighter patrols are effective protection against hijackers. Let me engage your points-
i have no doubt that they could! Our air force is certainly designed to engage entire opposing squadrons, let alone to intercept 4 easy-to-track, unarmed planes at a time. My GQ is, how many would it take, how distributed, and at what cost?
i don’t believe this can ever be assumed again. Now, every hijacked plane has to be assumed to be a missle, to be destroyed. The people on it are already essentially dead. That’s what the people over PA realized, and saved civilians. as for the time delay, we are now hearing that flight controllers were aware of the hijacking, transponders being turned off, and course deviations well in advance of the crashes. It’s just that no one thought the planes would be used so.
not if the fighters are already scrambled
in the new rules of the game, that is a partial victory, as in PA.
yes. if it doesn’t cooperate, pull the trigger. partial victory, see above.
it was correctly escorted down. succesfull intercept. They only shoot down the ones that don’t cooperate.
very good point. Especially most major airports are near large population centers. For this protection to work, it would have to be very closely escorted when near population centers. I don’t know if that is feasible.
Let’s see. Typical maximum non-afterburner speed for most of our fighters is around 450-550 knots. Assuming 2,600,000 square nautical miles to cover for ConUS and a ten-minute reaction time, we’d need 330 fighters in the air at all times.
A basic rule of thumb is that you need three times as many total aircraft as how many you need in the air at once, so we’ll say a nice round 1,000. I don’t know what our current inventories are at, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than this – but spread out all over the world.
And DDG: aircraft can’t intercept intercontinental missiles. As of current technology, nothing can. You’re thinking of cruise missiles. Big difference.
yikes. that’s considerably higher than I’d guess. Especially given that even unprepared, we were supposedly only minutes away from being able to intercept the hijacked planes tuesday.
Well, our fighters didn’t show up “within minutes” – if you extend the minimum response time to 30-40 minutes, then it begins to include aircraft on the ground, but ready to go. I wouldn’t be surprised if we always had at least some aircraft at major AFBs on short alert, and there’ll generally always be some in the air too (on training, if nothing else) I really have no idea how the Air Force runs things like that.
As for my conclusion, here goes.
500 knots is 500 nautical miles an hour, so at the typical top-speed-cruise, a fighter could cover 83 miles in ten minutes. However, it would take some time and deceleration for them to form up with the airliner in question so I’ll guesstimate and drop that to 70 miles in ten minutes. With a 70 mile radius, a single fighter covers 15,400 square miles, so that’s 168 fighters to cover 2,600,000 square miles. A single fighter would not be really acceptable since you want to keep some tolerance for malfunctions, so we’ll go up to two-ship flights, and there’s 330
It’s pretty quick and dirty, but hey. If you’re just looking for how many it would take to provide coverage to shoot someone down in 10 minutes, no questions asked, then that’s more along the lines of 50 aircraft, which is perhaps what you were expecting beforehand.