Fucking hell! NORAD LIED! Flight 93 might have been saved???

[Broomstick]

@RTFirefly

I’m still kinda puzzled, though, that no one was in a position to realize we had multiple hijackings while the planes were still in the air. Given the sort of event a hijacking was before 9/11 (rare but a big deal if it happened) you’d think that even within the air-traffic control system and the FAA, word of each hijacking would have been relayed up the line in a hurry, until word reached someone who’d realize that we’d passed from happenstance to coincidence to enemy action, and would have woken up their boss’s boss if necessary to get the word relayed to the top. After all, even if 9/11 hadn’t been what it turned out to be, you still wouldn’t have wanted the President to find out from CNN that three planes had been hijacked at once.

Because the hijackings all happened in different ATC sectors.

There is no one controller looking at the entire sky at once. Each controller is given a designated slice of sky to watch, and he/she pays attention to just what’s inside it. Sure, there’s communication with controllers of adjacent airspace, but only what’s necessary to get the job done (and the occassional “Good morning” or “thank you”).

So when a controller notices a hijacking, he’s only paying attention to just that airplane. Actually no - he’s paying attention to the hijacking and any other airplanes under his jurisdiction still in his sector, at least until they can get someone in it help him (if they can - in some towers/TRACONs personnel is stretched a little thin). Priority (at least prior to 9/11) was with trying to keep the hijackers happy so they wouldn’t hurt someone - a strategy that works well with people wanting to go to Cuba or achieve some goal other than breaking buildings and killing people. Sure, the news is passed up the chain of command, but it wasn’t as high a priority as trying to determine 1) that there WAS a hijacking and not some sort of weird malfunction that took out the transponder and was affecting communications and 2) once it was certain there was a hijacking, trying to communicate with the guys on board to determine what they wanted and where they might be going so other airplanes could be moved out of their way.

That is the way the system was, and up to that point it worked, as far as maximixing surviors. Problem was, the rules of the game had changed and no one had toled ATC. If they had known the hijackers were planning to ram buildings notifying NORAD would have become much more important - but they didn’t know that, and had no way to know that.

So, with enough separation in space between hijackings, you wound up with multiple hijackings but no one in the system aware (at least for a time) that there were multiple hijackings.

Also keep in mind that they guys working ATC were doing just that - working. They weren’t watching CNN. At 10:30 am September 11, 2001 the guy sitting in the control tower 10 miles from my house knew less about what had happened in NYC and DC than I did - because by that time I was home watching TV, he was still at work trying to find room at the airport for yet another landing airplane. It’s not a job where you can just drop everything and run off to look at a TV set for an hour or so. He’s gotta stay focused on what he’s doing, especially in a crisis. He knew something really bad had happened, but not what, and from what the guy told me he was so busy with the “land all planes” order that he didn’t even have time to wonder about it. He just put it out of his mind and figured he’d catch up when the shift was over.

Now, I suspect NORAD is notified first thing for a suspected hijacking. Live and learn, I guess.

[Broomstick]

@E72521

I read in an interview with a commercial airline pilot shortly post 9/11 that if he had notice of what was going on with the other three planes and he thought that someone was trying to break into his cabin, he could easily make maneuvers, such as rolling the aircraft several times, that would incapacitate pretty much anyone in the back of the plane not strapped down. IANA pilot and I have no idea how feasible such a tactic would be.

There’s also a handy fire ax up front, but again, the guys need a little warning to get it out and use it as a weapon.

Anyhow - you wouldn’t need to loop or roll. A bit of a nose-over would have anything not tied down floating, followed by a sharp nose-up to slam everyone loose into the floor. Repeat as necessary. It wouldn’t stress the airplane anymore than bad turbulence, which they are designed to handle. That sort of thing during turbulence has killed people (getting hit with an airplane can cause all sorts of head, neck, and back injuries) - artifically induced turbulence has the same potential.

And yes, a pilot could get more violent than that with the airplane, with no risk to the machine itself, or his control of it.

I had a flight instructor who used to demonstrate his control of the airplane by manuvering such that his clipboard in the back seat would float up and move forward through the cabin, then he’d reach up and just pluck it out of the air. (For an encore, he’d hold it up, let go, and float it back into the back seat). Stupid airplane tricks and all that. That sort of skill is normally used to give ya’ll a nice, smooth ride, or at least as smooth as conditions will allow. But it could potentially be used against someone not strapped in.

The downside is that anyone else not strapped in - like the flight attendants - will also be subject to the same battering. Most people are a little reluctant to severely injure or kill their co-workers, even on a bad day. Then again, if the Bad Guys are cutting the throats of your co-workers out in the cabin it’s not like your co-workers are going to complain much about some bad bruises or even a broken bone if it saves their lives.

[Zebra]

So why did golfer Payne Stewart’s plane get intercepted so quickly and these were not?
here is a time table
It seems to me that if the first plane was followed it would have been watched going into the first tower. There is no way they would have shot it down as it flew over Manhattan to hit the tower. But the second plane came in from the sea and the Pentagon plane was later. There should have been enough time to have fighters up and on these guys tails.

[Broomstick]

Says right in the article you linked to:

F-16 from Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., was airborne on routine mission when diverted to provide the initial escort.

(emphasis mine)

The F-16 was already in the air, in the vicinity.

Also - it was abundantly clear from a very early point in this flight that something had gone seriously, seriously wrong. The flight path not only did not conform to ATC instructions, it made no sense from an operational standpoint and there was zero radio contact. Unlike on 9/11, when the airplanes - even if deviating from their assigned course - were clearly under some sort of human control and there was even some intermittant radio contact. The Payne Stewart case looked very much like an airplane with no one at the controls. The 9/11 hijackings, at least initially, bore some resemblance to an equipment malfunction or some other ambiguous situation. That cost us some time in responding to the situation.

Catching an airplane in flight is harder than it appears - airliners do not always travel at their maximum speed, but they can go quite fast. Trans-sonic flight is expensive in fuel - an interceptor has to balance speed in getting there with able to remain airborne long enough to do some good. Burn all your gas getting there in a hurry you won’t be able to stay up long enough to do anything once you arrive.

Not to mention trying to find just a handful of airplanes on radar screens with thousands and thousands of potential “targets”.

This point has been hashed and rehashed on this board - search on the 9/11 threads if you’re interested.