Payne Stewart & friends were in a LearJet, which is a very fast plane even if it is civilian, and capable of climbing to a very high altitude. They sent fighters jets in part because fighters can match the performance of a Lear, and a lot of other airplanes can’t.
Again, the Air Force in this situation where functioning more like state troopers on the freeway than combat pilots. Contact was lost very early on in the flight (during climb-out) so they knew something was wrong. The plane did not follow air traffic instructions (yes, Berkut, they failed to comply with their clearance ). Clearly, something was wrong. Since the plane was, apparently, going to continue climbing upward you needed to send someone who could potentially match the top altitude of a Lear without endangering the chase pilot. Yeah, a fighter jet fits that bill nicely.
And when the fighters intercepted? They first spent some time trying to look into the cockpit (which was frosted over - an indication that pressure had been lost), using visual signals, and so forth to determine if anyone was still concious on board (apparently not). So… looks like the plane depressurized and either knocked out or killed everyone aboard. Well, no foul play, at least not the sort that leads to delibrate crashing into buildings.
Did they shoot it down? No - they followed it until it ran out of fuel while air traffic steered other traffic away from its path. Fortunately, that path did not take it over densely inhabited areas where it was likely to cause massive destruction. The idea was to give any aboard who might still be alive every possible chance to do something to save themselves. (Pretty darn hopeless, really, given their maximum altitude, but hey…)
Now, if the choice was to let it crash into a city, or shoot it down over farm country…? Yeah, they would have brought it down. But that wasn’t necessary. So they let it run out of gas on its own. Our military doesn’t really want to get into the business of shooting down civilian planes for any reason. That’s not why those guys volunteered for the job.
CurtC: Please see [url=http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=whacko]this definition from www.dictionary.com[/url. You’ll see that the spelling I used is one of the two provided.
Well, everyone needs a hobby, and you can’t tilt at the windmills all the time – the folks inside get a touch cranky about that, particularly when trying to get some sleep.
I think, Broomstick, that the whacked-out conspiracy theories are akin to a religious dogma for those who hold them. And for those folks, they very well can tilt all the time.
I don’t think the President or anyone in the administration knew exactly what was going to happen, or on what date. But it does not seem implausible to me that, due to the various warnings from our European allies, they did know that a terrorist attack was probably in the works. If they had wanted to prevent the attack, beefing up security, warning their defense agencies to be extra-vigilant, and directing the CIA, FBI, etc. to investigate the threat would have been the thing to do. What I suspect is that they just didn’t try to prevent whatever was coming, because they did want a Pearl Harbor type event to occur, so as to have justification for launching the Iraq War. Also, justification to reduce civil liberties here at home. I don’t think anyone else has mentioned that, but doesn’t it seem likely that they were just waiting for a good excuse to introduce the PATRIOT Act?
Re the theory that Roosevelt failed to try to prevent Pearl Harbor, as I understand it, it’s believed that he and whoever else was in on it assumed that the attack wouldn’t amount to much, as, due to racist assumptions, they didn’t think the Japanese were capable of pulling off a major attack. Likewise, IF the Bush administration decided not to try very hard to prevent an attack, they, too, may have assumed that it wouldn’t amount to much. They may have assumed that a bunch of fanactics from a third world nation just would not be capable of pulling off anything major.
And re the failure to send Airforce planes to investigate, I agree that there probably was not enough time for them to suceed in stoping the attack. Once the planes had been hijacked, the puzzling thing isn’t that the attacks were not prevented, the puzzling thing is that the Airforce did not send planes to investigate sooner.
It’s being said that this seeming failure to investigae was not unusual; that when a plane goes silent and departs from its flight plan, it’s usually not a hijacking, and while it is looked into, the looking into isn’t fast; isn’t deemed urgent.
But, these were not small pvt planes, they were large passenger planes operated by comercial airlines. At close to the same time, four such planes went silent. And they did not make small departures from their flight plans; they turned around and headed back the way they came. They were flying from the east coast to west coast destinations. They turned around and headed back toward NY and DC. Shouldn’t this have looked very suspicious?
As the story makes clear, jets were scrambled, but our defenses that day were oriented out towards threats coming in, not towards threats from within. Now, the article says, our defenses do both.
Simple, clear explanation.
If you refer to the theory that Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen because he wanted to get into WW2, I have no idea if it’s true or not. But I’m sufficiently familiar with it to know that it’s believed that, due to racist assumptions, Roosevelt believed that an attack by the Japanese wouldn’t amount to much.
It was what I’ve heard about the Pearl Harbor theory that gave me the idea that perhaps, if it is true that the Bush administration just sat back and didn’t try to prevent the terrorist attack they’d been warned about, they may have assumed that it wouldn’t amount to much. An attack would not have to kill anything like as many as died on 9/11 to be used for their purposes.
"But retired Army Col. Dan Smith, the former director of research for the Center for Defense Information, believes even a scaled-back contingent of fighter jets would have been enough to protect the U.S. - if intelligence information were distributed properly.
"CDI is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1972 by retired military officers, that conducts research on various aspects of global security. Smith served for 26 years in the Army, 23 of them in military intelligence.
" ‘The failures were of imagination and of intelligence centralization that might - might - have picked out the disparate information and pieced it together,’ Smith said.
"Smith noted there were previous attempts to conduct terrorism activities similar to what happened on Sept. 11. ‘The abortive attempt by Algerians in the early 1990s to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower; the thwarted effort to blow a dozen U.S. commercial aircraft out of the sky in the Pacific; the strange behavior of a number of Saudi men in flight training - not caring too much about landing and taking off; connections of key people with known terrorists/terrorist organizations, etc.’ "
Whatever else it may have been, 9/11 was cirtainly a major intelligence failure. In particular, the method used – crashing planes into buildings – was not something so unprecidented that no one should have been expected to have considered the possiblity. The Eiffel Tower attempt should have been enough to alert our govt officials and intelligence agencies to to possiblity.
Most of this has been addressed quite well, but I wanted to add that visual contact was not made until 1hr 25min after last radio contact from Stewart’s jet, and that was from a USAF F-16 that was already in the air for a test flight out of Eglin AFB.
Hazel: Actually, I was referring to the asinine assertion that President Bush et all did not try to avert an attack. But thanks for bringing up that other asnine assertion that President Roosevelt “let Pearl Harbor happen.”
FYI: When I asked for evidence, evidence is what I expected. What you provided was a load of malarkey.
You’re making three unwarranted assumptions:[list=1][li]That commercial airliners almost never deviate from plan. Broomstick already cited one instance where a commercial airliner had a complete electrical failure over Chicago, and implied that there are relatively frequent occurrences of such apparently mysterious deviations from plan that have mundane explanations.[/li][li]That there’s someone tracking air traffic for the entire country, or a significant part of it, who would notice four plans having significant deviations at the same time. Given the volume of air traffic over the U.S. at any given time, four might seem unusually high, but not suspicous, IMHO, in the sense of automatically leaping to the thought that terrorists have hijacked the planes. Now, there probably is; prior to 9/11, I doubt anyone continously monitored the overall state of air traffic down to individual planes.[/li][li]That, even if I’m wrong about two and there is some person doing that exact job, such a person was slow to be suspicious. Look at it another way: it only took an hour to get fighter jets in the air, after discarding all the more plausible scenarios like equipment failure, and making normal efforts to contact the planes and find out if something is wrong.[/li][/list=1]
I watched the first interview with Cheney after 9/11. He reported that a fighter was sent after the Pennsylvania flight, and the President did give the order to shoot it down. Then the plane was down. It took officials two hours to “confirm” that it had not been shot down.
Monty, of the “Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen” theory, I said that I had no idea if it was true or not. Re the “Bush let 9/11 happen” theory, I’ve been saying “if”. As I’m not asserting that either theory is true, why ask me to provide proof? I’m just speculating as to what might or might not have happened. I’m asking, could this theory be true? Is it possible?
). Clearly, something was wrong. Since the plane was, apparently, going to continue climbing upward you needed to send someone who could potentially match the top altitude of a Lear without endangering the chase pilot. Yeah, a fighter jet fits that bill nicely.