Ok. You’re the President of the United States. The White House Chief of Staff approaches you and whispers in your ear “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” and then he steps back. Sitting there, you know:
A plane hit the first tower at 8:46 AM.
A plane hit the second tower at 9:03 AM.
The time between the first plane and the second plane is approximately 15 minutes.
Therefore if there is a third plane it will hit at approximately 9:15 AM.
“A plane hits the North Tower at 8:46 AM. A plane hits the South Tower at 9:03 AM. What do you do? What do you do?”
“I want to know how many planes there are.”
Knowing how many planes there are is only a good thing to know if you believe you can send F-16 pilots up to intercept them and shoot them down. Apparently two F-16’s were scrambled on the east coast and headed out to sea. (Heard this on a program this weekend during the 9/11 programs).
I too would want to know what else is going on in the sky, but I would have immediately scrambled as many fighter planes as I could from every airbase in the country to make sure I had pilots in the air close enough to any rogue planes. At the point of the second plane hit, did anyone know if there were planes on the west coast that had been similarly hijacked and were aiming at other targets on the west coast or in the mid-west?
Does it sound radical? Maybe. But my job is to protect the american people. Shooting down a plane is a terrible option, but when people are flying those planes into buildings, it’s the only option that minimizes the body count.
Then, I’d go back and read “Cat in the Hat” to the kids (because it’s all about the kids, isn’t it?)
After getting on AF-ONE, I’d pick my least favorite country, fabricate evidence against them (making sure to use great words and phrases like “unfettered access”, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” or “WMD’s,” “Chemical Weapons”, etc.), send one of my administrations most credible people to the UN, and have him present that fake evidence to get a UN rubber stamp to bomb the country as long as possible, fully prepared to maintain a permanent presence in the region after the war is over. Just because Iraq happens to be in the middle of all the middle eastern oil is just a coincidence!
Make sure I look good in baseball caps, specifically ones that say “FDNY” and “NYPD”, and practice, practice, practice throwing the first pitch out at the World Series to give the people of our country and the world that I am a man’s man and not a girly-man, who throws like most politicians (for a recent example, check Obama’s throwing motion - no confidence at all).
I think that gets us through the first few months.
Scramble fighter jets to shoot down commercial airplanes filled with American civilians? And just how do you think the Presidant’s advisors could find out how many planes had been hijacked in a reasonable time frame (like the fifteen minutes you propose)? Call each of them and ask?
No, on 9/11 the first thing the President should do is get his ass to a safe place where he can get more information as it becomes available and not start reacting before the situation became clear. A situation of this magnitude is never clear as it is happening.
Ordering all flights grounded was a good move, but in the time it took to get everyone redirected to an airfield any number of other deliberate crashes could have happened. And there would have been nothing anyone else could have done about that
They did scramble fighter jets to shoot down commercial airplanes filled with American civilians, only they had to do it so fast they didn’t have any weapons and the plan was to fly the fighter jets into the airliners.
Ah what would I do? First thing ground all flights and any flight that didn’t obey would be shot out of the sky. Then I would not jump all over the place like a grasshopper on a hot griddle, but head directly to Washington and immediately address the country. I would say that this is a serious attack and everyone had better be prepared for some belt-tightening. I would say (and would have already ordered) that there be a task force sent to Afghanistan to destroy the dastardly government that had allowed this outrage to be trained and deployed from their territory. having destroyed the government, I would depart, leaving the Afghanis to sort out their own problems.
It was a very good move but not one made by the president. If I recall correctly it wasn’t even head of the FAA that made that call, but some underlings.
This. America is under attack and you’re a prime target. If you stay sitting in the middle of a group of civilians, not only are you not dealing with the problem but you’re potentially endangering yourself and everyone else around you. Get secured, get informed and go from there.
I’d say, “Sorry, kids, but something very important came up and I have to leave right now”, then hustle to the limo. I’d call the Secretary of Defense and tell him to get some fighters up in the air around major cities, then call the FAA director and tell him to halt all takeoffs right away, and to turn all outbound international flights and bring them back in case the plotters were trying to escape the country. I’d call the FBI and CIA and get them looking into every person that was on the planes that hit the buildings. Then I hustle back to Washington with a fighter escort.
-FAA officials recognize a terrorist attack is going on, one of the mid-level guys at FAA unilaterally takes the initiative and issues the order to ground all air traffic in the United States (first time in history this has happened.)
-It isn’t until some time before air traffic control can recognize what planes are hijacked and what planes aren’t, there are a few planes whose transponders are turned off–one of those planes is United Flight 93.
-By the time it is known definitively that United Flight 93 is hijacked two fighter jets are immediately scrambled, because we do not keep them in a state of immediate readiness they launched without ammunition, the two pilots had planned to ram the passenger plane out of the sky (one pilot planned to ram the cockpit and the other planned to ram the tail.)
-By the time those two pilots are in the air, the passengers have revolted on U93 and the hijackers (we assume) intentionally crash it into a Pennsylvania field.
As President there is very, very little you could have had time to do before all of that went down. At that point all three planes that were going to hit their targets had already done so and U93 was already happening as it was going to happen.
As President, even though I have been in the military I would immediately recognize I do not possess the expertise to know what appropriate tactical action needs to be taken so I would immediately consult with my military and security advisers as to what options are on the table and make the decision to the best of my ability.
To answer this question honestly, I think you are all going to have to lose ten years of living with the idea of planes as weapons.
I guarantee you that if any of you were president on that morning, you would not in any way have decided to ground all planes by the same you had even left the school. At that stage there will still have been confusion about what was actually happening, no chance that you immediately deciphered the terrorists plans.
All replies so far stink of hindsight, and are not taking into account the mentalities of the time. If you were president today you would ground all planes immediately, but its not today, its ten years ago, and planes weren’t weapons then.
Just to give you a picture of how different things were back then:
At 8:37 AM the military was alerted by Air Traffic Control that a hijacking may have happened.
By 9:03 AM both towers had already been hit, the President was notified at 9:05 that a second plane had hit the WTC (he was notified at 8:50 a first plane had hit.)
At this point everyone knew that we had been attacked but things were totally confused from a command and control perspective. No contingency plans existed for this, our national air defense was still preparing for fighting off Russian bombers coming from the North over Canada.
As an idea as to how confused things were, the Vice President was not taken to his bunker by the Secret Service until 9:36, moments before the Pentagon was hit.
Before 10:00 U93 was down, and realistically given the operational performance and things on the table, there isn’t a damn thing any President could have done to have changed a single thing about that day.
Today things are vastly different:
We have SAM batteries that are kept fairly at the ready to provide the ability to blast any plane out of the skies around D.C. if necessary. (I do not believe they are kept up and going, but they can be deployed in moments and their crews are required to remain close by, and periodically you will read that they are “armed and ready” for certain days where there is even a rumor of something going down.)
We have fighter jets in the sky pretty much continuously. If you’ve read any news articles about commercial jets being escorted by fighters periodically, that is now very common if there is even some sort of problem. On the 10th anniversary of 9/11 3 passengers locked themselves inside a bathroom, F-16s were immediately deployed to begin escorting this plane. It ended up being nothing, you have all probably read various news articles in which people have been on planes that have been escorted by fighters for various reasons (comm failures, passenger misbehaving, etc.)
If this sort of thing were to happen again there is a much more realistic chance a President would first find out after the military had already responded and he would be told, “we have a hijacked airliner that isn’t responding to communications, we have the ability to take it out, do we have the go ahead?” and the President would essentially have to make that call.
