Military Reaction on 9/11

I might be opening a can of worms with this, but someone said this might need a new thread, and I agree, so here goes....

Oh, and a point that I wanted to bring up that a lot of people seem to miss is how the planes weren't tracked on radar. There are two types of tracking going on with radar. There is the IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) which sends a code providing the planes altitude, airspeed, and location by putting a signal on the radar screen, and there is the skin paint. When you are talking skin paint, you are talking a MUCH more difficult target to track. You have about a two foot radar screen to look at, and most skin paint targets are tiny little dots on the screen. When you see a tv show or movie showing a radar screen, and you see the "tags" on the screen, that is actually the IFF, not the skin paint. You would have to have a magnifying glass and a good idea of where to look for the target on a skin paint, until the plane was very close to the radar transmitter. That's why the last couple of minutes of the flights were seen on radar. They had flown close to an area where there were several radar antennas so they were able to see them.

As far as the interceptors go, in a normal situation, which 9/11 started out being, there were very few interceptors sitting active alert, waiting to launch and intercept an airplane, and most of them were in the wrong spot. Not all airforce bases have fighters sitting alert armed, waiting to launch. Once they GOT a fighter launched it generally only has about an hour to an hour and a half of internal fuel, for subsonic flight. If they're carrying external tanks, they can only get to high subsonic speeds unless they drop the tanks off, at which point they're right back to where they started. Afterburners are great for getting speed built up fast, but you're dumping raw fuel into the exhaust, and that eats up a LOT of fuel really fast.

"But at the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the basement of the Pentagon, Air Force staff officers monitoring every inch of airspace over the northeastern seaboard would have caught that first hijacking when Flight 11's identification transponder stopped transmitting at 8:20 - automatically triggering a radar alarm.

With their capability to monitor developing "situations" by tapping into military and civilian radars, U.S. military commanders would have also seen Flight 175 turn abruptly south 25 minutes later - just as they had watched on radar in October 1999 when pro golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet abruptly departed its flight path while en route to Dallas. [CNN, Oct 26, 1999]

In that legendary intercept, a fighter jet out of Tyndall, Florida was diverted from a training flight to escort the Lear, whose pilot had become incapacitated, trapping Stewart in the stratosphere. An F-16 was reportedly sitting off the left wingtip of Payne's pilotless business jet within 19 minutes of the FAA alert. [ABC News, Oct 25, 1999]

If NORAD had been as quick to scramble or divert airborne fighters on Sept. 11, two "anti-terrorist" F-15's on armed alert could have been sent south from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. Flying at full afterburners without edging over the Atlantic to disperse their sonic footprint, two of the fastest fighters on the planet would have broken a few windows. But all the glass in the Twin Towers might have stayed intact had the "fast-movers" intercepted Flight 11 over the Hudson River at least six minutes from Manhattan."

I have several things that are wrong with some of these statements. First is that comparing trying to track an airliner that is moving at 500+mph with no transponder to Payne Stewarts Lear jet travelling at 3-400mph WITH a transponder is misleading. It goes back to the Lear broadcasting exactly where it is, and flying a reasonably straight line, as opposed to a plane that is NOT broadcasting any information about its location and is manuvering. The fighters could have launched and gotten to the AREA they lost the transponder in, but it would have been luck for them to find it again.

An F-15 going supersonic would burn through the onboard fuel in a matter of maybe 30 minutes, and I'm not even sure it CAN go supersonic with more than the fuselage missiles onboard. Otherwise you get too much weight and drag pulling against the forward thrust. The four forces of flight are thrust/drag and lift/weight. The more drag you have the lower your top speed is. You would be talking two to three 600 gallon external fuel tanks, plus up to 8 missiles weighing up to 100 pounds apiece, all causing drag on the aircraft, which would slow it down.
Fuel and load: internal fuel 13,123 lb (5952 kg);
external fuel: 21,645 lb (9818 kg) in two CFTs and up to three 610-US gal (2309-liter~ drop tanks;
Range: ferry range 3,100 nm (3,570 miles; 5745 km) with CFTs and drop tanks, or 2,400 nm (2,765 miles; 4445 km) with drop tanks;
combat radius 685 nrn (790 miles; 1270 km)
All of those ranges are low-medium subsonic speeds. From what I've heard aferburner is 125% of normal fuel consumption or somewhere around there.

The interception of the Lear was again completed with a working transponder on both aircraft.

Another statement that I have trouble with is this.
"Also, there is an Air Defense Intercept Zone just off shore for the entire Atlantic Coast. This zone is constantly being patrolled. In general fast movers would not need to be scrambled. They can be diverted from routine patrol and training flights for the intercept. The odds are that on a beautiful blue morning in September many flights would be on patrol just off shore. It would be most improbable that even one commercial flight could go more than fifteen minutes without being intercepted."

This is simply not true. There are no active patrols of the ADIZ zone. Aircraft entering the zone without proper id are intercepted by land based fighters that sit 5, 10, or 15 minute alert, meaning that they have 5, 10, or 15 minutes to be airborne after the alert is sounded. We have alert fighters here that sit on the end of the runway in a shed waiting in case the alert is sounded. Those are the only fighters that are armed here, and there are either three or four waiting to launch at any time. Sometimes it's three, other times it's four. It takes up to two hours to scramble an unarmed fighter. You have to load weapons, get the crew in the plane, run engines for 45 minutes to an hour to align the navigation system, and THEN launch. It takes time to get the weapons out of storage, out to the plane, uploaded, etc.

I'm not saying that the military did everything they could, or that there weren't things that could have been done. I am just trying to clear up what seems to me to be some ignorance on the part of writers trying to sound knowledgeable about something they might not be.

Oh, and going back to some of the hijackers not being able to solo a Cessna, so how would they be able to fly a 767? You could put just about ANYONE that knows how to turn on an autopilot, and punch coordinates into a nav system into a cockpit of a plane in the air and they would be able to fly it. I'm sorry to all those that don't believe you could use Microsoft Flight Simulator to learn to fly, but I have seen the game, and compared it to real cockpits, and it's VERY accurate. I used to fly some when I was younger, and all the lessons in Flight Sim are the same ones I learned when I was younger, just with more detail to them than I had. You wouldn't have to be able to solo a Cessna, which would require taking off, landing, and normal flight to be able to fly a plane that is already in midair and you have no intention of landing.

And another thing to remember about the military reaction, is that until 9/11 ALL hijacked airliners were flown somewhere, landed and demands were made, so the military could have figured that was going to happen again, so they could wait a little and see if they landed somewhere, before trying to intercept the flights.

Zap, thank you for an educated and lucid report! Reasonable and calm thinking people will agree 100% with you on this, but.......


.....stand by for the looney tunes, conspiracy lovers, and anti-American rhetoric that abound here on ATS.

BTW, the F15 will easily go trans-sonic with a full load of ordnance. It is the only US fighter/interceptor/bomber that has more thrust than gross weight, enabling absolute vertical acceleration.

[edit on 28-6-2005 by Army]

So If a foreign country sent commercial jets into America, they could then bomb America for a peroid of 2 hours and there is nothing the Americans could do about it what so ever.

Originally posted by aelphaeis_mangarae
So If a foreign country sent commercial jets into America, they could then bomb America for a peroid of 2 hours and there is nothing the Americans could do about it what so ever.

Wow. Just goes to show you don't care about the truth, you just want to blame Bush.

I didn't say that the military COULDN'T have stopped the attacks on 9/11, I said it would have been harder than people think.

"I'm not saying that the military did everything they could, or that there weren't things that could have been done. I am just trying to clear up what seems to me to be some ignorance on the part of writers trying to sound knowledgeable about something they might not be."

This isn't an attempt to say the military did everything they could, or that the government did nothing wrong. This is an attempt to combat disinformation that is being spread about how easy it would have been for the military to stop the attacks if they had wanted to. I think that something odd DID happen on 9/11, but if you read what writers are saying, there were tons of armed military planes just waiting to take off, and as soon as they were in the air they could have shot down the planes, and that is simply not true. ALL this post is, is an attempt to inform people about a little bit of how radar and military intercepts work, and "set the record straight".

And also...

Originally posted by Zaphod58
An F-16 was reportedly sitting off the left wingtip of Payne's pilotless business jet within 19 minutes of the FAA alert. [ABC News, Oct 25, 1999]

...you don't have to make much effort to explain that, because it's a mistake: the NTSB document on the Stewart case changed timezones part way through its timeline, so it took an hour longer for the intercept than some people reported (76 minutes from noting something's wrong to the first plane arriving in the vicinity). See the change from EDT to CDT at www.ntsb.gov...

[edit on 29-6-2005 by ashmok]

That's a good point, I had heard that somewhere and forgot it. I didn't even look into that intercept, just that they had the transponder on.

[edit on 29-6-2005 by Zaphod58]

Very informative post I always wondered what the military's reaction
was to 9/11 hijackings, and how radars work. Good Read (I got a lot to learn!!)

Don't forget also that the F-16 that was vectored to Stewarts plane was on a training flight, Unless that F-16 was conducting live fire excercises over Florida that morning, it is unlikley that he was armed.

A little more about how radar works, after doing a little more research.

Most of the radar systems in the US are actually Air Traffic Control radars. There are two types of radar systems with ATC. Primary and Secondary. Primary is used from 0-18,000 feet. It picks up skin paints, and will track planes with or without a transponder. However without a transponder you have no way of knowing who is who.

Secondary radar is used from 18,000=space basically. Seconday will NOT pick up skin paints, and unless there is a transponder will not see an airplane. The reason Primary is not used is because the ATC would pick up TOO much with the Primary over 18,000. All civilian flights going from Point A to Point B travel above 18,000 for fuel efficiency, so the radar set would pick up EVERYTHING that was just transitting the airspace over the radar set.

There ARE military radars, which are considered Primary Radar sets, in the US, but most of these are pointed OUT not looking IN. The majority of them are located in Alaska, and along both coasts looking for bombers and missiles entering US airspace. I believe something like 85-90% of the radars in the US are civilian ATC radars, but I don't have the exact figures.

Originally posted by Boatphone

Originally posted by aelphaeis_mangarae
So If a foreign country sent commercial jets into America, they could then bomb America for a peroid of 2 hours and there is nothing the Americans could do about it what so ever.

Wow. Just goes to show you don't care about the truth, you just want to blame Bush.

2nd post warns against looney tunes and anti-american rhetoric. 2 posts after that we get "wah wah wah you hate bush" from absolutely nothing. This is absolute proof that it goes both ways on this forum. Way to let your team down, Boatphone.

This isn't an attempt to say the military did everything they could, or that the government did nothing wrong...I think that something odd DID happen on 9/11

Can you go into a little more detail on these oddities? You seem to focus almost completely on what wasn't wrong with NORAD's response.

The problem is only partially covered here. To believe this is the end of the intercept debate is putting on your shades when the sun is yet to rise.

Bush put Cheney in charge of all agencies in early 2001, for conducting anti-Terror and War Game exercises. With this position, Cheney had instant communications with Secret Service, Army, Norad, FBI and was the person they answered too.

He was in charge on Sept 11th, Bush was doing a photo-op at a Primary School, Cheney was in a bunker controlling the war games with a open line to ALL agencies in America with the Secret Service.

There were mulitple war games being run that week and on Sept 11th, the reason there were so few fighters on ground was because they were up north over the ocean running drills with Canada of what to do when the Russians invade from over the ocean!

Now, again in London we have a 1,000 people team doing drills in the exact spots that were bombed that day. They were in these tunnels for an anti-terror drill.

"Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life."
www.prisonplanet.com...

These Al-Qaedas have some pretty damn good contacts in the intelligence and defence communities. If you can't comprehend CIA/Mossad/M15 working together to summon support for a western worlds war on the middle east for it's resources and for Isreal, then i guess there must be spies in the governments because the Terrorists have scored TWO attacks during anti-terror exercises and war games so they are getting info from the inside, there's a hole in the bucket.

Because I think what's odd was outside the scope of NORAD. I'm trying to keep this dealing with NORAD and misinformation. The oddities I mention go into who was and wasn't warned, how much warning they had, things along those lines. I think that based on what they knew, and past hijackings that NORAD did what they thought was right, with what they knew.

Until 9/11 I think there were maybe four hijacked planes that had crashed, or been brought down. Every other hijacking in history the plane was landed somewhere and demands were made. When 9/11 went down, the initial response, since NORAD probably hadn't been warned, or at least not ALL of NORAD, they would have taken their time trying to find the planes, and the attitude would have been "Let's see where they land and what their demands are."

My feelings about 9/11 were that at least part of the government knew SOMETHING was going down but not everyone. From what I've been able to research, and find out, the military response was exactly what I would expect if they weren't warned and were running an exercise that would have slowed down response times.

The timing of the exercise was incredibly suspicious, but the fact that it was about using planes as weapons wasn't. Japan started that in WWII, so it was known for a long time it could happen. The interaction between NORAD and the FAA was rather interesting. No one can seem to agree when anyone was notified about the hijackings. The Navy Captain that was in command at NORAD, for whatever reason, I don't know if they wanted to give him experience since there was an exercise on and he had only been certified 30 days prior, did everything right according to The Book. I think that this is being blown out of proportion, him taking over. I think that this was a case of him only being recently certified to be in command, and at the last minute it was decided to let him run the exercise and get experience with a non real world situation, that turned into the real thing.

[edit on 10-7-2005 by Zaphod58]

Originally posted by TheShroudOfMemphis

The problem is only partially covered here. To believe this is the end of the intercept debate is putting on your shades when the sun is yet to rise.


There were mulitple war games being run that week and on Sept 11th, the reason there were so few fighters on ground was because they were up north over the ocean running drills with Canada of what to do when the Russians invade from over the ocean!

I'm not trying to cover the ENTIRE problem in one thread, just to try to counter some of the misinformation that's being thrown out there. I leave it up to others to draw conclusions of their own about what happened that day. I just have been seeing so much misinformation being thrown out there that I want to try to combat some of it, in areas that I know well.

Actually, even if there were no wargames going on, there were NEVER that many armed fighters sitting alert waiting to launch in recent years. Alert fighters are NEVER involved in wargames. For ANY reason. Even if you send out every other fighter in the entire wing, the Alert fighters don't launch. Their sole purpose is to be ready to launch to intercept any threats. With the scaledowns in recent years, and the changing threat they had a drawdown of alert fighters in CONUS bases. During the Cold War there was the threat of Soviet Bombers coming down through Alaska and Canada, so there were more Alert fighters in the north, but with some on either coast. As the threat changed, you saw fewer bases with Alert fighters because they weren't needed anymore according to the threat assesments.

A civilian jet liner has to be confirmed and verified before it enter US air space, if we have just two 747 heading toward the US with no response or contact coming from the planes they would not be allowed to enter.

Actually, they would be intercepted and identified as civilian airliners, then escorted to the nearest airfield. Once on the ground they would question the crew, and look into why the flightplan wasn't filed with the proper agencies. One fighter would fly right up next to them and examine the plane looking for anything suspicious, while the other flew behind them ready to fire if they did anything hostile, such as try to ram the other fighter or not obey their instructions from ATC or the fighters themselves.

O.K. Let get to the nitty gritty show the physical proof how USA knew with in 3 days who the highjackers were, how they got thier picture's and info, how they traced the car with islamic book and stuff to Muhammed Atta? for those who know 9/11 was inside job don't you guys find it VERY funny how all the "SO CALLED" Evidences (Koran, instructions whow to fly) was "Conveiniently" available for US Gov to find out it was Muslim highjackers who did it. P.S. have you ever read the documents "Operation Northern woods" Isn't it funny how these docs were written back in the 60's and clearly showed the shadow Gov with in the US Gov planning to bomb US cities so they can use it as excuses to suspend the Constitution, even if you were to believe the Documents were forgeries, don't you find it VERY interesting/shocking how they were written in th 60's and in 2001 and after 2001 USA all of a sudden has a PERMINENT WAR ON TERROR AGENDA" to deal with, Bush even said that the war on terror will probably last a hundred years.

[edit on 10-7-2005 by SiberianTiger]

This thread has to deal with NORAD, and NORAD only. I'm not going to argue about how they new what, or when they knew it. I leave that to other people. I'm dealing with what I KNOW and know well. As stated before, this is to combat misinformation about the MILITARY response on 9/11. It's not to argue about how they knew who the hijackers were, or when they knew it, or how the WTC fell, or ANYTHING else.

O.K. Let get to the nitty gritty show the physical proof who USA knew with in 3 days who the highjackers were how they got thier pics and info, who they traced the car with islamic book and stuff to Muhammed Atta?

Its called video tapes genius all our airports have them, and there were calls from the planes by flight attendants describing the hijackers it doesn't take much to math them up. Once you have their pictures and the info they used get the flight tickets you work your way up from there.