F-16s Tracking Stolen Cessna

Originally posted by king9072
They knew the airliners were taken over within minutes, additionally they're commercial airlines which are obviously available on military radar. If it were possible to fool the greatest airforce in the world, simply by turning a transponder off, wouldn't we have already been invaded? Get real. So they knew the planes are taken over, and then obviously know where they are.... and for over an hour not 1 jet is even off the ground?

Yet, here we have a canadian plane, with no transponder (not a commercial jet), which just decided to fly into the states... and its magically intercepted... how did they know where he was? MAGIC? SORCERY?

OF course its magic fool.

The FAA knew the planes were hijacked. If the FAA doesn't request a launch then they don't launch. The transponders were left on, but changed, on 9/11. Again, the planes were ALREADY IN US AIRSPACE, so the time factor was much smaller. The 15 minute intercept time is to intercept a plane IN THE ADIZ. The entire US defense was designed to stop aircraft from entering the US, not aircraft that were supposed to be in the US, and were already here.

I also love how you claim they didn't launch for over 1 hour. Nice try at a blatant lie there. The first plane was hijacked between 8:14-8:20. The FAA realized that it had been hijacked and notified NORAD around 8:36, and the first fighters launched out of Otis at 8:46. That's a hell of a lot less than an hour.

The Cessna had a transponder, the question is whether it was on, but it doesn't matter. He was OUTSIDE THE US entering the country, so they were already keeping an eye on him, but Canada requested they intercept him. They even watch Canadian airspace coming into the US, because one of the routes that would be used by Soviet bombers was through Canada.

North American Aerospace Defense Command spokesman Mike Kucharek said lethal force was an option, but one that was ruled out soon after a pair of F-16 fighter jets began tailing the plane.

"In this instance, I don't think it was considered," Kucharek said. "We knew very early on it was a stolen aircraft, learned pretty early on he didn't have hostile intent."

"He didn't threaten population centers and didn't appear to be threatening critical infrastructure," Kucharek said. "And then, you don't want to provoke someone into doing something they weren't going to do in the first place by taking some sort of aggressive posture."

Kucharek said the decision to shoot down goes to the president or the secretary of defense. If both are unavailable, a group within NORAD can decide.

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