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According to the Associated Press, fighters were scrambled by NORAD 67 times in the 9 month period preceding 9/11/01, so apparently it was not an uncommon occurance.
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Yes...NORAD has changed their timeline and stories many times. Originally they said they were first notified about Flight 77 after 9:20. But then in the book "Among the Heroes", the pilots who were at Langley claim they were called by NORAD much earlier and told to get into their planes and they then sat on the runway for some time awaiting instructions. They also claim they were then told to fly to New York, although NORAD officials say they were ordered to fly to Washington.
Better yet, on 9/13/01 in front of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, General Myers was asked to give a detailed account of the Air Force's response that day and he never made any mention of any fighters taking off from Langley. CBS was the first to report the Langley fighters on 9/15/01 in a Dan Rather news broadcast where he said "CBS has learned....." without giving any source of the information. After that, all the other news channels reported the same. Now that has become a part of the official story.
During the 9/11 Commission hearings, the blame was thought to lay at the FAA's feet since they had waiting over a half hour before notifying NORAD, but they then changed their story and said they notified them much sooner, and NORAD went along with this and then blamed this "exercise" for the delay.
Either way you cut it, there was a 40 minute gap from the time the plane first went off course to when interceptors took off. Regulations for both NORAD and the FAA call for this to happen "immediately".
I have read the excuse that this was an unusual situation and they were not prepared for this, but this was not an unusual situation at all as interceptors are sent up very regularly when planes go off course or when they have communication problems with pilots. The Associated Press had reported that NORAD had sent up interceptors over 60 times during 2001 before 9/11, so this was not an unusual procedure. If anyone remembers the Paine Stewart flight a few years ago, you would remember that interceptors went up to make contact with the plane. The fact that this was a hijacking should make no difference as NORAD was supposed to have responded long before any hijacking was confirme
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1. Neither 'fog of war' nor the unprecedented nature of the attack, nor the fact that there were one or more hijackings can explain the delayed response given standard procedure for air emergencies. 2. Air emergencies begin at the first sign that a plane is not responding to commands, not communicating with the FAA towers, heading off course for any period of time, or losing its transponder electronic identification signal. 3. Some combination of all these things happened on all four flights in the early part of the scenario, and all led to increased communication with the planes, cross talk among controllers, and alerts to both FAA, NORAD and military responders before they were identified as hijacked planes or suicide missions. 4. Standard procedure requires an immediate response for any sign of an air emergency, and there is no delay period in scrambling to intercept during these events while FAA or other agencies try to determine the nature of the emergency at a distance. The first purpose of an interception is close assessment of the situation and then either surveillance, assistance or guided flight of the plane in trouble. 5. In the year previous to 9/11 the FAA/NORAD procedures had worked efficiently to respond in a timely fashion to 67 air emergencies. 6. Normal scramble times of between 6 and 10 minutes upon notification, which happens very soon after the first controller sights signs of trouble or miscommunication, because lives are at stake, were stretched to periods of over an hour and NORAD planes got no guidance toward their targets once in the air. 7. Additional scramble and defense procedures to protect P-56, the air space over the White House and Capitol, guided by the National Capitol Area Regional Communication Center, now located in Herndon, VA were not activated that day, despite radar alerts of an unidentified plane entering the restricted Air Defense Identification Zone 50 miles out from DC. 8. Additional planes and NORAD bases could have been tasked, including bases in Canada, northern Virginia, New Jersey and other Air National Guard sites closer to both New York and Washington than the Otis AFB and Langley AFB NORAD sites used. Based on a call from the Secret Service, planes from Andrews AFB were scrambled after the Pentagon was hit. 9. The scrambled planes were sent up too late to intercept the New York attack planes, but not to intercept Flight 77. 10. DOT Secretary Norman Minetta's testimony about a conversation between an unidentified young man and Vice President Cheney in the White House command room concerning Flight 77's approach into restricted space is consistent with a stand down order, but not a shoot down order. 11. The reported shoot down order did not follow down the chain of command, if given, which would normally result in disciplinary action. 12. The military and NORAD were alerted very early in the scenario by phone calls from FAA controllers to military bases, through phone bridges with FAA and other agencies, and through their own liaisons stationed at the FAA command centers involved, yet they did not respond in a timely fashion.
The NORAD timelines provided the 9-11 Commission all begin when the FAA officially notified the NEADS (North East Air Defense System) HQ in Rome, New York at 8:37:52 AM.
But the FAA air traffic controllers at the Boston Center, shortly after realizing they had a hijacking, first attempted to notify both the Massachusetts ANG at Otis AFB at Cape Cod and the 177th NJANG wing at the Atlantic City Airport in Pomona, Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey.
According to the Staff Statement #17 'Improving Homeland Defense,' released during the June 17th public hearing, 'Boston Center did not follow the routine protocol in seeking assistance through the prescribed chain of command. In addition to making notification within the FAA, Boston Center took the initiative, at 8:34, to contact the military through the FAA's Cape Cod facility. They also tried to obtain assistance from a former alert site in Atlantic City, UNAWARE IT HAD BEEN PHASED OUT (emphasis added). At 8:37:52, Boston Center reached NEADS. This was the first notification received by the military – at any level ˆ that American 11 had been hijacked.'
< www.9-11commission.gov/hearings12/staff_statement_17.pdf p.5 >
When that first call came in from FAA Boston Center to the 177th NJANG, there were two F-16s on the tarmac ready to take off, which if armed, could have easily intercepted the second hijacked plane UA 175, which entered New Jersey airspace four minutes flying time from Atlantic City.
Jack White, the former Facility Manager, Air Traffic Control Command Center of the FAA, '∑The hijackings should have been reported by the controllers up their management chain to the regional operations centers. The regional operations centers should have passed the information to the Washington Operations Center. The Operations Center should have advised the FAA official assigned the responsibility of coordinating military assistance. I cannot say that during the attacks of 9/11 my personal understanding of the process was crystal clear, but I did know that the request for military assistance had to come from headquarters.'
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Transportation Secretary Norman Minetta told the Commission that he went to the White House Situation Room and heard Cheney being asked by an aide about such an order at regular intervals as Flight 77 was approaching the Pentagon, evoking an angry response from Cheney confirming the order to shoot the plane down just moments before it hit the target. Even without such a shootdown order, a number of standard interception strategies should have been carried out long before the plane approached DC airspace or the Pentagon.
NORAD testimony revealed that after the Pentagon was hit Secret Service agents at the White House called Andrews AFB directly asking for them to put up a defense to Flight 93 or other aircraft, and Andrews responded at that point. NORAD’s testimony about “the fog of war” suggested that “confusion” within the military played a key role in the failure to intercept. In fact, Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers, is on record as saying that the Pentagon’s “crisis-action team was up” at 8:50 am, just after the first attack. This means that the FAA, the secret service, NORAD, and the Pentagon were all in constant communication with one another, and had access to every radar screen in the country. Why did they wait another 35 minutes before launching any intercept planes? There should have been no need for the Secret Service to call Andrews AFB directly, when the acting commander of the Air National Guard, stationed at Andrews is an integral part of that “crisis-action team.”
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9/11 Commission Member: Sir....according to NORAD guidelines, when a plane is hijacked or when the FAA loses communication with the pilot, or when a plane goes off course by more than 5 miles, NORAD is to send up an interceptor immediately to make contact with the plane and escort them to the nearest airport if need be. So why did NORAD wait over 40 minutes after Flight 77 went off course, and over half an hour after being notified by the FAA that Flight 77 had been hijacked before sending up an interceptor?
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More lies and changing stories from NORAD:
GEN. ARNOLD: Thank you, sir, and I will try to do that to the best of my ability. And perhaps General McKinley has some data that he could shed light on, because I have been retired a little while, and do not have access to the staff for some of the very specifics on that. But I will try to do my best.
As you know from previous testimony from General Eberhardt to Congress, we were in the middle of a NORAD exercise at that particular time, which means that basically our entire staff was focused on being able to do the air operations center mission, which was our job to do. We had just come out of a video teleconference with the NORAD staff and with our folks at that particular time, when I was handed a note that we had a possible hijacking at Boston center, and it had come from the Northeast Air Defense Command, Colonel Bob Mahr (ph), who is commander up there, and he had requested that I call him immediately. And I was upstairs in our facility, immediately went downstairs, picked up the phone, asking on the way to my staff, "Is this part of the exercise?" Because quite honestly, and frankly we do do hijacking scenarios as we go through these exercises from time to time. But I realized that it was not. This was real life.
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