Reply #151: Is this a serious contention?

[leanings]

That aircraft should have been scrambled from Houston? Let alone the fact that the entire US would have been left undefended for any further contingency. Do you think those aircraft would have had any fuel remaining to loiter or otherwise affect the outcome of the situation?

The reason I called the idea that those bases were within "range" stupid is that "range" doesn't simply mean that the aircraft goes there at full throttle and then crashes into the ground. At that speed of 1400 mph, an Eagle can go for about 8 minutes. Even getting above Mach 1 requires getting into afterburner. That's one of the supposed advantages of the F-22: supercruise.

The sloppiness of these sources doesn't reflect too much credit upon them: "at 10:01 a.m. the FAA ordered the 180th Fighter Wing out of Swanton, Ohio to scramble their F-16 fighters..." Oh, the FAA ordered them to scramble? Huh. I never heard of that contingency. So a Guard base got a couple of fighters up an hour and a half after all this was on CNN. Did they happen to have some flight training scheduled that day, maybe? Do you have any idea of how long it takes to preflight an aircraft, suit up a pilot, warm up an APU, get munitions out of their storage bunkers, fuel the plane, load the ordnance...this stuff about how Andrews should have had fighters up in 30 minutes after the FAA realized something was going on is just poppycock to anyone who is even remotely familiar with the subject material.