Existing comment:
A Military Response:
On September 11, America's air defense is in the hands of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) with seven alert sites, each with two fighter aircraft on alert. The agency's focus is on protecting the continent from external attacks. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and NORAD have protocols for responding to a hijacking. With clearance, NORAD can scramble planes to identify a rogue aircraft and escort it to the ground where, hopefully, the situation would be resolved with no loss of life.
The situation that the FAA and the military face on September 11 -- multiple hijackings of domestic flights by terrorist-pilots planning to use the planes as weapons -- does not fit the existing protocol. Systems for information sharing and decision making are strained. Personnel struggle to adapt to what one NORAD controller calls, "a new type of war."
Minutes after the first hijacking on September 11, the FAA contacts the US military. NORAD scrambles two fighter gets from a base in Massachusetts, but with only nine minutes advance warning before Flight 11 strikes the World Trade Center, there is not opportunity to take action. NORAD learns of a second hijacked plane, Flight 175, at the very moment when the aircraft strikes the World Trade Center. NORAD scrambles two fighter jets from a base in Virginia in response to an erroneous report from the FAA that one of the flights that actually hit the Towers is still airborne and heading for Washington DC.
The jets are directed eastward, over the Atlantic Ocean. The military learns that an unidentified aircraft is heading toward Washington, DC, from the west one minute before Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon. After Flight 77 impacts the Pentagon, the military establishes a Combat Air Patrol over the nation's capital. Initially, the two armed fighter jets circling the city do not have authorization to fire, only to "ID, type, and tail" non-responding aircraft.
The staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission, uses logs, recordings, radar data, and interviews to construct this timeline of events relating to military awareness of the fourth hijacked aircraft, Flight 93. |