Wow, OzmO!! I am really impressed, bro. Thank you for this.
And I agree, we should stick to this part for now, because we're getting ahead of ourselves otherwise.
No prob.
Let me start by challenging something here:
Just for the record, yes, both the President and the Secretary of Defense could have issued an unquestionable order to shoot down a civilian plane that day. Ultimately, of course, the order would be received by the military from the Secretary of Defense.
As the second plane was hitting, there was absolutely no question about what was happening. This fact must be recognized. We were indeed horrified, but we were not confused about the fact that hijacked planes were being used in a deliberate, coordinated attack on our citizens.
The urgency to neutralize this threat cannot be overstated. This was to be our primary goal, period.
The military operates on contingency plans and protocols. Thousands and thousands of them. They think up reactions and counter measures for all sort of scenarios. They might have even had one for something like this, but they certainly didn't practice it. And there was no protocol absolutely none for who decides to order the shooting down of a American passenger plane full of Americans. BUSH and Rumsfield weren't just handling this one issue at the time either. I am not saying they didn't eventually order it, i bet they did. But for it to get decided and identified in the time allotted, knowing what i know about the military, its amazing they did it as fast they did in launching the plane when they did.
I don't know about your personal back ground but have you ever tried to get a large corporation to make a quick decision? There are hundreds of people involved in things like this.
35 minutes after 175 crashed into the second tower flight 77 crashed into the pentagon and the intercept flight was launched from langley 5-10 minutes before that.
The identity of the remaining confirmed hijacked plane was obvious, as it was the only plane that had turned off its transponder (93 was not jacked until 9:28). Just to be clear, everything about its identity was in fact known except its exact location. So we have a scope of presumable location around which to orbit, we have an identifying airplane type, we have identifying carrier marks and color schemes, and we have individual markings and identifiers.
Again, we are brought back to question of why Rumsfeld did not order a seek and destroy for what was known to be an active enemy missile. The order would have been placed as quickly as he could have spoken the words.
I think you put it best when you said:
There's a reason why they have a secondary Radar system and why transponders are so important and why the world uses them now. Because basic radar can be spotty at times. when you are trying to pin point a plane in a small area moving at 300+ MPH or what ever its not that simple. But when you have both there's very little error. At that time they had only Primary.
So even if you take from the first WTC hitting there are so many things working against them getting a armed interceptor over there in time:
first WTC hit 8:46
Second WTC hit 9:02
Pentagon hit 9:37
- Basic fog or war confusion which leads to hesitation. Especially the more people involved.
- A lack of armed and ready jets. They probably will never release this info to the public, but i would not be surprised if they had scrambled every hot jet they had which if i remember it right was 14 along the eastern seaboard probably patrolling all over the place around many major cities. And probably just didn't have anything they could arm up super fast like a hot jet is. You got to realize that intelligence and and satellites would give us weeks worth of warning from an impending Russian attack and since we were in stand down mode it makes sense.
- They was no clear protocol or procedure to scramble a jet to shoot down a passenger plane. That alone is a miracle we got a jet vectoring over there in the time we did.
- Not knowing exactly what the next target was.
- It doesn't matter who you are or what is so apparent and undeniable at the time. Ordering the downing of a civilian passenger jet is NOT a snap decision in the chaos of the moments (even 60 minutes) they had to decide it.
And think about this: If they were intentionally delaying the order who would know?
Every ATC in the country who has any experience with will military air space and operations.
Thousands of people at the FAA
Thousands of retired military personal
Every single military pilot.
Its impossible to think thousands have some sort of chip in a grand CT here.