Air Defenses on 9/11

[hack89]

Here are some links that discuss the air defenses on 9/11. Some things I took away from them:

1. FAA procedures were unwieldy and not geared towards a 911 scenario.

2. Air Force radars were old and obsolete.

3. Air Force radars were on the coast to cover aircraft approaching from sea. With a maximum range of 250 mile, they would have had great difficulty tracking aircraft that were inland.

4. Air Force radars were old, analog systems that would not have been able to display synthetic injected tracks even if they existed.


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/13/3335/57833
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060801fege01
http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/defense/aviationnow_jumpstart.htm

[BootinUp]

1. but we have the greatest air defenses in world!

Someone had to start the responses. ;)

[hack89]

2. kick nt

[Jazz2006]

3. kick

just because

[BootinUp]

4. A Timeline I put in a spreadsheet for reference

The data is from two sources, the 9/11 Commission report and the Vanity Fair article written about the NEAD Tapes for that morning. Its ugly but functional. Please tell me if you see any errors.

September 11 Hijacking Timeline

[BootinUp]

15. So does this page work ok?

Do the headers scroll ok? If they do not, try enabling javascript (or active scripting in IE).

[hack89]

16. Looks good. nt

[Bushwick Bill]

5. How did the wargames affect the response?

Please advise. Thanks.

[BootinUp]

7. I would like to read more about that

from the official report before I try to answer. So far, putting together my little Timeline I haven't seen anything that would conclusively show they couldn't respond as normally because of the scheduled exercise, but I need to look into more.

[DoYouEverWonder]

6. Shouldn't this thread be in the DU Lounge?

How many billions a year have we spent for decades on defense and all they have are excuses.

Why don't we just save all that money and spend it on something useful?

[mhatrw]

8. I can't help but laugh.

1. FAA procedures were unwieldy and not geared toward a 911 scenario.

Such that the FAA was unable to a single military authority about a 757 hijacking it had known about for over 45 minutes that came to its attention 30 minutes AFTER everyone with a TV or radio knew the USA was experiencing a coordinated terrorist attack?

2. Air Force radars were old and obsolete.

Such that none were available that could locate huge and slow moving passenger jets -- even a known hijack passenger jet that was being actively tracked by FAA radar for almost 30 minutes that came to the FAA's attention more than 30 minutes AFTER everyone with a TV or radio knew the USA was experiencing a coordinated terrorist attack?

3. Air Force radars were on the coast to cover aircraft approaching from sea. With a maximum range of 250 mile, they would have had great difficulty tracking aircraft that were inland.

Leaving trained fighter pilots blind and helpless against passenger planes manned by amateur pilots. Right?

4. Air Force radars were old, analog systems that would not have been able to display synthetic injected tracks even if they existed.

Which is why the tens of thousands of military flights that flew through US airspace every day throughout the last 25 years of the 20th century were constantly crashing into each other. Right?

Thank God Bush has finally cleaned up all that mess by fully funding our nation's defense! How did our US military ever manage to limp by on just 500 billion dollars a year?

[hack89]

9. Lets see here ...

1. Yup - why do you think the FAA is anymore competent then FEMA, NSA, the DoD or any other government agency. I don't share your faith in the efficiency of the government.

2. If the radars aren't in the right place then they wouldn't see. Why do you think the hijackers went so far west? They knew that they would be beyond the range of military radars. Did you bother to look at the map? The system was obviously designed to look out, not in.

3. Fighter are vectored to a target by a ground site or an AWACS. Fighters have relatively short range radars with coverage limited to a cone in front of them. They are not designed to search large areas of air space - that is what the AWACS does. The pilots needed for someone to tell them where the threat was. Because the FAA system is a cooperative system and the transponders were off, the ATCs could not help them. The military radars were too far away.

4. Military flights in the Continental US fly using the same FAA air traffic control system as everyone else does. There is no separate military ATC except in military exclusion areas. Military flight file flight plans, talk to ATC and transmit transponder codes like commercial airliners.

[mhatrw]

10. Replies

1. Yup - why do you think the FAA is anymore competent then FEMA, NSA, the DoD or any other government agency. I don't share your faith in the efficiency of the government.

Yes. Government is truly the root of all evil. In emergency situations like 9/11, the complete failure of our entire air defense to act in any capacity before the passengers on Flight 93 managed to find out exactly what is going on by talking to relatives, managed to plan their suicidal attack together and finally take matters into their own hands should be fully expected. Because God knows that you can't expect any government agencies, even one for which delaying even few seconds on a daily basis would result in the immediate deaths of hundreds, to communicate any faster than passengers getting their aviation news from their loved ones using their cell phones.

2. If the radars aren't in the right place then they wouldn't see. Why do you think the hijackers went so far west? They knew that they would be beyond the range of military radars. Did you bother to look at the map? The system was obviously designed to look out, not in.

Where exactly did the hijackers obtain their knowledge concerning the inadequacies of our military's radar? Interesting, isn't it, that the 9/11 Commission makes no mention of this?

3. Fighter are vectored to a target by a ground site or an AWACS. Fighters have relatively short range radars with coverage limited to a cone in front of them. They are not designed to search large areas of air space - that is what the AWACS does. The pilots needed for someone to tell them where the threat was. Because the FAA system is a cooperative system and the transponders were off, the ATCs could not help them. The military radars were too far away.

Sure. Except Cleveland ARTCC was tracking Flight 93 from the time it became a known hijack at 9:35 to the time it crashed about 30 minutes later. The problem was not tracking, if your "evidence" is to be believed. It's that nobody out of the literally scores of people who are on record as knowing about the emergency before Flight 93's crash -- including members of Congress, the mayors of Cleveland and Pittsburgh and the personnel at at least three different regional airports -- nobody bothered to contact anybody in the entire US military about the situation.

4. Military flights in the Continental US fly using the same FAA air traffic control system as everyone else does. There is no separate military ATC except in military exclusion areas. Military flight file flight plans, talk to ATC and transmit transponder codes like commercial airliners.

Exactly. Which is why it makes no sense that the FAA couldn't talk to the military on 9/11.

[hack89]

11. Answers..

1. I am glad your eyes are finally open to the weakness of government planning. Because we know that government plans and regulations are always perfect and work flawlessly the first time they are tested by real world events.

2. I got my map on the internet - I am sure they did the same.

3. Well, if there is no evidence that they contacted the military, then they obviously didn't. Looks like you just proved how inadequate the procedures and communications were.


4. Did you read article - they were talking. They just didn't have good information to pass to the Air Force.

[petgoat]

12. Air defenses

FAA procedures were unwieldy

Ah, so that's why after 3 planes had been flown into buildings, FAA brass had to
blither about whether to call in NORAD for a 4th hijacked plane.

Air Force radars were old and obsolete.

That explains why Popular Mechanics claims the NORAD radar looked outward, but
the Vanity Fair piece claims that NEADS was distracted by 3000 blips showing
every airplane in the sky.

[sofa king]

13. Can #3 possibly be true?

Seriously, if I were a cagey Soviet strategic bomber general, and I knew about that, I'd make sure my plan would be to penetrate into the interior and then double back to targets on the coast, so that my bombers would look like friendly aircraft, or if I had Backfires, even friendly interceptors. And if I were a SAC general, I'd be crying a river about it to any Senator who would listen.

Perhaps the interior defense radars were decommissioned as the threat migrated to ICBMs and SLBMs. I find the concept absurd, but in this day and age I have to put up with a lot of absurdity.

[Bryan Sacks]

14. If these claims were all true,

and let's put aside whether they are or are not, you would have provided some of the clearest possible evidence that:

1. Our 'defenders', those responsible for the functioning of the nation's defense, do not care to be vigiliant and cannot be bothered to guard against even the most obvious kinds of threats posed to US citizens. Let's not forget, the idea of hijacked airliners being turned into missiles was well known by military strategists and had entered the cultural imagination years before 2001;

2. Our leaders, who have hundreds of billions of dollars per year to fund the military, must have contempt for the citizens because they work in and proliferate a corrrupt system of non-responsiveness and will not risk their personal comfort or station to make the needed changes. ten years after the great diminishing of the Soviet threat, how on earth could the defense that a posture of 'looking outward' result in anything but a conclusion that those responsible for the posture are criminally uninterested in protecting America?

3. As such, they should be forcibly removed from office if they will not step down (and they won't); and

4. They could not have performed any worse in this situation if they had been in on the plot.

Their negligence, on this view, would be just as severe a breach of trust as participation in the plot, since the completely forseeable consequences of their negligence resulted in the death of almost 3,000 people they were sworn to protect as best they can.

AS BEST THEY CAN. It cannot be argued (so do not try) that they protected them as best they could have, or even as best as they foreseeably could have. Only strict adherence to the 'cult of intention' obscures this obvious fact ('They didn't mean it, so it's not nearly as bad as if they did mean it').

Out of honor, Eberhart, Myers, Winfield and Arnold should not only step down but turn themselves in.

Your mistake, hack, is to believe that somehow the claims you make above are exculpatory. They are nothing of the kind. The crime of completely forseeable criminal negligence is not a lesser one than complicity - it only seems so to those of us (which is most of us) wrapped up in the cult of intention.

In a way, if the info you provided was correct, one might wish that top officials WERE in on the plot. Otherwise, it would mean that most in the system were 'little Eichmanns', OK with the system's obvious shortcomings and choosing to go along rather than make a career-threatening stink.