As for airspace, the WTC north tower had already been hit. Having a jumbo jet off course and approaching DC at a high rate of speed while technically startling restricted airspace doesn’t seem to speak to a "wait and see" posture on the part of the military or senior administration officials.
To be honest the above comment doesn't make any sense, but I'd like to clear up a few things. First a minor nitpick, a 757 is not a jumbo jet.
AA77 is in some ways the most interesting of the four flights on 9/11. It was hijacked for the longest period of time, and yet the military had the least period of time for intercepting it.
Here's why.
The FAA uses two types of radar - primary and secondary. Primary radar coverage is a physical return on the actual skin of the aircraft itself.
The other type is secondary radar. Secondary radar is the return from an interrogation of the aircraft's transponder - a device that transmits the aircraft's flight code, heading, altitude and speed.
The FAA's Air Route Traffic Control Centres (ARTCC), on a normal daily basis use Secondary Radar. There's a few reasons for this. Firstly, primary radar picks up every single aircraft in the air, and also picks up things like cloud formations. This makes the screen very busy and hard to follow. Secondly, FAA regulations require that all aircraft flying at cruising altitudes (which is the airspace ARTCC's manage) have a transponder and radio. So there's no reason to use primary.
Another problem with primary is it doesn't tell you the identity of the aircraft. and finally, primary coverage is not 100%. There are gaps in the coverage all across the USA.
Now, the big problem with secondary radar is that an aircraft's transponder can be turned off with the flick of a switch, and that's exactly what the hijackers did on 9/11. This isn't a problem if the aircraft transponder is turned off in an area with primary radar coverage - the traffic controller simply flicks a switch to turn on their primary radar display, and the primary contact will appear right where the secondary return just vanished.
The problem is, AA77 was hijacked in a part of the country with no primary cover. When the controller got a full loss of signal and radio communication they made the reasonable and appropriate decision that AA77 had suffered a catastrophic mid air break up and had gone down. Bear in mind that only the eastern ARTCC's knew anything was amiss in the US that day. Indianapolis Centre - where AA77 vanished - knew nothing of the other hijacked aircraft.
The centre began looking west along AA77's flight path for the aircraft to come up again, and asked for the military to start Search and Rescue operations. Meanwhile AA77 had turned around and was heading east, and no one had any idea.
It wasn't until about 9.20 that the FAA began spreading the word to other ARTCC's that hijackings were in progress. At this point, with no AA77 in sight and no wreckage, the supervisor at Indianapolis Centre began to suspect AA77 might also be a hijack. But by now AA77 was in Washington ARTCC's airspace, and they knew nothing about the missing aircraft.
With the likelihood of AA77 being a hijacking continuing, the FAA began searching east, and Washington ARTCC started searching their unidentified primary returns.
At then at 0934, Dulles TRACON picked up an unknown radar contact moving low and fast over Washington DC. That was the first time since the hijacking that anyone had located the flight on a radar. It was too late. Three minutes later it hit the Pentagon.
Or at least it shouldn't. Jets were scrambled. I know that. However there is no excuse for CAP not being in place over our nation's most vital structures--the capitol building in seconds.
In seconds? Really? And where were these jets to come from? Why Washington DC? What indication was there that the capital was a target?
What I am saying is that the fact that there did not seem to be a plan in place to secure the DC airspace (restricted or unrestricted) is grounds for a serious reduction either in rank or employment status.
The only people you could even possibly entertain punishing would be the US Congress, who decided to drastically reduce NORAD's resources after the end of the Cold War.
You have to appreciate that maintaining readiness levels is prohibitively expensive. It's simply not sustainable. That's the reason for the various military DEFCON levels. If tensions increased between the USA and Russia, for example, the DEFCON level would be raised, and as part of that additional resources would be allocated to things like air defense. You have to remember, NORAD's peace time role was very small. In the event of a large scale attack a plan
was in place that would put thousands of fighters in the air with AWACS support. But such a plan can't be activated in a few hours, and certainly not from DEFCON 5.
Seriously, this is a republic and we're vulnerable by the definition of our form of government but, IMHO, no other government in the world would allow such actions to take place.
Really?
Are you sure about that?
Mathias Rust (born 1968) is a German man known for his illegal landing near the Red Square in Moscow in 1987. As an amateur aviator, he flew from Finland to Moscow, eluding the Soviet air defenses and landing on Vasilevski Spusk next to the Red Square near the Kremlin in the capital of the former USSR.
-Gumboot
