Why was NORAD so slow to scramble feghter jets on 9/11?

Question

In the year prior to 9/11/01 NORAD scrambled jets 67 times rapidly and effectively to intercept aircraft that had gone astray. Payne Stewarts plane was surrounded by fighter jets less than 20 minutes after it lost contact with ground control, and it was over rural Misssissippi.

Answer 1

Of those 67 times jets have been scrambled, 66 of them took place as a result of aircraft in offshore Air Defense Identification Zones, prior to 9/11 there were no domestic Air Defense Identification Zones.
Also, it took and hour and 20 minutes to intercept Paynes Stewarts aircraft not 20 minutes, according to records of ATC radio transmissions, contact with the aircraft was lost at 0933:38 EDT, at 0952 CDT, a USAF F-16 test pilot from the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base was vectored to within 8 nm of the aircraft, note the time zone change.

Answer 2

You have to take all the factors into account. The world trade center strikes were the first to occur and timed just right being only minutes apart. It would have been damn near impossible to have made the interception unless you already had a fighter jet in the air near downtown NY.

Many would also argue that there were fighter jets ready to strike Flight 93 on a moment's notice. The ones assigned to tail the plane were 11 minutes away at the time it crashed according to the 9/11 investigations. However, there were several circling Washington D.C. that were much closer and could have been used had the plane become an immediate threat.

Don't buy into the consipiracy theories. Fact of the matter was, we were not as prepared as we should have been. Also the order to shoot down a civilian plane was not defined well prior to 9-11 (requiring the Secretary of Defense to give permission).

Answer 3

Over the years there had been a number of aircraft hijacked and NORAD had never been called on to do anything more about it than fly escort from time to time. I'm sure that sending NORAD or Air Force or any other military aircraft to intercept and SHOOT down an American aircraft with American passengers, over American territory was the last thing anyone was thinking about until the WTC towers were struck.

The jets that were scrambled did not carry missiles, and only had their 20mm cannon. You have to get close to shoot something down with 20mm's. A thousand yards or so. With missiles, they may have been able to shoot from 10 or 15 miles. It's all moot anyway.

If you're still looking for someone to blame for 9/11, try looking at the islamo-facists.

Answer 4

well there were a number of reasons responsible for the "slow" response of NORAD.

firstly, no matter how high ur level of preparedness u cant expect everyone to be at top alert unless and untill they realise that something of this magnitude can happen, and as we all know in the case of 9/11 everybody was taken aback.

this can be attributed to a false sense of security prevailing in the minds of american civilians and military and intelligence establishment alike that no attack is possible on the united states mainland.

moreover at the time of 9/11,
very less number of crafts were designated for the security of north eastern united states. the number of jets was four and even the four that were there were unarmed and it took a long time for the pilots to scramble because of lack of ground preparedness.

one study revealed that even if the jets had managed to reah the rogue jets they wud have had no option but to slam their fighters into the jets if so ordered by the commanders( which was an option being considered at that point)

another interesting fact is that at time of 9/11 nobody other than the prez had the authority to order the shoot down of a passenger jet.
but after 9/11 this authority was passed on to air force base commanders.

instead of NORAD acting as the nodal point of launching any interception missions aircrafts were deployed all over the country in air force bases to meet any such event in future

Answer 5

Because they had no flippin' clue as to what was going on that day. Hijackings had never before resulted in the aircraft being used as guided missiles. Then the hijackers went below radar coverage and were lost in the busiest air corridors in the U.S.

Go see the movie "United 93" -- it does a great job of portraying the utter confusion of what was going on that day. One of the reasons it does it so well, is that many of the folks appearing in the film are the actual air controllers and military advisors who were on duty that day.

Answer 6

I suggest you read this article
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1&c=y

The following part debunks the conspiracy theory you are buying into.

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No Stand-Down Order
CLAIM: No fighter jets were scrambled from any of the 28 Air Force bases within close range of the four hijacked flights. "On 11 September Andrews had two squadrons of fighter jets with the job of protecting the skies over Washington D.C.," says the Web site emperors-clothes.com. "They failed to do their job." "There is only one explanation for this," writes Mark R. Elsis of StandDown.net. "Our Air Force was ordered to Stand Down on 9/11."

FACT: On 9/11 there were only 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous 48 states. No computer network or alarm automatically alerted the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) of missing planes. "They [civilian Air Traffic Control, or ATC] had to pick up the phone and literally dial us," says Maj. Douglas Martin, public affairs officer for NORAD. Boston Center, one of 22 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regional ATC facilities, called NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) three times: at 8:37 am EST to inform NEADS that Flight 11 was hijacked; at 9:21 am to inform the agency, mistakenly, that Flight 11 was headed for Washington (the plane had hit the North Tower 35 minutes earlier); and at 9:41 am to (erroneously) identify Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 from Boston as a possible hijacking. The New York ATC called NEADS at 9:03 am to report that United Flight 175 had been hijacked--the same time the plane slammed into the South Tower. Within minutes of that first call from Boston Center, NEADS scrambled two F-15s from Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Mass., and three F-16s from Langley Air National Guard Base in Hampton, Va. None of the fighters got anywhere near the pirated planes.

Why couldn't ATC find the hijacked flights? When the hijackers turned off the planes' transponders, which broadcast identifying signals, ATC had to search 4500 identical radar blips crisscrossing some of the country's busiest air corridors. And NORAD's sophisticated radar? It ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward. "It was like a doughnut," Martin says. "There was no coverage in the middle." Pre-9/11, flights originating in the States were not seen as threats and NORAD wasn't prepared to track them.

Answer 7

There were over 5000 aircraft in the air at the time, and if I recall, the aircraft in question had their transponders turned off. When this happens, the only way to track them is via a "skin paint" radar return, which is restricted to local radar transmitters, and hard to interpret as a threat.

Answer 8

actually, they did scramble jets, although the flight controllers kept dropping the planes on radar. by ability of the time they were given an excellent region on a plane, it replaced into to overdue, our warring parties were to distant to get there in time. I watched a 2-hour particular on 9/11, and they did say they scrambled jets, they even interviewed the pilots on the coach. They stated each thing replaced into the form of large number because nobdoy knew what the hell replaced into happening, and the controllers were putting forward that this planes replaced into right here and that one there and in a roundabout way they were given all of it mixed up, so like i stated by ability of the time they figured it out it replaced into to overdue to fix it.

Answer 9

Bush was responsible for 9/11. So, of course he didn't want the military to respond so quickly.

Answer 10

Are you kidding? Anyone who says that the 9/11 scenario could have been avoided or that somehow the military let us down is a 'conspiracy theorist'. No one could have predicted things happening as they did.