[BillW]

Originally posted by Lanny_MacDonald+Oct 24 2004, 12:56 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Lanny_MacDonald @ Oct 24 2004, 12:56 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-sjwalter@Oct 24 2004, 07:15 PM
First of all Lanny, how would they know exactly where the plane was that was going to hit the other Trade Center? And can you imagine if they US Air Foce would have shot it down, how people would have reacted because we all know how people sue over anything and they certainly would sue they US Government to sh*t because they can't prove that the plane was actually going to hit the other Trade Center or even the Pentagon. And there were over 200 planes in the air at the time the attacks took place, how do they know which one to shoot down? Of course people called in for help, but who's to say it wouldn't be a prank? And now you're blaming Bush for allowing the terrorists to hit the Trade Center. Pure left wing media BS. You know the government better then i do, and i'm sure there is a hell of a lot or red tape and people to go through regardless if he is president or not in order to shoot the planes down. You're now talking what might have been, instead of dealing with what happened. I would pay to see how Kerry would have reacted and knowing his history he would have probably called it a nusicance.


And Lanny, if the President made one wrong move in that Classroom, all of America would have been over him. There is nothing wrong like Dis said with what he did.

Jesus you promote some really stupid arguments. How would they know where the plane was that was going to hit the other tower?

All planes have file a flight plan before they take off. Anything that veers off of this flight path is reported immediately to NORAD is supposed to be checked on through radio communication, and should that fail, it is escorted back to its flight path (like Payne Stewart's plane eight months prior). All planes also have transponders on them that identify their exact position and all the vitals of the plane and carrier it represents. Now should these transponders go inactive or become turned off there are back up systems that the military relies upon.

There's this really cool invention called Radar. It works off the concept of bouncing sound waves off of objects and tracing them through the use of computers. Its been around for a while and works pretty good. So good infact that this system is what they use in missles to find their targets. Now this radar thingy is so good that they can track things as small as birds these days (the signature size of the F-117 BTW) so tracking an airliner the size of a 757/767 would be bo problem what so ever.

I can't believe you have the balls to even suggest that the government would have thought twice about shooting a threatening aircraft down, especially after the first tower was hit and that the other three aircraft had been identified as being hijacked. Lawsuits are the last thing the government thinks about when under attack. That you would even consider that makes me wonder about you or your values.

Now how would they tell which planes were a threat? Oh gee, I don't know? How about start with the planes off course? Then how about the planes wothout transponders? Then how about the planes that refused to acknowledge communication with them? Are you completely naive and don't think that there are protocols in dealing with situations like this? You don't think that situations like this have been completely thought out and simulated?

Who's to say that the people calling in were not making a prank? Oh my god you're an idiot! Do you know how many federal laws that would break? Do you have any clue what ramifications that would have on your life? Not only that, simpleton, the people who called in first were flight attendants. If they were fooling around they would not only lose their jobs, but also be subject to jail time. Yeah, that's probably what was running through the heads of those who took the calls. Someone is just playing a prank.

You're right on one thing, I know the government and the processes of what happens in a situation a lot better than you. So STFU and listen and learn something. There is no red tape involved once the President gives an executive order. Once the President is informed of the situation he makes the call and that is it. All red tape is taken care of through a carefully orchestrated series of pre-determined protocols identified to handle situations and eliminate the red tape.

And what Kerry would have done is irrelevant. We can speculate all we want, but Kerry was not in the seat of power and what HE would have done does not matter. I highly doubt he would have sat there with a room full of seven year olds reading a book about goats. I would hope he would have been more responsible than Bush and his handlers were. [/b][/quote]
Thank you so much for the education about how the air traffic control system works along with the FAA interaction with the military and specifically NORAD. But most of your points are WRONG.

Less than 1/3 of the aircraft in flight over the US at any given time are operating on a flight plan, thousands of aircraft are flying without transponders or even radios everyday, en route air traffic control typically has primary targets turned off most of the time, transponders are the most notorious of all avionics for failure and hundreds of them fail in flight every day, if a plane operating under an instrument flight plan veers off course and loses either radio communications or transponder the controllers first responsibility is to attempt to anticipate the new course and clear that airspace so there is not a midair collision, and RADAR as used by the FAA is not capable of identifying the altitude of a primary target. But these are just a few of the things you must have forgotten about.

My perspective on the happenings of 9/11 begin when a friend of mine walked into Jane Garvey’s (the FAA Administrator) office at 8:48 AM to prepare for her 9:00 AM staff meeting of her direct reports. He had just landed his single engine aircraft at Washington National and headed to FAA HQ and heard a news report on the way in about a small plane hitting the WTC. At that time FAA HQ was still trying to figure out what plane had hit the tower because it had been lost among primary targets on TRACON control in primary mode and ARTCC (en route) had not been able to maintain a computer lock on the primary target when it lost altitude. Airspace under IFR flight plan control in the US is divided into 21 Centers and each Center is divided into dozens of sectors as required to maintain proper controller load, and some of that space falls under the control of one of the 185 TRACON areas. By pure happenstance since the sectors are constantly changing and not published, two of the hijacked planes shut down their transponders at about the same time while in the same sector leaving one controller up to his eyeballs trying to clear traffic so neither one of the no response aircraft endangered any other aircraft – which is what his job was.

Because of the confusion taking place in ARTCC trying to reduce the controllers workload and protect all of the other aircraft in the center and sector, word did not get back to FAA HQ that the no radio (norad, not NORAD) aircraft that struck the WTC was a hijacked plane until 9:03 AM at which time Jane fortunately had her entire staff sitting in her office and they began putting all the pieces together and realized that things were happening around the country appearing normal on the individual level, but terribly wrong at the high level and NORAD was brought into the loop. So in actuality there was less than 2 minutes between the time the government fully understood the situation and the second aircraft hitting the WTC. If memory serves me, there were about 100 aircraft out of tens of thousands in the air at the time that were deemed “possible” threats because of norad or transponder conditions or other suspicious circumstances. It was believed there were other aircraft hijackings taking place, but because of the way they were being tracked in individual locations, there was no fast way to identify which flights those were out of the many possibilities. At that point FAA Flow Control (ATCSCC), which acts as kind of a big brother to the Centers, opened a hot line between HQ and NORAD to try and start clearing the normal problems from the possible threats. Prior to 9/11, there had never been a procedure for multiple hijackings and hijackings were always assumed to be a case where the hijackers wanted to live.

The above delays in response to an unanticipated scenario in multiple bureaucracies is why there is no way NORAD could have responded any faster unless they would have gone out and shot down 100 innocent aircraft. NORAD was not notified sooner because there was no hijack or emergency code transmitted prior to the aircrafts transponders being turned off, and the individual controllers involved had no way of knowing that any given aircraft was anything other than a transponder, radio, or electrical system failure and the aircraft were turning, as they should have, to the nearest place of landing and repair.