fiat_money;130573 said:
That's the thing, I have researched these topics:
I was genuinely asking about the "1 & a half" hour statement, as I could not determine if it was refering to 9/11 or something else. This "something else" I speak of is the golfer's jet which you mentioned earlier; which I assume is Learjet 35 of Payne Stewart. This plane took off at 9:20am, contact was lost at 9:33am, and a F-16 reached the plane for communication at 10:52am. The time between the loss of communication and the F-16 intercept was 1 hour and 19 minutes; which is quite close to 1 and a half hours. This time period was significantly longer than the longest of the time periods it took to hijack and crash a plane on 9/11.
NORAD is responsible for the area that surrounds the U.S. known as ADIZ; therefore, they prepare to address hijackings within the ADIZ. The planes were hijacked within America, but outside of the ADIZ; there was no planning done to handle such a situation. So, not only were they lacking preparation, they had much less time than it took for the government to intercept in the prior incident.
1st things 1st.. A lil' common sense: Have you ever heard of a pilot learning to fly in a Cesna [by all witness accounts mind you] & then being able to magically fly a 757?? Not only fly it but fly it crack shot fighter pilot style? Yeah.. Me neither.. The Boeing 757 and 767 are equipped with fully autonomous flight capability, they are the only two Boeing commuter aircraft capable of fully autonomous flight. They can be programmed to take off, fly to a destination and land, completely without a pilot at the controls. They are intelligent planes, and have software limits pre set so that pilot error cannot cause passenger injury. Though they are physically capable of high g maneuvers, the software in their flight control systems prevents high g maneuvers from being performed via the cockpit controls. They are limited to approximately 1.5 g's, I repeat, one and one half g's. This is so that a pilot mistake cannot end up breaking grandma's neck.
No matter what the pilot wants, he cannot override this feature.
The plane that hit the Pentagon approached or reached its actual physical limits, military personnel have calculated that the Pentagon plane pulled between five and seven g's in its final turn.
The same is true for the second aircraft to impact the WTC.
There is only one way this can happen.
As well as fully autonomous flight capability, the 767 and 757 are the ONLY COMMUTER PLANES MADE BY BOEING THAT CAN BE FLOWN VIA REMOTE CONTROL. It is a feature that is standard to all of them, all 757's and 767's can do it. The purpose for this is if there is a problem with the pilots, Norad can fly the planes to safe destinations via remote. Only in this flight mode can those craft exceed their software limits and perform to their actual physical limits because a pre existing emergency situation is assumed if this mode of flight is used.
Moving on..
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the most technologically advanced, and the most dominate military force ever known to man. There were seven Air Stations that were armed and on full alert to protect the continental United States on Tuesday September 11, 2001. The Air National Guard exclusively performs the air sovereignty mission in the continental United States, and those units fall under the control of the 1st Air Force based at Tyndall Air Force Base (AFB) in Panama City, Florida. The Air National Guard maintains seven alert sites with 14 fully armed fighters and pilots on call around the clock. Besides Tyndall AFB, alert birds also sit armed and ready at; Homestead Air Reserve Base (ARB), Homestead, Florida; Langley AFB, Hampton, Virginia; Otis Air National Guard (ANG), Falmouth, Massachusetts; Oregon ANG, Portland, Oregon; March ARB, Riverside, CA; and Ellington ANG, Houston, Texas.
There were at least 28 other USAF bases [7 bases on full alert] that were in range of the 4 airliners on 911.
& umm.... NORAD is a binational United States and Canadian organization charged with warning of attack against North America whether by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles, utilizing mutual support arrangements with other commands. Aerospace control includes providing surveillance and control of Canadian and United States airspace. The job of NORAD is to know every inch of the skies over North America.
Around 8:45 a.m. [As a NORAD spokesman, Major Mike Snyder is reported as saying] the FAA notifies NORAD that United Airlines Flight 175 has been hijacked. NORAD has officially admitted that the FAA told them about the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 175 at 8:43. So, now NORAD knows about two hijackings and American Airlines Flight 11 has been barreling down on New York City since turning south at 8:26, and is just 3 minutes away from impacting the WTC. What does NORAD do with this new information? Do they immediately scramble the 102nd Fighter Wing of the Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts? Again, no they dont, they sit on this most vital information of now two hijacked airliners. Stand Down.
The Stand Down Memo:
Jim Hoffman has discovered a document which superseded earlier DOD procedures for dealing with hijacked aircraft, and it requires that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is personally responsible for issuing intercept orders. Commanders in the field are stripped of all authority to act. This amazing order came from S.A. Fry (Vice Admiral, US Navy and Director, Joint Staff) so it appears to me that responsibility for the US armed forces "Failure to Respond" rests directly with Fry for issuing this instruction, as well as with Donald Rumsfeld for failing to execute his responsibility to issue orders in a timely fashion.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction CJCSI 3610.01A (dated 1 June 2001) was issued for the purpose of providing "guidance to the Deputy Director for Operations (DDO), National Military Command Center (NMCC), and operational commanders in the event of an aircraft piracy (hijacking) or request for destruction of derelict airborne objects." This new instruction superseded CJCSI 3610.01 of 31 July 1997.
This CJCSI states that "In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC will be notified by the most expeditious means by the FAA. The NMCC will, with the exception of immediate responses as authorized by reference d, forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval."
Reference D refers to Department of Defense Directive 3025.15 (Feb. 18, 1997) which allows for commanders in the field to provide assistance to save lives in an emergency situation -- BUT any requests involving "potentially lethal support" (including "combat and tactical vehicles, vessels or aircraft; or ammunition") must still be approved by the Secretary of Defense. So again, the ability to respond to a hijacking in any meaningful fashion, is stripped from the commanders in the field.
While none of this relieves the Bush Administration from ultimate responsibility from 911, the "Stand Down" was implemented through a routine administrative memo. The question here is, why tie the hands of the people actually able to do something about it right away?
& remember the coincidence in london i spoke about?
Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building
Wed Aug 21, 7:45 PM ET
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism — it was to be a simulated accident.
Officials at the Chantilly, Virginia-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.
The agency is about 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport.
Agency chiefs came up with the scenario to test employees' ability to respond to a disaster, said spokesman Art Haubold. No actual plane was to be involved — to simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building.
"It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," Haubold said. "As soon as the real world ( news - Y! TV) events began, we canceled the exercise."
Terrorism was to play no role in the exercise, which had been planned for several months, he said.
Adding to the coincidence, American Airlines Flight 77 — the Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon ( news - web sites) — took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes before the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground.
The National Reconnaissance Office operates many of the nation's spy satellites. It draws its personnel from the military and the CIA ( news - web sites).
After the Sept. 11 attacks, most of the 3,000 people who work at agency headquarters were sent home, save for some essential personnel, Haubold said.
An announcement for an upcoming homeland security conference in Chicago first noted the exercise.
In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement says, "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day."