It takes 35 minutes to hijack a plane, divert it, and hit a target
It takes 145 minutes from the first tentative indications of a hijack before fighters are airborne who:
Have been told a specific area to protect
Have been told that they are protecting it against the actions of hijacked passenger jets
Have been given authority to shoot passenger jets down, if necessary
Even that timescale was only achieved by secret service agents and military allowing common sense to dictate that they exceed their authority.
Conclusions (i.e. personal opinions) I've drawn from the document:
The FAA (Federal Aviation Authority), NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector) didn't communicate effectively with one another, or other parts of government or the military.
People wasted time confirming orders that had to be executed instantly, or failed entirely to pass information up the chain of command and orders back down it.
The Chairman, Vice-Chairman and Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the US President and Defense Secretary, were all hard to contact on a timescale of tens of minutes. Nobody knew how to derive authority to do anything about an emergency in their respective absences.
The document makes that very clear in consistent detail. When the plane disappeared from radar, some people who had given orders for it to be shot down presumed those orders had been carried out. However, the plane disappeared before the orders were conveyed to pilots in the air, the pilots were in entirely the wrong place, and a cargo plane saw pretty-much the entire thing from the air.
In order to disbelieve that the Pennsylvania crash was genuine, one would in effect have to believe the entire document. It is written in a manner I find highly credible, though I've seen little independent corroboration of it.
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Date: 2004-06-22 10:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-23 01:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-23 02:16 am (UTC)In order to disbelieve that the Pennsylvania crash was genuine, one would in effect have to believe the entire document. It is written in a manner I find highly credible, though I've seen little independent corroboration of it.