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Originally Posted by willravel
"We're facing the largest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, but don't go too fast to stop it". An exception to that rule (which was only sometimes observed) is as easy as a few words from NORAD.
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Hind site is 20/20. At the time it was nothing big until they started impacting buildings. You seem to think NORAD and all these other organizations are some super computer, capable of operating quickly and efficiently, they are not, and they are bloated bureaucracies. We are talking about making split second decisions with dire consequences; we are talking about shooting down a commercial jet because it was hijacked, if they had shot all the planes down, you'd be complaining that there was no probable cause to shoot them down.
Before 9/11 the rules stated that a controller had to go through multiple layers of both the FAA and the DOD before any action is taken. The regulations are to blame.
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Originally Posted by willravel
Irrelevant. These planes had transponders, then the transponders shut off. Also, they were aware that the planes were hijacked.
They didn't have a location to go? They knew the approximate heading because the flight controller gave it to his or her supervisor who gave it to NORAD.
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The transponders were shut off, making it impossible to distinguish from the other 4500 planes except by going though them one by one, there was no easy way to do it. And they only had 9 minutes to do it. The person tracing flight 11 that morning when the transponder was shut off was tracking 15 planes as well, to get a view of the radar, he had to go up a flight of stairs. The displays were on different floors, ok, lets think about this, we have 2 screens, one with 14 dots, one with 15, they are on different floors, find the missing dot, by the way, they are all moving, ready, go. It can’t be done, not in 9 minutes.
There was a massive communications break down, things happened to fast. They did not have an approximate heading or location, they could have gotten it, with time, but they did not have enough time. They thought they had more time, they thought it was a standard hijacking, where demands are made, and they have time to negotiate, not that they would plow the planes into buildings.
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Originally Posted by willravel
Wrong. They had 14 minutes to go from Otis to NYC. That would have been easy, as the flight controller said it was headed towards NYC.
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It was 9 minutes, but even with 14 minutes, it is impossible to pick one blip out of 4500, it just can't be done.
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Originally Posted by willravel
You're already forgetting that NORAD had run drills about planes being used as weapons so recently before 9/11? Comon. The Pentagon knew about it, NORAD knew about it, the Air Force knew about it. The FAA even knew about it.
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Even if they had drills, they still did not think it could happen, and once it was known to be happening, it was too late. When normal criminals take hostages, the cops don’t just bust in shooting, they wait it out until they know the hostages are going to be killed, the cops would rather wait it out until the time is right it minimize civilian casualties rather then risk an assault. The same is true here.