Power, corruption and conspiracy

[Nono]

Re NORAD, I agree that there are some damned good questions to be answered there. (Good luck, eh?)
911 is richly fertile ground for conspiracy theories, especially as The Usual Suspects have been acting so, well, suspicious. And the US public has let them get away with it.

The one glaring question for me is how a passenger plane ever made it to the Pentagon such a long time after it had become obvious what was going on.
But people who think that the whole thing could have been prevented if only NORAD had been on its toes don't seem to be very familiar with things like transponders. The cock-up theory does also bear consideration.

Like I say, though, there's nothing like a no-holds-barred investigation to clear the air. And that ain't gonna happen, is it?

[dotcoma]

But people who think that the whole thing could have been prevented if only NORAD had been on its toes don't seem to be very familiar with things like transponders

Nono,
Fighters had been scrambled almost 70 times in the year before 9/11 to intercept planes off course (mostly Cessnas and such). Four planes doing it at once are able to elude a trillion dollar system for almost an hour? There was a standdown. No doubt about it...

[Nono]

roxdog: "Fighters had been scrambled almost 70 times in the year before 9/11 to intercept planes off course (mostly Cessnas and such). Four planes doing it at once are able to elude a trillion dollar system for almost an hour? There was a standdown. No doubt about it."

I wouldn't rule it out, though how you go about effecting a stand-down is something I'd like to see ("Now then, General uhh Ripper, despite the fact that you'll be in the middle of a long-planned readiness exercise, we want you to stay on the ground that morning no matter what happens. Kindly pass these instructions down the chain of command.") A lot of people involved there. A lot of potential whistle-blowers.

It isn't all that unusual for a controller to lose radar contact with an aircraft. Normally a couple of minutes are spent re-establishing it, and that's if the people on the flight deck are cooperating... Both the WTC planes were out of Boston and not that far apart from each other. Both switched their transponders off, and so disappeared from secondary radar. No immediate panic there, though. And so the minutes passed.
The flight conditions that morning were "severe clear" -- very lucky for the hijackers. I figure it was little more than a matter of finding the Hudson visually and following it down to Manhattan. This, mind you, through one of most crowded airspaces in the world, so I don't see the air force being able to find those two AND doing anything to stop them in time. Who would have tried to shoot down that first plane while the Twin Towers were still untouched?

Washington was different. Long before the Pentagon flight hit, they should have had that airspace closed. No matter how complacent they may have been, there's definitely something strange there.