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... Why the belief that you have that this could've been handled in a "standard" manner is off center. Sure they could've put planes in the air to observe what was going on. But how do you FORCE them to land? Remember my last post, at the time there were NO armed fighters sitting on the ground on any base within launching range of the hijacked airliners. That means any aircraft that was scrambled without armaments would have no way of forcing any of the airliners down. So, where does that leave us... we didn't KNOW the intentions of the hijackers, they could've been doing what most hijackers do, fly off to a sympathetic country and hold hostages. At the very least both Towers would've probably been hit, even with a fighter riding off the wing. The only chance an unarmed F-16 would have to knock out a Boeing passenger aircraft would be to ram it.
You also answered your own question about the miscommunication, the only fighters to get airborne were directed towards New York City. Why? Because that was the only city (at the time) where an actual attack took place. It was reactionary defense, a classic defensive problem. You rush your available forces to a place where an attack has happened on the assumption that it will continue to be attacked. Remember, the distances you are talking about are HUGE. A fighter aircraft, especially an F-16, does not have the fuel capacity to go zipping up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States. Which is where this whole line of "they were only operating at half speed" goes. They had to be operating at slower speeds because they had to conserve fuel UNTIL they were directed to where they needed to be. It was a breakdown in communications. Too much chaos and as you have pointed out, to many gaps in the Chain of Command. Case in point: Luke Air Force Base, in the suburbs of Phoenix Arizona is home to the USAF's F-16 Fighter Training School. There are more than two hundred F-16's located at Luke. Now, two of the squadrons are foreign, which means they cannot be used inside CONUS, outside of training missions. The rest of the USAF squadrons are all primarily focused on training, however, Luke did retain (at the time) a single squadron of F-16's that were fully combat oriented... but they were a USAF Reserve Wing. Even so, Luke still retains a sizable live ordinance stockpile and all the instructor pilots are combat qualified. From the time the first warning went out it took the squadrons at Luke nearly THREE HOURS to put a Combat Air Patrol over the city of Phoenix. Why? Because no one told them to. There were literally dozens of pilots and hundreds of ground crew sitting around TV's watching everything happen just like Joe and Jane Six-pack on the street and not a SINGLE AIRCRAFT on the ramp was being loaded with live munitions or even being spooled up to take off unarmed, just as a set of eyes in the sky. Total and utter communications breakdown. The PENTAGON had already been hit when the first word went out to the Command and Control section of Luke to put SOMETHING in the air over Phoenix... and as many other southwestern cities as they could reach. That is just one base. It happened all over the continental US.
Also, I hate to say it, but you have been misinformed about the AF and NORAD's defense attitude towards CONUS. A single hijacked airliner, pre-9/11, was NEVER considered the primary threat to air safety in the US. I don't know who is telling you that, but they are wrong. The Air Forces primary mission when it comes to defending the continental US is interception of inbound aircraft from outside our airspace. You can go back all the way to the end of World War II and see the doctrine in action. The reason why a hijacked airliner was never considered a high threat was, up until 9/11, none of them had ever been used as a guided weapon. They were either flown to a foreign country, as I've mentioned before, or they were blown up in mid-air. I participated in hundreds of wargames during my time in the service and every one of them that happened at a CONUS base involved intercepting incoming aircraft from outside of our borders. Not once did we ever practice intercepting a multitude of hijacked airliners inside of our own borders, it just wasn't a threat that was taken seriously.
Look, I'm not saying that there aren't some pretty questionable events that went down that day. There are. And there are holes in the official story that have never been effectively explained. BUT, a lot of what happened happened because the main body of the USAF and NORAD was simply unprepared and caught flat footed by what went down. Maybe someone did get the massive ball of confusion rolling... but that is all they needed to do, once it started rolling the "system" imploded on itself. Go find an air traffic controller and ask them what the airways over the US are like. It is utter insanity. Airplanes are constantly traveling in and out of your airspace, being handed off to you by a controller in one city while you hand off an aircraft to a controller in another, there are blind spots in the radar coverage INSIDE the continental United States... the list goes on and on. A tiny bit of confusion at the top will turn into an avalanche of confusion as it travels down through the chain. The result you get is what happened on 9/11. An Air Force that was simply not prepared to handle the situation that was happening. We were reactive instead of proactive, and it hurt us bad.
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