911: What makes you suspicious - now with added extra poll option!

[snadge]

1) Demonstrates they are capable of lying and covering up the facts upto 4 years after the event. Shoots a hole in the whole, "well they wouldn't be able to cover-up such a major incident" line

2) If they know that the passengers are about to tackle the hijackers and they are possibly succeeding in regaining control, then why would they shoot it down unless .....

woo hoo, that's great

 

[laptop]

While it may be OK at 30,000 feet the point at which the computer will be under most load will be at take-off and landing. If the thing freezes then you certainly won't have time to reset it.

Mm. You certainly don't want to be a pilot of a plane where all the displays go dark while landing.

I'm not aware that that's happened - yet. But it has happened in mid-flight...

Anyway, this isn't strictly much more relevant to the A320/A340 and B777 than to the B767-200s involved.

I'm still waiting to hear Jazz' wonderful theory about a flight being staged purely to provide cellphone traffic...

 

[editor]

1) Demonstrates they are capable of lying and covering up the facts upto 4 years after the event. Shoots a hole in the whole, "well they wouldn't be able to cover-up such a major incident" line

2) If they know that the passengers are about to tackle the hijackers and they are possibly succeeding in regaining control, then why would they shoot it down unless .....

Priceless stuff! A career in writing (possibly sci-fi) is surely yours for the asking!

 

[Pickman's model]

Priceless stuff! A career in writing (possibly sci-fi) is surely yours for the asking!

i doubt it. because you have to have a plot and the ability to get the reader to suspend their disbelief. and i doubt you'd find a reader with that much disbelief to suspend.

 

[editor]

I'm still waiting to hear Jazz' wonderful theory about a flight being staged purely to provide cellphone traffic...

Which, of course, would sit rather uneasily with his earlier emphatic 'it wasn't possible to make the calls so the CIA employed a team of expert impersonators instead' claims...

 

[editor]

i doubt it. because you have to have a plot and the ability to get the reader to suspend their disbelief. and i doubt you'd find a reader with that much disbelief to suspend.

Well, that's true. Maybe children's writing and fairy stories would be more suited to his skills (2-4 yr olds).

 

[Pickman's model]

he'd be good at that as long as planes and towers weren't an integral part of the story.

 

[editor]

"Jack and Jill went up the hill.
Or, rather that's what the government wanted you to think" etc., etc.

 

[pk]

What a shallow, hateful thing to say,........
Well, since ya wanna go fight in the war against the U.S. why dont you go?
hop a flight to Beruit then Bagdad,
it should be easy to find some insurgents
I am shure they have a vest that will fit ya.
you should go, hitting that switch is the only thing that will make you feel better.
once they give it to you make shure you practice first....................

Hey Rentonite, nice reply, though you seem to have trouble spelling the word 'sure'.

I was just making the point that there is no difference between a Nazi concentration camp general and an American US Army general responsible for torturing raping and maiming men women and children in Fallujah.

None whatsoever.

 

[WouldBe]

That doesn't hold. The hijack alert is within easy reach of the pilot and in the case of flight 93 the reports of the transponder being switched off were after the reports of a struggle being heard by air traffic controllers

There isn't a hijack alert button. No such thing exists.

You have to turn a knob until the display reads 7500. This is the hijack code for the IFF. It's a damn sight harder trying to turn a knob, accurately to 7500 while struggling with hijackers than it is for the hijacker to turn the other knob to the OFF position.

 

[neilh]

Try looking closer and you'll see that your reply came under two minutes after mine, meaning my edit was done in the minute that everyone else has to immediately edit their post.

While it may be mildly annoying, to have you publicly accusing me of being in the habit of editing posts "long after" I'd replied to them and "read your reply" is not only wildly inaccurate, it's rather more annoying.

but i'm quite certain it didn't happen during those minutes between the posts, as it was still unchanged when my reply appeared, and when you posted next 4 minutes later, by which time you must have read my reply (#196) as you had replied back to it.

anyway, irrespective of this, if either you only ever reedit minorly before having seen following posts, or if this isn't the case but you've read my last few posts, hopefully it won't happen in the future, in which case i'm happy.

 

[editor]

but i'm quite certain it didn't happen during those minutes between the posts, as it was still unchanged when my reply appeared, and when you posted next 4 minutes later, by which time you must have read my reply (#196) as you had replied back to it.

No. You're wrong and you were out of order to post up what you did. Really.

But, whatever. Let's move on.

 

[MikeMcc]

...
3) Air defense failures and failure to follow standard operating procedures This to me is the most glaring area. By 9.28 clear signs ua93 is hijacked, 9.30 all doubt removed when transponder turned off. Everyone including cheney, rumsfeld, FAA and NORAD were all talking to each other. That's over 30 minutes to intercept the plane. What has nver been satisfactorily explained is why NORAD would not be able to track, hear air traffic radio, talk directly to FAA and USAF all in real time from the time a communications bridge was established. The re are various accounts of when this was achieved, but according to Richard Clarke it was in place by 9.30. All this supposed chatter between air traffic controllers ('doh, do you think we should think about scambling some planes?') is nonsensical.

NORAD supposedly can track multiple ICBMs but US air defenses are supposedly thrown off by the disablement of a transponder

...

I spent years working on air-defense kit. I can easily understand why there were problems in trying to track this aircraft. Military air surveillance in the states is dedicated to detecting external air threats. Internally they rely on the civilian air traffic control radars (where there is coverage) and good positon keeping in air traffic corridors. Civilian ATC relies on transponder replies for displayable information and will also be screwed by descending to low level.

As far as tracking ICBMs are concerned, this is initially done by Over-The-Horizon radars, the antennas for which are hundreds of miles long!. The pulse widths and frequencies used mean that the resolution is in order of many miles as well. It's only when targets get within a reasonable distance that other radar systems can be used that have better resolutions.

 

[editor]

I spent years working on air-defense kit. I can easily understand why there were problems in trying to track this aircraft.

So yet another sparticus 'fact' is shown to be a pile of steaming doggy-do!

 

[TAE]

Military air surveillance in the states is dedicated to detecting external air threats. Internally they rely on the civilian air traffic control radars (where there is coverage) and good positon keeping in air traffic corridors.

If an enemy air-craft ever made it into US air space, surely the US military would be able to track it - wouldn't they ?

 

[Lock&Light]

But, whatever. Let's move on.

I can't understand why this idiocy is still being allowed to 'move on'.

 

[MikeMcc]

If an enemy air-craft ever made it into US air space, surely the US military would be able to track it - wouldn't they ?

Only because they will have been able to track it coming into the air-space so will have been able to get AWACS coverage and a comabat air patrol to intercept it, possibly calling in National Guard air-defence units, etc. All of that takes time, probably less time now than prior to 9/11. It was probably very easy to become complacent about the threat and the ability to respond in the post-Glasnot and pre-9/11 times.

 

[editor]

It was probably very easy to become complacent about the threat and the ability to respond in the post-Glasnot and pre-9/11 times.

I think some people have immense difficultly remembering that the world was an entirely different place pre-9/11.

 

[sparticus]

So yet another sparticus 'fact' is shown to be a pile of steaming doggy-do!

Hardly

If you think Mike's post explains the air defense failures of 9/11 and makes the questions surrounding these failures into a pile of steaming doggy-do, then you clearly haven't been following the investigation with the multiple changes and contradictions between the different accounts offered and the omissions in the Kean report and you can have little understanding of the seriousness and extent of the failures that occured that rely on a level of criminal incompetence by the FAA that IMO is beyond belief. Is Senator Dayton talking doggy do when he says the Kean Report in effect means that for 2 years NORAD were lying about their timeline?

And if you think that the multiple hijacking of domestic aircraft and flying them into symbols of US power was not on the radar of US intelligence pre 9/11 then you know even less about the intelligence failures.

 

[editor]

If you think Mike's post explains the air defense failures of 9/11 and makes the questions surrounding these failures into a pile of steaming doggy-do, then you clearly haven't been following the investigation with the multiple changes and contradictions between the different accounts offered and the omissions in the Kean report and you can have little understanding of the seriousness and extent of the failures that occured that rely on a level of criminal incompetence by the FAA that IMO is beyond belief.

Face it: after all these years, you still haven't got a single scrap of anything that looks even remotely like credible evidence to support wild theories, have you?

Talking of which, when's Jazzz going to come along and finally explain his latest bonkers yarn?

 

[sparticus]

The only thing I accept is that you are not interested in understanding and debating the real facts and questions surrounding 9/11 (as typified by the intelligence and air defense failures) and I'm wasting my time trying to make you interested. Bye

 

[mauvais]

I note you've ignored WouldBe's correct assertion that there is no hijack alert button, and that setting a transponder is far more complicated than turning it off - something fairly obvious that any hijacker would surely wish to do rather quickly.

 

[editor]

The only thing I accept is that you are not interested in understanding and debating the real facts and questions surrounding 9/11 (as typified by the intelligence and air defense failures) and I'm wasting my time trying to make you interested. Bye

It's hard to get interested in a scattergun methodology which involves making an unresearched conspiratorial claim based on some minor, often barely-connected 'fact' you found on some site on the internet, and then immediately discarding that 'fact' when someone who actually knows what he's talking about proves you're talking rubbish.

Instead of conceding defeat and admitting that your claims are even dodgier than the 'official' ones you're challenging and that you still haven't a shred of credible evidence to back up your wild stories, you immediately pick up on some other minor detail found on the internet and quote that as fact until someone else can be arsed to correct it.

 

[editor]

I note you've ignored WouldBe's correct assertion that there is no hijack alert button....

Standard procedure, I'm afraid, because he's not really interested in facts - he's only interested in pursuing his self-declared status as a (guffaw) 'truth seeker.'

 

[mauvais]

I'll tell you why the air defense 'systems' failed; they're not physical systems like a SAM site, they're human and organisational systems.

In a non-war context, noone was ready for such an attack. Paper contigency plans don't help or count. New and unplanned decisions must be made by people. This is a classic management problem, and you'll quickly find that around half of all management decisions taken are actually 'wrong'.

These decisions are based on information. This is inter-organisational stuff. Who knows what's happening? The FBI, the FAA, the ATC services, the 911 emergency services, the military, DoD, the White House? Probably little bits with each, but does anyone have the bigger picture? No. Do these organisations cooperate well? No. Is information sharing, even in an emergency, going to be quick, fluid and cohesive? No.

I'll bet there were individual failings, and mistakes that could have been avoided. I'll also bet that the bigger problem was lack of communications, standard operating procedures, and divides in organisational culture.

If someone takes their plane into unauthorised military airspace or into an airport's departure path, something will be done about it bloody quickly, by that one affected party. 9/11 was a different set of parameters; lots of actors, lots of factors. You can't formulate a fitting response without considering them all, and this is slow. Even now, I wonder if it would be any different. Sure, you can put F-16s up and find the rogue airliner, but who decides to shoot it down? Slow again, and if you're too slow, it's over a population centre and it's too late. More difficult than you think.

That's why it took a long time to coordinate a response. I bet it doesn't now, but I bet it could still be done faster. Such are the rules of humans, groups and organisations.

 

[editor]

I'll bet there were individual failings, and mistakes that could have been avoided. I'll also bet that the bigger problem was lack of communications, standard operating procedures, and divides in organisational culture.

Absolutely.

Did you hear the recording from the air traffic controllers where they were all asking each other what they should do next?

They couldn't get hold of anyone and clearly had no idea what on earth they were supposed to be doing as the emergency unfurled.

 

[mauvais]

I've not seen that, actually. Do you have a link?

This - http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-08-12-clearskies_x.htm - is pretty interesting to see the level of confusion. It's perhaps slightly sensationalised and certainly favours the ATC staff, but most importantly gives a good idea of what bad or missing information, conjecture and worry can do in that situation.

Take for example the report of a missing helicopter over New York, the delay as they came to understand the gravity after three planes had crashed, the worry about losing their jobs or the FAA itself being hit, and so on...

 

[editor]

I've not seen that, actually. Do you have a link?

They played it on that Flight 93 film that was on last week.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Absolutely.

Did you hear the recording from the air traffic controllers where they were all asking each other what they should do next?

They couldn't get hold of anyone and clearly had no idea what on earth they were supposed to be doing as the emergency unfurled.

Sorry to not be around for a while. There are standard procedures for dealing with the sort of problems faced that morning. On plenty of more mundane occasions those procedures have been followed. But over the (probably) most protected airspace on earth we are told there was just something of a cockup. Or 4 simultaneous cock-ups to be precise. I find that hard to swallow. It is also worth noting that these "bungling" controllers managed to ground every flight in the states without a hitch.

 

[editor]

But over the (probably) most protected airspace on earth we are told there was just something of a cockup. Or 4 simultaneous cock-ups to be precise. I find that hard to swallow. It is also worth noting that these "bungling" controllers managed to ground every flight in the states without a hitch.

So how does your inability to understand the chaos that surrounded this unprecedent event add up to anything?

And who are you quoting when you're describing these "bungling" controllers?