Spark wrote:
Kmarion wrote:
BN wrote:
Another quality thread by ATG
What? .. I commercial airliner overshooting it's target by 150 miles. That is pretty serious. It's shows neglect.. very dangerous.
I was about to say. Who knows what was 150 miles beyond? A city?
In any case post 9/11 people would have to be watching any aircraft deviating from flightplan a lot very closely - though marine can fill in on tha tone.
I was thinking the same.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collec … d_up.shtmlA silent jetliner is heading toward a major American city and the military didn't intercept it. Why not? The threat the situation posed was demonstrated clearly on 9/11.
"Before the fighters could get airborne, FAA re-established communications with the pilots of the Northwest Airlines commercial airliner and subsequently."
According to officials, the plane stopped talking to controllers while it was over Kansas. The plane's flight path, however, only took it over a sliver of Kansas, specifically over Goodland, Kansas. The plane was over Goodland at 7:03 p.m. on Wednesday evening, while it was still under the direction of air traffic controllers in Colorado.
According to the plane's flight record, it did not change its flight path until 8:15 p.m., when we can safely assume the pilots either (a) stopped fighting with each other or (b) woke up and realized what was happening.
The fact that NORAD says the flight wasn't intercepted because by the time fighter jets could be launched, Minneapolis controllers re-established contact, invites us to see when the jets could have intercepted the airliner.
NORAD won't say where the fighters were stationed that were "on alert," but it's not hard to figure out. Madison has the most active Air National Guard base in the Upper Midwest. Indeed, CNN confirms that Madison was the base on alert.
Goodland, Kansas, is 600 miles by air. The jet didn't pass over Minneapolis St. Paul until 7:53 p.m. -- 50 minutes after it "went dark." The 115th Fighter Wing in Madison flies F-16 jets. F-16s fly about 300 knots per hour in cruise, but can fly much faster when they've got a good reason to. F-16 pilots I've talked to say the fastest they've gone is in the vicinity of 800 knots, so let's just say with an American city under a possible threat, they'd got about 700 knots -- that's 805 mph.
Madison is 198 miles from Minneapolis St. Paul or about 15 minutes for an F-16 in a hurry. If the military wanted to intercept a threat before it reached Minneapolis St. Paul, the area around Redwood Falls would've been the place to do it. That's 20 minutes away for an "on alert" F-16 in Madison.
To have been able to do that, the order to intercept would've had to have been given by 7:34 p.m., or almost a half hour after the plane "went dark." That obviously didn't happen. The military either didn't know about a plane that had been flying without being in contact for a half an hour, or they did know about it and the decision was made not to intercept the possible threat. We don't know; nobody's talking.
"I've told you more than I needed to," Keith Holloway of the National Transportation Safety Board told MPR's Marty Moylan today after telling him, well, nothing.
Taking NORAD's press release at face value, there's still the question of why the planes weren't in the air at all. Let's assume it's one minute before contact was re-established (i.e. 8:14 p.m.). That still means that an hour and 13 minutes after a jetliner stopped communicating with the ground controllers, the military still had not taken steps to intercept it.
It's true, however, that the plane's altitude hadn't changed over that time, indicating no apparent threat, but if it had been under the control of hijackers, waiting until it did to launch jets to intercept it would've been -- like 9/11 -- far too little and far too late.
In a statement today, the Transportation Security Administration provided little insight into a simple question:
TSA was aware of and monitored the situation working with our federal and stakeholder partners. As part of our procedures for events of this nature, TSA protocol included checking possible screening anomalies from the departing airport, checking to see if Federal Air Marshals were onboard, notification to the airline, as well as TSA and DHS leadership. TSA also participated in briefing conference calls with other federal partners and continued to monitor the situation.
Coincidentally, an aircraft was intercepted by fighter jets on Wednesday. The pilot of a small plane stopped communicating (it turns out, he was likely dead or incapacitated) over Indiana and fighter jets followed it until it crashed.
It took the pilots about 5 minutes to intercept the plane.
In Minnesota, of course, everything turned out fine. But what if it hadn't? What questions would we be asking today?
