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In the skies, a scary 'failure of imagination'


desdemona

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I watched the session where the FAA testified before the 9/11 commission on c-span, scary, for some reason I was under the impression the military took control of the skies if we were under attack and there'd be some plan for co-operation with the FAA, unbelievable, Below an article from US News summarizes the testimony.

In the skies, a scary 'failure of imagination'

America's aviation system was "unsuitable in every respect" for dealing with the simultaneous terrorist hijackings that occurred over about two hours on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. That was the frightening and ultimately depressing news shared on Thursday, the last day of the 9/11 commission's hearings. From abysmal communications to what panel Vice Chair Lee Hamilton called a "failure of imagination," what ensued that day was high-level chaos at the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, tempered with heroic rank-and-file ingenuity. When it was all over by about 10 a.m., as United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into the soft earth of rural Pennsylvania, none of the four planes had been diverted from their sinister paths. And the question of whether the United States could protect itself from a domestic air assault was grimly answered: It could not.

Behind the chaos were systemic problems that overcame the agencies. For one, rusty Cold War policies were still in force, with the government expecting bad guys to fly in from places like Russia. There had never been any training to deal with suicide hijackings of domestic planes. Indeed, the warnings that had been issued that summer about new methods of al Qaeda attack never reached key people like Benedict Sliney, the operations manager at the FAA's New York Terminal Radar Approach Control. He was the one who ordered the unprecedented "ground stop" of every plane in America on 9/11. But had he known about, say, the August 2001 CIA memo "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly," he says he would have stopped everyone sooner.

The final, comprehensive picture of what happened that morning yielded troubling details. For instance, within minutes of United Flight 175's crash into the South Tower--American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower minutes earlier--an FAA operations manager in Boston asked the FAA's command center in Virginia to order pilots across the country to lock their cockpit doors. That message was never relayed. The military was alerted too late to intercept the hijacked planes. Jets guarding Washington were based 130 miles away at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Phone lines for President Bush, who was away at an event in Florida, kept cutting out. Military and government commanders, even Vice President Dick Cheney, got critical information from television news. Cheney, who relayed the president's extraordinary approval to shoot down the planes, did not do so until all the planes had crashed. The FAA didn't tell NORAD that Flight 93 was hijacked until it was down. Military jets were scrambled, but without the pilots' knowing why they were scrambled. Commissioner John Lehman called FAA's headquarters a "black hole" where information disappeared.

Heroics. Yet there were some shining moments of improvisation. In one instance, a United Airlines dispatcher took it upon himself to call the pilots of the 16 planes on his watch and tell them what was happening. One of those planes was Flight 93. It was hijacked two minutes later, but the passengers and crew struggled with the hijackers, crashing the plane in a Pennsylvania field, preventing it from reaching its target, believed to be either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

And the lessons learned have brought better protection. The NORAD commander, Gen. Ralph Eberhart, claims that communications and protocols have improved so much that today it would be possible to shoot down four similarly hijacked aircraft. Among the changes: The FAA and NORAD have a 24-hour communication line, the number of bases housing battle-ready jets has jumped from seven to as many as 30, and the phone lines on Air Force One have been improved. But Eberhart says what's more important is strengthening U.S. border and airport security to ensure that terrorists can't get into the country or onto U.S. planes. As Commission Chairman Thomas Kean said, solemnly wrapping up the hearing: "This is the story of a lot of problems, and shame on us if we don't learn from it." -Samantha Levine

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040628/.../28nine11.b.htm

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