9/11: Eleven Years Into the Nightmare

NORAD and 911

Within mere minutes of my being informed of the impact of Flight 11 into the North WTC tower — that is to say well prior to the intrusion of a second airliner into lower Manhattan airspace — I knew that the Pentagon was intimately and inextricably interwoven into the emerging tapestry of terror. And how did I know? In part, because as a youngster, by the luck of the draw as it were, I resided for 10 years on a military base wherein an important component of NORAD is headquartered. That experience, when combined with my subsequent 13 years involvement in the aerospace industry as a vendor of air traffic control avionics, permits me to address with authority that particular aspect of the days’ events.

It should be remembered that all of the flights allegedly highjacked on Sept. 11 were routine commercial flights, and as such were required, pursuant to FAA protocols, to submit flight plans to that agency in advance; the data contained within these plans includes, inter alia, average airspeed, assigned altitude, route coordinates, and ETA. The FAA, in its turn, shares all flight plans with NORAD, again as per requirement.

Even momentary deviations from any of the aforementioned criteria are detected in real time by the FAA’s and NORAD’s terrestrial antenna arrays and by space-based communication, imaging, eavesdropping, and GPS platforms maintained by the Air Force, and the NRO, and the NGIA, and the NSA, Any sustained anomalies will set off alarm bells even if, especially if, a given aircraft were suddenly to observe RF silence, i.e., were it to disable its transponder. Otherwise the USAF, tasked with securing American airspace, would find itself unable to distinguish its friends — or to extinguish its foes — were the continental US to be suddenly subjected to aerial attack! The catchphrase for this omnivorous capability back in the day was “universal air surveillance.”

(Universal air surveillance, as defined to me by more than one participating scientist, on more than one occasion some four-plus decades ago meant that the velocity and trajectory of any aerial vehicle, aloft at altitudes ranging from a few hundred feet above sea level to several hundred miles above planet Earth itself was subjected to real-time, 24/7 scrutiny! So acute was the network’s sensitivity, even items as miniscule as the dislodged nuts, bolts, wires, and washers that comprised the flotsam and jetsam of American and Russian endeavors in outer space were precisely pinpointed at all times. The system, as configured in the mid-1960s, could track hundreds of air/spacecraft simultaneously and was, by virtue of its redundancy, considered to be fail-safe. This formidable achievement, attained as it was years before the NSA’s fishnet of spy satellites was established, and decades prior to the deployment of DoD’s GPS array was, not unjustifiably, a point of pride to both its designers and its overseers.)

Bottom line? At no point were the whereabouts of any of the four errant aircraft left to chance and thus the failure to interdict these flights could only have occurred pursuant to orders.

I well remember laughing to myself when, in the aftermath of the tragedy, a mainstream media organ was queried as to why the wildly deviant flight path of one or another of the doomed planes had proceeded apace — without detection, without interception. The news organ in question, forwarded that query to a gentleman it deemed certified to expostulate on such matters. The Expert replied that the aircraft tracking antenna (as though there was only one tasked with the tracking of the plane in question) was at that auspicious moment unable to detect the deviation because it had — Are you ready for this? — been “facing the wrong way!”

Say what?!

What his response implied, but dared not state, was that the lone antenna, though fully functional, maintained a fixed position 180 degrees opposite to that of the aircraft its was assigned to track and, for that reason, had been derelict in its duties. Of course, as anyone who has ever passed by a large airport has doubtlessly observed, air traffic control antennas are in a state of constant rotation, because the accurate management of air traffic requires the precise positioning of all aircraft in its vicinity at all times, a degree of accuracy, only the ongoing triangulation capability afforded by a rotating antenna can provide. Oh well, at least our Expert didn’t claim that a non-functional transponder was the culprit!

For a “real world” example of the tracking matrix at work, one need only to revisit the sad saga of PGA icon Payne Stuart. When the golfer’s Learjet lost cabin air pressure somewhere over the middle west and subsequently veered off piste, that deviation was quickly detected and his aircraft accurately located, promptly interdicted, and subsequently shepherded by a brace of F-16s. The fighter pilots were prepared to incinerate the zombie aerodyne were it to assume a downward trajectory that would culminate with its impact into a populated area once its fuel reserve had been exhausted. Suffice it to say that NORAD’s minions weren’t asleep at their CRTs that day!

An Ominous Postscript

On the evening of September 14th, I was visiting a relative in Northern Virginia. Naturally, the events of three days earlier were the cynosure of conversation. A neighbor who was present throughout the discussion the let it be known that his closest friend worked at the Pentagon, his employer of record being the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). He further elaborated that on the evening of the 11th his friend, rendered distraught by the tragedy, informed him that during the previous afternoon, his supervisor had taken him aside and suggested that he spend the next day with his family as it would be a “slow day at the office.” The underling, knowing that his wife couldn’t request a day off on such short notice, politely declined the offer. Almost instantly, his superior’s demeanor underwent a Jekyll-to-Hyde transmutation — his posture stiffened, his gaze intensified, and his voice acquired a stern sonority — at which point he was then ordered not to attend work on the following day! The junior employee complied, no questions asked and, come the morning, joined the millions of Americans glued to their televisions, transfixed by the unfolding events; the awkward exchange of the previous afternoon was forgotten, if but briefly. Moments later, it was reported that a third wayward plane had impacted the Pentagon, and that the collision point had occurred precisely where his office had been located!

Are we to suppose that the ONI official was only coincidentally clairvoyant?

(I learned subsequently, that the area impacted by the plane had very recently undergone extensive structural reinforcement. Why would a low-rise building, and one none the worse for wear to boot, require beefing up?)

“Taking our Nazi example”

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html