September 11, 2001 Research & Archives

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alerts North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)'s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) about the suspected hijacking of Flight 11. In response, NEADS scrambles two fighter planes located at Cape Cod's Otis Air National Guard Base to locate and tail Flight 11; they are not yet in the air when Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower.

Two F-15 alert aircraft at Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts were ordered to battle stations (seated in their aircraft, engines not yet started).

On September 18, 2001, NORAD issued a press release containing a timeline of the events of the September 11, including when they were contacted by the FAA. This page has been removed, but a copy can be found at archive.org. However, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission, after listening to tapes of communications, found that portions of this timeline were inaccurate. The NORAD timeline had served as the official account of the military response, and elements of that timeline appeared in the book Air War over America (notably information concerning United Flight 93, e.g., pages 59 and 63) and was given in testimony to the 9/11 Commission by NORAD's Major General Larry Arnold (retired), and Colonel Alan Scott (retired) in 2003.

    Concerning Col. Scott's statements to the Commission. From Vanity Fair, August, 2006, page 5 of 9: —

        In the chronology presented to the 9/11 commission, Colonel Scott put the time NORAD was first notified about United 93 at 9:16 a.m., from which time, he said, commanders tracked the flight closely. (It crashed at 10:03 a.m.) If it had indeed been necessary to "take lives in the air" with United 93, or any incoming flight to Washington, the two armed fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia would have been the ones called upon to carry out the shootdown. In Colonel Scott's account, those jets were given the order to launch at 9:24, within seconds of NEADS's receiving the F.A.A.'s report of the possible hijacking of American 77, the plane that would ultimately hit the Pentagon. This time line suggests the system was starting to work: the F.A.A. reports a hijacking, and the military reacts instantaneously. Launching after the report of American 77 would, in theory, have put the fighters in the air and in position over Washington in plenty of time to react to United 93.

    Concerning Gen. Arnold's statements to the Commission. From Vanity Fair, August, 2006, page 5 of 9: —

        Major General Arnold explained to the commission that the military had been tracking United 93 and the fighters were in position if United 93 had threatened Washington. "It was our intent to intercept United Flight 93," Arnold testified. "I was personally anxious to see what 93 was going to do, and our intent was to intercept it."

        In testimony a few minutes [following Col Scott's testimony], however, General Arnold added an unexpected twist: "We launched the aircraft out of Langley to put them over top of Washington, D.C., not in response to American Airlines 77, but really to put them in position in case United 93 were to head that way."

    Problems with the officers' statements to the Commission. From Vanity Fair, August, 2006, page 5 of 9: —

        As the tapes [of F.A.A. and military communications on 9/11] reveal in stark detail, parts of Scott's and Arnold's testimony were misleading, and others simply false. At 9:16 a.m., when Arnold and [NEADS commander Colonel Robert] Marr had supposedly begun their tracking of United 93, the plane had not yet been hijacked. In fact, NEADS wouldn't get word about United 93 for another 51 minutes. And while NORAD commanders did, indeed, order the Langley fighters to scramble at 9:24, as Scott and Arnold testified, it was not in response to the hijacking of American 77 or United 93. Rather, they were chasing a ghost [Flight 11]. NEADS was entering the most chaotic period of the morning.

The Washington Post reported in its August 3, 2006, edition that:

    "Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

    Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said."

In their 2007 book, Without Precedent, 9/11 Commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that 9/11 conspiracy theories had grown primarily because of problems in the previous story about the planes:

"If the military had had the amount of time they said they had ... and had scrambled their jets, it was hard to figure out how they had failed to shoot down at least one of the planes. ... In this way, the FAA's and NORAD's inaccurate reporting after 9/11 created the opportunity for people to construct a series of conspiracy theories that persist to this day." "The tapes recordings ... from the day were extremely important – they provided a real-time record of what was happening that enabled our staff to relive the day, instead of relying solely on people's memory or their hurried notes of what took place."

The NORAD timeline showed that the FAA had notified NORAD earlier than the taped evidence indicated, and the 9/11 Commission Report faulted the FAA for not contacting NORAD quickly enough. The NORAD timeline showed notification of the hijacking of Flight 175 at 08:43, while the tapes show NORAD was notified at the same time Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 09:03. According to Scoggins, however, "With American Airlines, we could never confirm if [Flight 11] was down or not, so that left doubt in our minds."

According to the 9/11 Commission report, at approximately 08:32, the FAA's Herndon Command Center established a teleconference between Boston, New York, and Cleveland Centers so that Boston Center could help the others understand what was happening. Controllers at the Boston Center knew American Airlines Flight 11, which departed at 07:59 from Boston for its flight to Los Angeles, was hijacked 30 minutes before it crashed. They tracked it to New York on their radar scopes: 'I watched the target of American 11 the whole way down,' said Boston controller Mark Hodgkins. Several Boston controllers tracked American 11 for its entire flight.

The FAA mistakenly thought Flight 11 was still possibly airborne, in part because American Airlines did not confirm that they had lost all contact with Flight 11 until some time after 10:00. The NORAD timeline showed that the fighters scrambled from Langley at 09:24 were in response to a 09:21 FAA report of the hijacking of Flight 77; NORAD never mentioned the phantom Flight 11.

    From Michael Bronner of Vanity Fair:

        The problem, Scoggins told me later, was that American Airlines refused to confirm for several hours that its plane had hit the tower. This lack of confirmation caused uncertainty that would be compounded in a very big way as the attack continued. (Though airlines have their own means of monitoring the location of their planes and communicating with their pilots, they routinely go into information lockdown in a crisis.)

In October 2003, the 9/11 Commission issued a subpoena to the FAA to turn over documents after the Commission's investigators determined that material had been withheld. A tape was made of oral statements of New York air traffic controllers, intended to be used as an aid in their making written statements, then destroyed. A quality assurance manager at the FAA's New York Center denied the staff access to the tape and later destroyed it. Its existence came to light in 2003 interviews with FAA staff. The Commission subpoenaed the tape and other records from the FAA on Oct. 16, 2003. In November 2003, the Commission issued a subpoena to NORAD; its second subpoena issued to a federal agency for failure to turn over documents.

In July 2004, the 9/11 commission made referrals to the Inspectors General of both the US Department of Transportation and the Defense Department to further investigate whether witnesses had lied.

    Commission staff believes there is sufficient evidence that the false statements made to the commission were deliberately false. [John Farmer, Jr., the commission's senior counsel]

The DoD Inspector General's report was released to the New York Times in August 2006 under a FOIA request. According to the report, military officials were exonerated of intentionally misleading the 9/11 Commission in their testimony. A summary of the report called for more steps to improve the Defense Department's ability to investigate "a future significant air event," including more effective event logging methods

The US Transportation Department's Inspector General's investigation report was released on August 31, 2006. FAA personnel were also exonerated of knowingly misleading the 9/11 Commission.

Background

In January 1982, the FAA unveiled the National Airspace System (NAS) Plan. The plan called for more advanced systems for Air Traffic Control, and improvements in ground-to-air surveillance and communication with new Doppler Radars and better transponders. Better computers and software were developed, air route traffic control centers were consolidated, and the number of flight service stations reduced. There is no overlap of responsibility between DoD and FAA within the NAS: this is why within FAA-controlled airspace the FAA is in charge of controlling and vectoring hijack intercept aircraft.

The radar systems at NEADS had been scheduled to be upgraded in a contract awarded in 1997, but the project cost had been revised upwards by 700% causing the Air Force to cancel the contract and begin plans to re-open the bidding process.

Planning for terrorist use of hijacked airplanes as missiles had been considered for some military exercises prior to 9/11, though all but one of those exercises considered only aircraft originating from other countries.

The US and Canadian militaries, particularly NORAD and the US Air National Guard, have been tasked with interception duties concerning hijacked aircraft. Their primary duty was assistance to law enforcement. Quoting Maj.Gen. Larry Arnold: "We always viewed an attack from within our borders as a law enforcement issue, ...". Military aircraft were to be used to assure positive flight following, report unusual observances, and aid search and rescue in the event of an emergency. Jamie Gorelick of the 9-11 Commission had taken part in those security measures as Deputy Attorney General, and described the measures in Commission hearings. In April 2001, NORAD considered an exercise in which an aircraft of foreign origin was hijacked by terrorists and flown into the Pentagon, like a missile, but rejected the scenario as implausible. Five months later, a similar scenario occurred. However, in January 2002 Maj.Gen. Larry Arnold, stated "...we did not honestly think about hijacked airliners being used in suicide attacks."

Efforts post-9/11

In April 2003, a contract was awarded to upgrade the Battle Control Systems, operational date by summer 2006.

Later systems, such as the Joint-Based Expeditionary Connectivity Center (JBECC), merge civil and military radar data. Once deployed, the JBECC can fuse and correlate target data covering about 400 miles (640 km) of coastline from disparate airborne, land- and sea-based sensors creating fire-control-quality tracks that can guide interceptors to engagement.

Major General Larry Arnold, USAF, ret. stated in May 2001, that JBECC will provide "... more time to scramble fighters and see any target, whether small, large, low or high."

General Arnold also stated "In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we had to hook up to FAA radars throughout the country, install compatible radios for nationwide coverage between our command and control agencies and our airborne assets, and purchase a new command and control computer system to integrate radar and communications. The initial investment was for $75 million, and this number has grown to nearly $200 million."

Organizations outside the FAA (e.g., the airlines, Department of Defense, NASA, and international sites) also have access to the FAA's Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) software and/or data for purposes of flight management and tracking.

2009 Government Accountability Office report on ASA

In January 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published "Homeland Defense: Actions Needed to Improve Management of Air Sovereignty Alert Operations to Protect U.S. Airspace" on the Air Force's Air Sovereignty Alert mission. According to the report:

    The Air Force has not implemented ASA operations in accordance with DOD, NORAD, and Air Force directives and guidance, which instruct the Air Force to establish ASA as a steady-state (ongoing and indefinite) mission. The Air Force has not implemented the 140 actions it identified to establish ASA as a steady-state mission, which included integrating ASA operations into the Air Force's planning, programming, and funding cycle. The Air Force has instead been focused on other priorities, such as overseas military operations. While implementing ASA as a steady-state mission would not solve all of the challenges the units must address, it would help them mitigate some of the challenges associated with conducting both their ASA and war fighting missions.

The report further stated:

    The GAO analysis also showed that none of the Air Force's key homeland defense documents—the Air Force homeland defense policy directive, the Air Force homeland operations doctrine, and the Air Force homeland defense concept of operations—fully defines the roles and responsibilities for, or accurately articulates the complexity of, Air Sovereignty Alert operations.

The report made the following recommendations to improve ASA operations:

    We recommend that the Secretary of Defense direct the Commander of the U.S. command element of NORAD to routinely conduct risk assessments to determine ASA requirements, including the appropriate numbers of ASA sites, personnel, and aircraft to support ASA operations.

    We recommend that the Secretary of Defense direct the military services with units that consistently conduct ASA operations to formally assign ASA duties to these units and then ensure that the readiness of these units is fully assessed, to include personnel, training, equipment, and ability to respond to an alert.

    We recommend that the Secretary of Defense direct the Secretary of the Air Force to take the following five actions:

        • Establish a timetable to implement ASA as a steady-state mission.
        • Implement ASA as a steady-state mission according to NORAD, DOD, and Air Force guidance by

        • updating and implementing the ASA program action directive;
        • updating the Air Force homeland defense policy, homeland operations doctrine, and concept of operations to incorporate and define the roles and responsibilities for ASA operations; and incorporating the ASA mission within the Air Force submissions for the 6-year Future Years Defense Program.

        • Develop and implement a plan to address any projected capability gaps in ASA units due to the expected end of the useful service lives of their F-15s and F-16s.
        • Develop and implement a formal method to replace deploying units that still provides unit commanders flexibility to coordinate replacements.