NORAD MIA on 9/11

One of the questions that has baffled me since 9/11 is “Where was NORAD?”

In the last half of the twentieth century, during the cold war, the US faced an enemy with thousands of nuclear weapons poised to strike. We built quite a sophisticated (not to mention expensive) military air defense system called NORAD. NORAD was designed to defend against any Soviet air attack, no matter how massive. It is quite a system, costing nearly a trillion dollars to build and nearly $100B a year to maintain. When it’s not being used to defend against the Soviets, NORAD assists the FAA by scrambling jets to intercept off course or unidentified airliners, which it routinely does about 100 times a year.

FAA rules specify that any commercial airliner that goes off course, or breaks communications, or lacks transponder signal, is to be treated as an emergency and reported to NORAD within minutes… all of which happened on 911. What usually happens next is that NORAD sends up fighters to intercept and investigate. Within 10-20 minutes fighters would normally be in visual contact with the suspect plane. But that didn’t happen on 9/11.

On 9/11 four hijacked planes were allowed to make U-turns in the sky, break radio contact with controllers, turn off or change transponder codes, and fly around for an hour and a half, all without being intercepted by NORAD jets. How can this be?

I’ve read the 911 report. I’ve heard all the excuses: There were training exercises (Vigilant Guardian, Northern Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, etc…) planes supposedly sent in the wrong direction and all the rest. But these are not a justification for what happened. These are simply descriptions of the myriad mechanisms by which commanders diverted the resources of our air defense to allow the completion of the mission, the mission of destroying the twin towers.