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WASHINGTON, June 17: US aviation and military officials responded clumsily to the Sept 2001 attacks and a White House order to shoot down hijacked planes did not reach Air Force jets until after the last airliner had crashed , a special commission said on Thursday.
A staff report for the Sept 11 investigation panel concluded fighters had no chance to intercept the ill-fated aircraft - much less shoot them down. They blamed uncertainty about key developments, poor coordination, lack of useful information from the Federal Aviation Administration, and the military's air defense shortcomings.
"NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. They struggled under difficult circumstances to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet," the report concluded.
The report, released as the commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks began its final public hearing, contradicted long-held event timelines and some witness testimony about NORAD's proximity to hijacked planes and whether they were prepared to shoot them down.
Neither the FAA nor NORAD, the US/Canadian military command responsible for airspace defense, would comment on the findings. Officials from both will testify on Thursday.
At times during the unprecedented al Qaeda attacks that killed about 3,000 people, confusion was pervasive and information-sharing slow, fragmented or absent, the panel's investigators concluded. In some cases, data was inaccurate.
Some senior aviation officials thought, incorrectly, that another plane, not American Airlines Flight 11, had struck the World Trade Center's north tower a full 30 minutes after it happened, according to a transcript of radio communications. NORAD said it was not alerted to the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 175 until after it struck the south tower.
COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS: Other communications problems were noted with American Flight 77, which slammed into the Pentagon.
FAA controllers in Indianapolis lost track of Flight 77's westward route from Washington and stopped looking for it, thinking it had crashed. While the first attacks in New York had occurred 10 minutes earlier, those controllers did not find out about them for another 20 minutes. By then, Flight 77 had turned around.
"American 77 traveled undetected for 36 minutes on a course heading due east for Washington, D.C.," the report said. The report said no one at the FAA asked the military for help locating Flight 77.
Once the FAA identified an unknown plane "six miles from the White House," fighters were too far away to help. Three of the four commandeered planes were difficult to track because hijackers disconnected aircraft transponders, electronic devices that emit data. Controllers had to rely on less precise radar images to determine location and direction. -Reuters
