Paine Stewart's plane was intercepted in twenty minutes according to published reports I've read. I've also read that it is routine for the FAA to contact NORAD upon losing contact with an airplane and that military jets are routinely scrambled. There is a published figure for the months preceeding 9/11/01, in which the military scrambled jets over 100 times in 2001 to intercept commercial aircraft.
I'm not sure what the typical response time is. But, I'm sure we can pretty much figure that out based on reasonable assumptions, such as: how long it take a plane to scramble (from the scramble order to the air, I believe 3 minutes is the time I've read), how fast these planes are able to fly (up to 1,700 MPH), their distance to the targets, etc. We all know the Northeast has plenty of military bases, some of which were still on 24 hour alert status. Now, the NE isn't that large of a region, why planes on stand by couldn't be scramble to at least defend Washington, DC a full hour after the WTC was struck (more than an hour after the planes veered off coarse) raises serious questions. OK, a skeptic could say that perhaps intercepting the planes that hit the WTC would be impossible given the lead time (although even then, New Jersey has air force bases that run routine training flights that could easily reach the WTC in minutes), but not having planes in the air over DC an hour later really raises some questions? I mean, we couldn't even defend our military nerve center with over an hour lead time, something really doesn't add up in that scenario. If not, why not? Why are our defenses so poorly designed? Andrews AFB is only minutes from DC, like they couldn't send up a few planes to defend the Capitol? That version of the official story has major holes in it.
As far as explosives and the WTC, that is a whole other ball of wax, and would require a much more intensive conspiracy. Not sure why someone would go to the trouble, since they could have been detected and just the impact of the planes hitting the WTC was enough to acheive any sort of goal to put fear in the general public over terrorism. I think what people have a problem with regarding the collapse of the WTC is: if the fires were actually hot enough to cause a structural collapse in a steel building, if seimsmographs actually detected some sort of disturbance before the buildings collapsed, and why the buildings would fall at the rate that gravity tells us they should and not be slowed by friction with the standing parts of the building. Those questions need to be put to rest to end the talk of bombs taking down the WTC. |
