9/11 attacks
Air defense stand down theory
The common conspiracy theory is that the air defense of United States had enough time to react to the hijacking and intercept the planes before they reach their targets, but either they were told to stand down or purposely the reaction was slowed down.
Unfortunately there isn’t enough data to make a reasonable judgment about that theory. According to some sources there were only 14 fighters on alert that day in 48 states, but since we don’t know if it is true or where exactly they were located at the time of attacks it’s hard to tell if they really had any chance to intercept the planes.
Between take off of two planes that hit World Trade Center and their crash into the building are about 40-45 minutes, which sounds like a lot of time, but everything depends on the location of the fighters. Also air defense command kept the fighters attached to off-shore areas since it seemed that there is no internal danger. Logically we can assume that some of them must have been close to capitol city of Washington or the biggest city of the east coast which is New York, but it’s just assumption.
Officials told that there was no plane hijacking over United States within at least a decade prior to 9/11 attacks and there wasn’t any procedure how civilian air control unit should warn the military headquarters. Also military officials stated that they were not informed about the danger until 3 out of 4 planes have crashed and that gives about 1 hour and 15 minutes to pass the information from civilian air control to the air defense.
Also there was explanation that the hijackers have switched off or damaged the onboard radar transponders, which would make the automatic radar system to be unable to identify those planes among about 4500 other planes that were around that area at that time. This explanation is rather feeble since minority of those planes had their transponders switched off it would make it easier to spot them.
Can you solve a case like this?
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