9/11 attacks
Air defense stand down theory
The common conspiracy theory is that the air defense of the United States had enough time to react to the hijacking and intercept the planes before they reached 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 the attacks, it’s hard to tell if they really had any chance to intercept the planes.
Between the take-off of the two planes that hit the 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 offshore areas since it seemed that there was no internal danger. Logically, we can assume that some of them must have been close to the capital city of Washington or the biggest city on the East Coast, which is New York, but it’s just an assumption.
Officials stated that there was no plane hijacking over the United States within at least a decade prior to the 9/11 attacks, and there wasn’t any procedure how the 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 had crashed, and that gives about 1 hour and 15 minutes to pass the information from civilian air control to the air defense.
Furthermore, there was an 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 a minority of those planes had their transponders switched off, it would make it easier to spot them.
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