14 planes for the whole US! Sounds fishy.

[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/americas/2222205.stm[/url]

US Air Force commanders considered crashing fighter jets into hijacked planes on 11 September because of a lack of armed planes, a BBC investigation reveals.
In the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks US fighter planes took to the skies to defend America from any further attacks.

Their mission was to protect President George W Bush and to intercept any hijacked aircraft heading to other targets in the US.

But, as a new BBC programme Clear The Skies reveals, the threat of an attack from within America had been considered so small that the entire US mainland was being defended by only 14 planes.

As a result unarmed planes were diverted from training missions in a desperate bid to increase the number of fighter planes patrolling American airspace.

Colonel Robert Marr was Commander of the North East Defence Sector and remembers the words that came over the secure phone "we will take lives in the air to preserve lives on the ground".

US military unprepared

However, at the time of the attacks the US had just four fighter pilots on alert covering the north eastern United States.

US pilots were forced to take to the skies without any weapons and might have had to deliberately crash into a hijacked plane to prevent casualties on the ground.

"I had determined, of course, that with only four aircraft we cannot defend the whole north eastern United States," he said.

"Some of them would have just gotten in the air possibly without any armament onboard.

"If you had to stop an aircraft sometimes the only way to stop an aircraft is with your own aircraft if you don't have any weapons.

"It was very possible that they [the pilots] would have been asked to give their lives themselves to try to prevent further attacks if need be."

Colonel Marr said: "That was the sense of frustration, of I don't have the forces available to do anything about this, we've got everything up that we can get up and still can't do anything."

Two of the pilots patrolling north east America told the programme how they struggled to get to New York as fast as possible after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center.

Pilots "Duff" and "Nasty" recalled they were only minutes away when the second plane hit the towers.

Pilot Duff said: "For a long time I wondered what would have happened if we had been scrambled in time.

"We've been over the flight a thousand times in our minds and I don't know what we could have done to get there any quicker."

[b]To the Clinton, the peace dividend meant devastate the military.[/b]

To me, the peace dividend was peace.

Bullshit...I'm here to tell you that nobody, at any time ever considered asking american pilots to commit suicide by crashing their fighter jets into airliners.

Out of all the really heavy duty tin foil hat stuff I have ever seen come out of the yellow jounalism sewer, that is the British tabliod press, this takes the cake. The true blue ribbon prize winner for jounalism, that you just made up.

I was listening to a radio talk show here in NY. The host (I forget who, maybe Rush) said something to the effect that "for people west of the Hudson River, 9-11 never happened, it was a TV show".

I know that eveyone here has a "similar" mindset, the people that did this need to be punished. And that it was not "the 9-11 tragedy", it was an ATTACK!

What are the "feelings" of the people that you encounter? Is this attack already being forgotton by John Q. Public? I hope not.

Never Forget!

What scares me more is that there may have been more than four planes slated for hijack that day. Have you noticed how the stories that some of the hijackers were posing as pilots to ride in the cockpit have disappeared?

Also, there were stories of Arab "guest" pilots sitting in cockpits when the orders to ground everything came in. How many of them might have been bad guys?

I'll bet there are other ways to force down a commercial airliner with a fighter jet.
Wouldn't flying (with full power) directly in front of the airliner cause serious problems with engine performance?
Just wondering....

The airliner is more likely to interfere with the fighter, especially a small one like an F-16.  Plus, the fighter probably has a total of 15 minutes flight time at full power (afterburners on, I presume you mean).

Fighters couldn't get there in time, eh?

Time to bring back the YF-12A...

[img]http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/annex/an12.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/fighter/yf12-12.jpg[/img]

Ahh yes... #936.  Officially 60-6936.  The third and last YF12A built.  Crashed 24 June 1971.

[img]http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/fighter/yf12-7.jpg[/img]

and...

[img]http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/fighter/yf12-10.jpg[/img]

If you don't think those birds were trick enough check the white heat-resistant tires in the top pic.

I'm still amased that we could build the SR-71 and YF-12A with slide rules, pencils, and paper. I'd love to see what those guys could have accomplished with todays design tools.

I really want to know your source. This is absurd.

We do not now and never have had a AAM shortage. We purchased thousands of AAMs even during the Clinton Admin and have fired off only a handful in action since the Gulf War. We do not use that many AAMs in live fire training every year to have run the stocks down. We have a problem with air to GROUND ordinance stocks, and cruse missle supplies, but we have been dumping that shit like rain all over the world.


Nor would we send Sidewinder armed aircraft on air intercept missions over the Persian Gulf. For the last decade our aircraft have been taught to avoid if at all possible such close range engagments with Mig 29's and Su-27's because of the R-77 and its helmet mounted sight system. You stay back and lob AMRAAMS at them.

The Air Force does not keep armed aircraft lying around, nor do aircraft on training missions need to be armed. It is unsafe.

There is at last one case on record that I know of in the early 1960's where Air National Guard F100's on a weekend training mission-carrying live Sidewinders per SOP at the time to guard against a Soviet surpise attack-shot down the B-52 that was their sparring partner.

You wouldn't do force on force drills with live ammo in your rifle, why would the Air Force use live rounds for the same thing in the air?

The only shortage on 9/11/01 was a shortage of aircraft assigned to armed patrol-not a shortage of either aircraft or missiles to do those patrols.

Um, when did 20mm get so expensive that we send our planes up without it?

I hate Bill Clinton.

These are fanstastic planes, but I wonder if they would be that good with low, slow (relatively) targets.

My only question is how many of these attacks will it take to wake the rest of the country up?

We're doomed.  The AR15.com Army is the last line of defense.

Stateside F-16's normally fly with 515 rounds of 20MM Target Practice ammo. There should have been at least F-16's available armed with TP which would be better than nothing at all and fully capable of damaging and bringing down a "lumbering" commercial airliner in an emergency.  

As for there being a missile shortage, that may be the case if you realize that stateside bases normally stock just enough AAM missiles and 20MM HEI to give each deployable aircraft a basic combat load to get it to its deployed (overseas) location.  Missiles are so expensive that the AF cannot afford to stock many spares at stateside bases, preferring to stock War Reserve Material (WRM) in the theather of expected use.

The only planes I ever saw flying live missiles while I was in the AF were alert birds responding to incoming threats or test planes (William Tell, WSEP, etc).  These missiles were designed and engineered to "fire and forget" one time and do not take well to the daily rigors of "flying the box".

I wish DoubleFeed was wrong.

But he's not.

[V]

HA HA HA...

Do you really think that our government would freely admit that we have a 'standing army' of ARMED fighter jets patrolling the United States?

Of course they are going to say that they are unarmed.

The fighter jets were [size=5]THERE[/size=5] WHEN THE AIRLINER PLOWED INTO THE GROUND. How come we never hear the story of what actually occured as the plane was smacking the ground?

Because we shot it out of the sky.