Barrie Zwicker, Canadian Television Journalist

A common explanation as to why no U.S. military interceptors took to the skies on September 11th, until it was too late, is that it was simple incompetence.  Well, let me deal with the incompetence theory first, by taking you back to October 26, 1999.  That is the date the chartered Lear Jet carrying golfer Payne Stewart crashes, killing all on board.  This, from the National Transportation Safety Board Crash Report. 

9:19 a.m.:  The flight departs.

9:24 a.m.:  The Lear Jet's pilot responds to an instruction from Air Traffic Control. 

9:33 a.m.:  The controller radios another instruction.  No response from the pilot. 

For 4-1/2 minutes, the controller tries to establish contact.  Having failed, the controller calls in the military. 

Note that he did not seek nor did he require the approval of the President of the United States or indeed anyone.  It's standard procedure followed routinely to call in the Air Force when radio contact with a commercial passenger jet is lost or the plane departs from its flight path or anything along those lines occurs. 

9:54 a.m., 16 minutes later:  The F-16 reaches the Lear Jet at 46,000 feet and conducts a visual inspection. 

Total elapsed time?  Twenty-one minutes. 

So, what does this prove? Well, it proves that standing routines exist for dealing with all such emergencies.  For instance, loss of radio contact.  All personnel in the air and on the ground are trained to follow the routines which have been fine-tuned over decades as the Lear Jet incident illustrates.  For large, scheduled aircraft, tracked throughout on radar, to depart extravagantly from their flight paths would trigger numerous calls to the military especially after two had hit the World Trade Center and now one is speeding toward Washington, D.C.  It flies over the White House, turns sharply and heads toward the Pentagon.  Everyone, and I mean everyone now knows these planes are very bad news.  It's been reported on all TV networks for more than half an hour that this is a terrorist attack.

Now, Andrews Air Force Base is a huge installation.  It's home to Air Force 1, the President's plane.  It's home for two combat-ready squadrons of jet interceptors mandated to insure the safety of the U.S. Capitol.  Andrews is only 12 miles from the White House.  On September 11, the squadrons there are the 121st fighter squadron of the 113th fighter wing equipped with F-16s and the 321st Marine  Fighter Attack squadron of the 49th Marine Air Group Detachment A equipped with F-18s.  This information was on the website of the base on September 11.  On September 12, Andrews chose to update its website.  I find it odd that after the update there is no mention of the F-16 and F-18 fighters.  The base becomes, according to the website, home to a transport squadron only.  Yet at 6:30 the evening of September 11, NBC Nightly News along with many outlets reported, "It was after the attack on the Pentagon that the Air Force then decided to scramble F-16s out of the DC National Guard Andrews Air Force Base to fly a protective cover over Washington, D.C."  Throughout the Northeastern United States are many air bases, but that morning, no interceptors respond in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation.  This includes the Andrews squadrons which have the longest lead time and are 12 miles from the White House.

Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports to my knowledge of reprimands.  This further weakens the incompetence theory.  Incompetence usually earns reprimands.  This causes me to ask, and other media need to ask, if there were stand-down orders.