9/11 - a conspiracy?

General Arnold testified that Colonel Duffy (one of the F-15 pilots) "elected to hit the afterburner and to speed up his way towards New York" at around 8.57 AM (5 minutes after he took off). He only did so because Arnold was watching CNN and saw the footage of the plane crashing into the first tower. Why not earlier? They had gotten a call from the FAA 10 minutes before that - why did Duffy wait to turn on his afterburner until they watched CNN?)... When the second crash occured (at 9.02) he was still 8 minutes away according to Arnold - We know that Duffy flew at Mach 1.5 for roughly 5 minutes (from 8.57 when he hit the afterburner until 9.02 when the second crash occured), in a straight line to New York. 1,000 MPH for 5 minutes = 83 miles. In 8 minutes (Arnold said he was 8 minutes away), at 1,000 MPH, you can fly 133 miles. 133 miles + 83 miles = 216 miles, which is 70 miles MORE than the distance from Otis to the WTC towers. Where did that 70 miles go?

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Afterburner – A device in the back of high-performance jet engines that injects fuel into the hot exhaust. The resulting explosive burn greatly increases the thrust the engine creates, but uses very large amounts of fuel. Even modern fighters like the F-15 and F-16 can only carry enough fuel to go at maximum afterburner for a few minutes. The T-38 can only fly at full afterburner for about a minute, so discipline and fuel usage awareness are paramount to the military pilot.

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Duh... More energy out = more energy in....

This _is_ rocket science you know... :D

And how much does one of those jets cost? They should just give the air force bicycles... or zeppelins... Obviously, those million-dollar jets are of no use. Give every pilot a Cannondale and a rocket launcher, and the air force would be more effective than it was back then... and probably still is.

Ok... Let's run with your idea of how it should have been done....

According to you he should have taken off on full afterburner and vector to target at full afterburner passing by the target at mach 1.5 losing off all his missiles as he goes. The result would be a large aicraft packed with fuel crashing in central New York City killing quite a lot of people.....

But the by-product would be a second very large aircraft, (go stand by an F-15 Eagle), coming down somewhere in built up New Jersey and doing a whole bunch more damage. The pilot may never be able to fly again after ejection because pilots are only allowed 2, (I believe though it may be three), ejections in their career _or_ if they lose 1/2" in height due to the compression of the spine.

Neg. In war the military has pretty much free reign to do as it pleases and it does so. In peacetime the regulations that aircrew sign as having read _every_ month, and are therefore expected to abide by, are huge. I used to have to sign for GASO's, (Group Air Staff Orders), which was a three inch thick book, Wing Standing Orders, (another 1 1/2"), Station Standing Orders, (1" thick), Squadron Standing Orders, (1/2" thick), Avoid Areas, (they had to be checked and updated on the maps for location, diameter and altitude and there were several hundred in southern England), Engineering Standing Orders and a bunch of other crap I can't remember. These were signed for _monthly_ as having been read and understood. Screw up and the first thing they did was check your signature and start asking questions about the regulations as the pertain to what you screwed up. Many a promising career has been brought to a premature conclusion due to an insignificant error that was compounded by a lack of knowledge of the pertaining regulations.

Yes, these are very expensive, highly technical "toys"... Hell, my crappy helicopter was worth about 2 million pounds, these baby go for many millions more than that depending upon model/role. But they have limitations. The most obvious of which is the amount of fuel they can carry and the rate at which you can use it and still land back at base with the required minimum fuel remaining in your tanks.

It's not all as simple as getting into your car and driving to MacDonalds....

Okay what was that conspiracy thing again......? oh yeah something about how the Ark was sunk by U754 during the first Biblical War, and it was supposed to be carrying the lost gold of the incas, was that it, I couldn't tell what with all of the areonautical stuff going on...posit: if the planes were carrying armed conventional nukes, would shooting them down have made any difference.

Too much information to process, for these jocks, even if they were to scramble in time, the intelligence was too faulty to give them a clear idea as to what the target should be, so trying to pin it down to mere minutes as a sunday afternoon couch quarterback is mute.

Have any of you with the exception of TS and nihil been in an environment where all hell is breaking loose and no one knows who is giving what order's to who, it's bedlam, and as I see it, with all of the different agencies being involved, you have a recipe for disaster, one of the reasons they hold these sort of exercises, to iron out the problems, to streamline chain of command type functions.

I still believe it was all a mass confusion I cannot believe the administration would willingly allow this to occur, I mean for one thing if I were President of the US and my aides told me of this, or my chiefs of staff had told me this exercise was in the works (which I am sure dubya knew about the exercise) then I sure as sh*t would not allow myself to be filmed in public on the morning it was happening, say in an elementary school, I mean dubya is dumb, but he aint that dumb... ;)

You know. I was watching the news live on 9/11. Even on the radio, I heard a total of 8 aircrafts were hijacked. Some international and some local. This could explain why our military jets were heading in wrong directions. Remember the transponders were off. You have 4-8 aircraft with hostages...gotta bargain.

An F-15A...................Some National Air Guard dinosaur from 1972? :D

I don't think that we were dealing with "Top Gun" candidates here?

If you want to check them out try here: http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/f-15.htm

We (RAF) only use regular pilots for this sort of job. We even have a squadron in the republic of Eire ;)

I don't know who's right and who's wrong.

What I do know is that there were screw ups. Do I, who despise Bush and think he's the worst president in history, actually think that he "let" this happen? No. What I think is that he inherited a system full of flaws where none of the government agencies talked to each other, and no one knew what was happening. I think it's possible that no one had any real idea what was going on, including the pilots who were scrambled that morning. I think that even having the little bit of information that was known at the time fed to them, they probably didn't actually believe what happened was going to happen...who would? The pilots that day had never been involved in a direct attack on the US. I was watching it happen on TV, and I didn't believe what I was seeing. Add to that the fact that they knew whatever it was that was happening involved aircraft full of American citizens, and I'm sure there was some hemming and hawing over what to do. It's so easy to forget that before 9/11, none of us could even conceive of 9/11. We think of things the way they are now, we feel like none of this should have been able to happen, that the military must have screwed up, the government must have screwed up...yes, all of that probably did happen. But what none of the conspiracists seem to consider is that it could have been plain simple human error. It wasn't a big conspiracy, it was fear, and compassion for the people on the planes, and confusion, and miscommunication.

That's what I believe, and until it's proven otherwise, I refuse to believe that Americans let this happen to other Americans intentionally.

People also forgot this. Before 9/11...people were questioning the effective roles of the CIA and FBI. Back then they couldn't track a janitor going through their offices. Also before Bush picked on Muslims for failures, Bush raid every airport to deport immigrants. Ironic how this resurfaces when Bush and his buddies are being spied on with the same laws they attempting to cram you with. Don't forget about bombs placed in transport buses and offices that never exploded.

Only reason why we are still fighting terrorism instead of picking on Iran and North Korea was because we needed an ememy we could 0wn. Interesting that the reporters were in the right spot and distance when shock&awe was broadcast on national tv. The enemy took care of that hotel later on. Ironic that our spies never knew Iran was cocky because they have technology that can spot a stealth aircraft when we thought our slht didn't stink. Now they have torpedoes and missles that can sink everything our Navy has. Sure you can deploy fuel guzzling jets to take them out but remember Iran is also hinting on using suicide bombers. In those countries, outsiders and political prisoners would love a chance to regain their honor to reunite with the finest in the country.

They are not going to kill Saddam and or his buddies until the truth behind the invasion surfaces with facts. This is why he can bad mouth a judge and the judge quits. You try to do the same, they would had lethal injected to you to death.

Hi debs,

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That's what I believe, and until it's proven otherwise, I refuse to believe that Americans let this happen to other Americans intentionally.

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We all wish that, and hope that was the case...as I said the alternative is worse ;)

But the fact remains history has bore out that governments do commit heinous unconscienceable crimes on their own people and American governments are not an exception.

Eg ;)